Un exemple de transfert pédagogique: le catéchisme politique

Abstract

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Protestant and Catholic Reformations involved an intense didactic and pastoral activity, and logically a huge catechetical production. Religious catechisms were the only books used as reading textbooks in the French “petites écoles”. The will to publish a secularised catechism progressively spread among the second generation of Enlightenment thinkers who published impious catechisms like Voltaire’s for example. But d’Alembert, among others, asked for the appropriation of sacred and popular form of religious instruction for Enlightenment purposes: scientific vulgarisation for example. Then, during the second half of the eighteenth century there occurred a secularisation of the catechism, often considered didactically as a knowledge summary. For example, in 1771 a Cours d’accouchement en forme de catéchisme by Tulinge, was published for midwives. And in 1773 the bishop Bexon wrote a Catéchisme d’agriculture for peasants. On the eve of the French Revolution, catechism had become a general way to expose knowledge in parallel with its Catholic use. The French revolutionaries used this teaching method to expose the new order and then, after the secularisation, a politicisation of the catechism occurred. During the French Revolution a transfer occurred from the Christian catechesis to the revolutionary education, which widely used political catechisms as official textbooks. Political catechisms – defined as summaries of main political doctrine principles and generally found in the form of questions and answers – were widely used in nineteenth-century France for political education. This article is based on a corpus of 815 political catechisms, published between the eve of the French Revolution and the First World War, mostly in France. This corpus of political books shares a deep formal homogeneity and a strong rhetorical stability. However, political catechisms had various uses: they were widely used for morals and civics teaching during the first half of the nineteenth century, and then turned to electoral catechisms from 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. The nineteenth century was the “century of the catechism” because this pedagogy was widely used, and not only for a religious purpose. We will focus on the pedagogic transfer that occurred from the 1750s to the French Revolution. For example, 1791 is the first peak with 47 books published that year. The reason for this production is a wide dissemination of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, subsequently of the Constitution and finally of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the latter two issued in 1791. Then, the French Clergy was deeply involved in such literature. In fact, a large number of clergymen, especially from the teaching orders (such as Doctrinaires for example) initially agreed with the revolutionary ideas and naturally used the catechism to spread the new underlying texts and ideas widely. The succession of questions and answers was considered the best teaching method to explain the new constitutional texts, especially for the youth. This teaching choice is backed by the will to provide people with a kind of political catechism, in parallel with the religious catechism. With 87 catechisms published during 1794 for 44 different titles, this is the most important peak of political catechism production. The first explanation for the peak is the fact that in 1794, on 28 January (9 pluviôse an II), the Convention Nationale launched a competition to stimulate schoolbook production, in order to replace books published during the Old Regime. This stimulated political catechism production. The transfer is obvious and was followed by a politicisation of the catechism. The political catechism is a major genre of nineteenth-century political literature with material conventions (a short, low-quality and cheap book) and obvious discursive conventions. The authors wished to write an elementary book used as a tool of politicisation and easy to spread among the lower classes. An educational transfer rather than a transfer of sanctity occurred during the French Revolution and political catechisms must be considered as a major political literary genre.