French Third Research Articles

Courting the former colony: Algeria's special position in French Third World policy, 1963

This article analyses the relationship between France and Algeria in the immediate aftermath of Algerian independence. In 1963, Algeria repeatedly breached the Evian Accords, and continuously threatened France's national interests. Yet, French policymakers accommodated Algeria's reassertion and even rewarded it with a generous coopération package. I will argue that this remarkable discrepancy was due to Gaullist France's belief that association with its former colony would benefit its image and influence in the Third World. Algeria at the time enjoyed significant prestige in Asia and Africa, and this was precisely the arena where France was keen to deploy its leadership in order to enhance its independence from the two superpowers. This perception detracted Paris from the cool-blooded pursuit of ‘realist’ state interests.

Education in a French secular group of scouts: a site to study tensions over citizenship

From its foundation in 1911 the EEDF (Éclaireuses et Éclaireurs de France) movement has been officially fostering a citizenship education project matching a normative model inherited from the French Third Republic. EEDF is thus a site to understand the main features of the French citizenship education arena. First and foremost this volunteer group stands at the core of a childhood policy, a field that has been progressively institutionalized and nationalized during the twentieth century. An ethnography of daily practices implemented within this policy framework brings to the fore the symbolic importance of the nation-state as the horizon in citizenship education. In this volunteer sector, individuals have internalized narratives about the decline of state and publicness. The daily work of this group reproduces some of the evolutions of public action in a shifting landscape: especially the increase in security claims and tensions over group identity. Citizenship as an indigenous resource is not mobilized in any innovative or ‘new’ form. It sticks to a mere orthodox (conservative) understanding: conventional political participation and dedication to a consensual conception of the collectivity and common good. This anthropological case study of citizenship questions the relevance of using citizenship as a concept to address political subjectivity and collective commitments in the French context.

The Enemy Within: Culture Wars and Political Identity in Novels of the French Third Republic

The Enemy Within: Culture Wars and Political Identity in Novels of the French Third Republic

The French Third Republic: Popular Education, Conceptions of Citizenship and the Flemish Immigrants

This article focuses on the influence of the (educational) policy of the Third Republic and the specific conceptions of citizenship that were implied in the reshaping of primary education. Particular attention will be drawn to the way children, as future citizens, were being addressed and ‘moulded’ through the then popular education practices, against the background of a severe assimilationist language policy and a fierce battle against religious institutions. One of its consequences certainly concerns the non-recognition, educationally as well as politically, of the problem of ‘immigrants’. The expansive definition of French citizenship vis-à-vis immigrants, with strong roots in the jus soli approach, implied that no special educational measures were taken to ‘adapt’ the Flemish, non-native speakers to their new situation, while at the same time a number of pragmatic motives on the part of the (children of) migrants themselves strengthened their integration and assimilation.

Albertine and the Inverted Mirrors: Reflections of Geographic and Ethnic Otherness

Albertine and the Inverted Mirrors:Reflections of Geographic and Ethnic Otherness Lowry Martin Since Justin O'Brien's 1949 article "Albertine the Ambiguous," which examined the importance of sexuality in Proust's corpus, most scholarly investigation has discussed male homosexuality in À la recherche du temps perdu.1 Proust's more robust development of Charlus and other male homosexual characters stands in contrast to the seemingly superfluous references to undeveloped lesbian characters, some of whom are either invisible or anonymous (e.g., Léa, the famous actress who is never seen or Bloch's sister and Mlle Vinteuil's lover who are never named). For many years, critics and contemporaries of Proust, such as André Gide or Jean Cocteau, claimed that these female characters, originally debuting in À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, were merely men in textual drag.2 In light of this "transposition" theory, it is understandable that for many years critics had largely passed over the racial and political nuances that filigree Proust's lesbian imaginings, and in particular, the way he imagined his character, Albertine.3 Her sexual ambiguity preoccupies Marcel, the narrator, as it fuels his imagination. The specter of lesbianism is woven throughout his work, and Proust's semiotics of this sexual other merits closer attention. My proposed reading of Albertine illustrates that representations of same-sex desire among women were more than literary afterthoughts. To the contrary, a careful reading of his treatment of Albertine and the Bloch cousins allows for a more nuanced and complicated understanding not only of Albertine but also of the rhetoric of Gomorrha (lesbianism) within Proust's imaginary. While Charlus serves as a Rosetta stone to unlocking and understanding the sign system of French underground gay culture, the portrayal of Albertine is also infused with an array [End Page 97] of contemporary discourses that highlight the political tensions and social anxieties of the period. This article focuses primarily on Proust's language of the nation and the other—national or ethnic stereotypes of the German, Austrian and Jew—which underscores the importance of contemporary cultural debates in the theorization of same-sex attraction between women. While Proust's reliance on cultural stereotypes may not have been a conscious political statement, they do illustrate just how deeply ingrained they were in the cultural thought of the period. Proust's various depictions of lesbianism echo and incorporate racial discourses of his time and reflect some of the political and social tensions of the French Third Republic. The fact that Proust's lesbians are descendants of the "race maudite" proves important to this kind of analysis.4 Like their male counterparts, these women are the strangers at the gate—women who, in a broader cultural context, can easily be represented as threatening the security of the nation. Through a juxtaposition of excerpts from Proust's work with materials from pivotal cultural moments of the fin-de-siècle, such as the Dreyfus Affair, I underscore how medical and political currents influenced Proust's conceptions of lesbianism and were anfractuous means of referencing contemporary social concerns. Before turning to the texts, a discussion of some of the formative ideological currents of the French Third Republic will anchor my readings. I. The Enemy Within: Creating the Threat of the Racial Other Issues of race and ethnicity inspired and structured the organization of many of the bourgeois political, legal, and medical discourses from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century.5 The legacy of French theorists such as Buffon, Cuvier, and Gobineau continued to shape French ideologies of cultural and racial superiority for decades. Bertillon's anthropometrics and Gobineau and Laponge's exaltation of the Aryan races were the cornerstones of racial claims of French supremacy. The same rhetoric provided the ideological underpinnings of France's colonial intentions. The impulse to order and to "normalize" the nation stemmed from representations of cultural dissonance that contravened accepted ideas of racial purity and sexual virtue—infrangible elements of the Third Republic's [End Page 98] ideological bedrock. The interchange between sexuality and French ideas regarding the health of the State is clearer when one considers the longstanding debates regarding the falling birthrates in France...

Industrial Paternalism in the French Third Republic

Industrial Paternalism in the French Third Republic

Visual arts and genetics: lessons from the past

No doubt our contemporary age is dominated by images. Moreover, beauty and appearance are a must in Western society. This book is an extremely elegant, multicultural and multidisciplinary voyage into the roots of ‘distortion' that led the desire of a fit and beautiful body, which always accompanied the human spirit (irrespective of the culture to which one belonged), to the promulgation in 1934 of the Eugenic Sterilization Law from the Third Reich: 250 000 people diagnosed with alcoholism, manic depression, schizophrenia, hereditary epilepsy, blindness and deafness, congenital mental deficiency, hereditary disease and physical deformity disrupting locomotion were sterilized. This was the first step in a complex and systemic eugenic campaign culminating in the extermination of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, political dissidents and others classified as physiologically or psychologically ‘degenerate'. The concept behind the three words ‘Art, Sex and Eugenics' is made available thoroughly in the eight chapters of this book. Art (or better visual art) was of great support in the Nazi eugenic campaign. Through films, posters, leaflets and carefully staged photographs, Jewish people and people of colour were inscribed as diseased and deformed, as well as morally and culturally degenerate. However, not only was such culture present in the Third Reich (ie, let us think of the artworks celebrating sports at the 1936 Olympic Games) but it was also alive and well in the Popular Front France: Leon Blum's Socialist government that reputedly stood against Fascism. Such artworks indeed had an integral role in popularizing French eugenics and desiring a eugenics body. The different ways in which the body became inscribed as the prime site of delectation through the interplay between art and visual cultures, modern medicine, science, anatomy, anthropology, anthropometry, criminology and eugenics in North America, in the French Third Republic, Victorian and interwar Britain, the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Australia and New Zealand are examined in each chapter of this book. In aestheticizing health, art was able to inscribe fitness as natural, evolved, civilized and beautiful. Sex and eugenics have been historically positioned as an oxymoron. The very term eugenics signifies control of sexuality in terms of its rationalization or strict management to ensure that nothing is wasted away in securing the betterment of a society, race or nation. By contrast, the word sex conjures up an action so excessive and uncontrollable by nature that it is capable of corrupting and contaminating an entire national order. Sex beyond imperative procreation was called ‘excessive' and ‘unnatural'. Constantly, warnings were issued about its destruction of energy and ambition, its weakening of virility and potency and its contamination of thousands. Through nudity and provocative posing, aspirational imagery made it seem normal and natural to desire to have sexual contact with the delectable body for ‘rational procreation'. Conversely, the abject image was designed to evoke repulsion: aversion to emulation of and sexual contact with the degenerate body compounded its alignment with syphilis and other forms of sexual contagion. To summarize the content of the eight chapters, first is the ‘measurement of man' and the ‘ranking of race', particularly once the ideal body was established through canonization of the statues Apollo Belvedere (Leochares, 350 BC; frontispiece image) and Gladiateur Bourgeois (Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alambert, 1770; Figure 4.2). Second is the mapping of the body through anthropometry, craniometry and metric photography and through ways in which these microscopes of conduct inscribed normality and beauty upon the fit body, as well as degeneracy upon the body as a result of alcohol, criminal activities, prostitution, syphilis or colour and upon Modernist art. Third is the function of eugenics as a scientia sexualis through the scripting of sex and the roles of art and visual cultures in making the eugenic body appear delectable. Fourth is the role of nakedness in body cultures and fine art. Fifth is the stripping of race. Sixth is the posing of the eugenic body to incite exhibitionism and voyeurism. Seventh is the idealization of the naked male with body to arouse emulation and heterosexual association, as well as homosociality and homoeroticism. The last and eighth chapter is on the representation of woman as a titillating eugenic body to signal her ripeness for procreative sex and nurturance of a new race. We congratulate the two editors, Fae Brauer and Anthea Callen, on the enormous effort of smoothly pooling together the different perspectives that arose from the contributors, among others, of a controversial topic that is always up-to-date, such as eugenics and its corollary implications▪

How to Make an Anarchist-Terrorist: An Essay on the Political Imaginary in Fin-De-Siecle France

This essay centers on the debate that surrounded the anarchist-terrorists of France in the 1890s. As a wave of bombings washed over Paris, commentators argued over the source of terrorism. With an eye toward a handful of notorious French anarchists—Ravachol, Auguste Vaillant, Emile Henry—they asked: How do you make an anarchist-terrorist? The debate that followed offers a window on the political imaginary of the French Third Republic in the years before the Dreyfus Affair. At times, the response to the anarchist bombings took the shape of a proxy war over the issues that moved French politics in the 1890s. But it was more than just this. For all of its variety, the debate centered on the problem of intellectual responsibility and gave form to the specter of the dangerous, rootless intellectual. There is a larger lesson in this tale, for the debate over the anarchist-terrorists of fin-de-siecle France makes for a revealing case study in the ways in which democratic societies respond to the threat of homegrown terrorism. It demonstrates the difficult challenge that terrorism poses to democratic societies and shows just how easily political-cultural interests can hijack discussions of terrorism.

A Social Laboratory for Modern France. The Musée Social and the Rise of the Welfare State (review)

Reviewed by: A Social Laboratory for Modern France. The Musée Social and the Rise of the Welfare State Isabel DiVanna Horne, Janet R. A Social Laboratory for Modern France. The Musée Social and the Rise of the Welfare State. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Pp. xiii + 353. ISBN 0-8223-2792-9 Janet Horne’s interesting book on the rise of the welfare state in France uses the case of the creation and internal structure of, and membership to, the Musée Social in Paris. Drawing a parallel with the rise of welfare states in the United States and Britain, Horne examines the Musée Social as a typically Third Republican French answer to the increasing concern with the social question. At a time when liberalism started showing signs of internal problems even in the most stable societies like Britain, the French response to the social question had to incorporate, Horne argues, a different sort of solution that relied heavily upon the “republican” mentality of the conservative and opportunistic new government. The origins of the Musée seem to be, Horne related to the 1889 Universal Exhibition. The Exhibition, being linked to the centennial commemoration of the French Revolution, attracted much criticism from those who believed that France was celebrating 1793, rather than 1789; the debate about the social, political and economic challenges faced by fin de siècle France was therefore heated, as competing versions of liberalism and republicanism were highlighted. The social economic exhibit in the 1889 Exhibition was the basis for the creation of the Musée Social in 1894. The Musée was designed, Horne argues, with the idea of collective responsibility in mind; in a republican state, citizenship needed to be an active concept, with all individuals committed to reform. Unlike the nearby form of British liberalism, in France what emerged was the notion of the state as having a central and centralizing function in French society. The État Providence of the post-French Revolutionary period was reconceptualised into one where individuals were taught to take responsibility [End Page 166] for themselves. One of its many parapolitical initiatives was the Musée Social. Placed somewhere between the invisible hand of political economists and the more visible hand of the state, the Musée encouraged beneficence and education through the new language of social rights which emerged in late nineteenth-century France. Horne’s book does much to illustrate the concern of the French state for the social question by using the Musée Social. Arguably, she could have offered further examples. In the realms of education and colonial policy, too, one could find the state’s attitude towards the penetrating social forces which both threatened and legitimized it. Likewise, Horne could have made better use of the comparative approach with Britain or the US, which she abandons after her introduction. That said, as a case study the book is rich and interesting, and it makes an excellent addition to reading lists and bibliographies on the French Third Republic, and late nineteenth-century social and political thought. Isabel DiVanna Clare College, Cambridge Copyright © 2010 University of Nebraska Press

The Founding of the French Third Republic

How France became a consolidated democracy after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 has received little attention from students of comparative democratization. Contrary to earlier structural theories, the French case shows that in periods of high social uncertainty, political elites with clear ideological visions of the future have a strategic advantage over their more “pragmatic” opponents. Clear and consistent ideologies can solve the collective action dilemma facing initial party activists by artificially elongating the time horizons of those who embrace them. Successful party ideologies have the character of self-fulfilling prophecies: By portraying the future polity as one serving the interests of those loyal to specific ideological principles, they help to bring political organizations centered on these principles into being. In the early Third Republic, ideologically consistent republicans and legitimists built effective networks of party activists, whereas ideologically inconsistent Orléanists and Bonapartists failed to do so, allowing the victorious republicans to design new state institutions—with pro-democratic consequences.

Buenos Aires en armas: La revolución de 1880

Buenos Aires en armas: La revolución de 1880

The Elusive Placelessness of the Mont-Blanc Observatory (1893–1909): The Social Underpinnings of High-Altitude Observation

ArgumentFrom 1893 to 1909 when it definitely sunk into the glacier, the Mont-Blanc Observatory (MBO) struggled to find its scientific purpose. In this article, we use recent literature on the social characterization of place to analyze this struggle. Our first goal is to investigate where the observatory may fit in the laboratory-field dyad. We investigate various kinds of conceptual “borderlands” between these places and look at the networking activities between particular knowledge production sites. We argue that part observatory, part laboratory, and part field station, the place of the MBO was “heterotopic” space in Foucault's sense. We then examine the social underpinnings that led to the foundation of this observatory in the context of French Third Republic at the turn of the century. Following some of the ways the MBO was connected to other scientific sites and surveying some of its visitors' scientific practices, we finally hint at the fact that some of these practices played a part in the emergence of a regime of science production that endured into the twentieth century (astrophysical aeronautical practices, spatial stations, polar exploration, etc.)

The enemy within: culture wars and political identity in novels of the French Third Republic

The enemy within: culture wars and political identity in novels of the French Third Republic

The Problem of Industrial Accidents in the French Third Republic

The Problem of Industrial Accidents in the French Third Republic

Defenders of Liberal Individualism, Republican Virtues and Solidarity

The intellectual founding fathers of the French Third Republic were innovative thinkers who achieved an original synthesis of republican and liberal principles. This becomes evident when one examines the works of four philosophers who played a crucial role in the French intellectual and political life of the period extending from the 1870s to the early 1900s: Emile Littre, Charles Renouvier, Henry Michel and Alfred Fouillee. Among their many contributions to moral and political philosophy, I highlight two themes: a) a conception of political liberty that grants a pre-eminent place to civic education as a means to free citizens from domination by dogmatic religious authorities, sectarian political movements or unexamined beliefs of any kind; b) the need to implement reasonable social reforms in order to ensure that the many and complex relations of functional interdependence constitutive of modern societies are equitable and realize an ideal of national solidarity. I suggest that these ideas ought to be carefully examined by contemporary proponents of civic republicanism.

The Right‐Wing Leagues and Electoral Politics in Interwar France

AbstractThe rise of the right‐wing leagues was the most striking symptom of the deep political crisis of the French Third Republic in the 1930s. The Croix de Feu was the most successful of these movements, and when it became a political party following the Popular Front government's ban on the leagues in 1936, it achieved a spectacular mass membership of around one million. French historians have, however, been reluctant to see these developments as analogous to events in Italy or Germany, arguing that the leagues were part of a long bonapartist tradition of episodic anti‐parliamentary protest, and that France was historically insulated against fascism. This article argues, on the contrary, that what made the leagues different from their Italian and German counterparts was not ideology, but their failure to gain access to the mainstream political arena. Without parliamentary representation they lacked political leverage at moments of crisis. The obstacles posed by the regime's electoral processes thus deserve much greater attention than they have been afforded hitherto.

Bourgeois Leisure on the Seine: Impressionism, Forgetting and National Identity in the French Third Republic

In the post-Commune period, visual representations of bourgeois leisure on the Seine exemplified an historical forgetfulness that Renan believed was inherent to nation-building. This article explores the relationship between riverine leisure as depicted in Impressionist painting and the construction of national and cultural identities in the early Third Republic. Idealised views of pleasure-boating on the Seine, symbolic heart of the capital, celebrated the affluent middle classes on whom the new Republic depended and located them in an iconic national riverscape. Such painting was also perceived to embody the modern Republican values of secularism and science, and it was consequently invoked in support of the developing Republican nation.

The Tragic Tale of Claire Ferchaud and the Great War (review)

The Tragic Tale of Claire Ferchaud and the Great War. By Raymond Jonas. (Berkeley: University of California Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 217. $21.95 paperback.) In March 1917, at the height of World War I, Claire Ferchaud, a peasant girl from the pious region of western France, managed to arrange a meeting with Raymond Poincare, the president of the French Third Republic. Based on a series of visions of Jesus she had experienced over the past several months, Claire asked that Poincare dedicate France to the Sacred Heart and place its image on the French tricolor, long-standing Catholic requests that needed to be fulfilled if the nation were to win in its against Germany. Ray Jonas' study provides the biographical, political, and religious contexts that explain how such an unlikely meeting could have occurred, and thereby opens up a fascinating new perspective on the war. Jonas opens with two chapters that serve as context for Claire's story. In the first he reviews some of the different visions of circulating in Europe before 1914, and suggests that Claire's sense of its meaning merits comparison with the ideas of the artists and statesmen who are generally more familiar to historians. After a brief overview of the early stages of the Jonas shifts his focus to the personal story of Claire. Extremely devout, Claire claimed to have had visions and conversations with Jesus even as a child of three. Her spiritual development encouraged by a friendly local priest, Father Audebert, whose support led her to further clerical connections. By the end of 1916 her visions of Jesus and her call for the dedication of France to the Sacred Heart had generated extensive publicity in the local press and a pilgrimage movement which bringing thousands to her small village of Loublande. An episcopal investigation chaired by Bishop Humbrecht of Poitiers interviewed Claire in December 1916, but produced no definitive ruling, and thereby encouraged the popular movement surrounding her campaign. With the help of a local politician, Claire finally reached Paris in February 1917, a stay which culminated in her interview with Poincare, who listened politely, but took no action in response to her request. In the second half of his study Jonas concentrates on a variety of initiatives coming from the French episcopacy and laity aimed at accomplishing the same goal generated by Claire's visions. As Jonas writes, Claire's campaign was merely one manifestation of a popular movement that had pursued victory from the opening weeks of the war (p. …

What They Think of Us

22 Historically Speaking March/April 2007 needs a big idea. Empires have another potentially beneficial value: they can nurture group tolerance, granting religious pluralism or a special role for diasporas: they also allow for enclaves of autonomy within their extensive spatial domains. They often welcome immigrants , especially those from the peripheries that they dominate. North Africans, Pakistanis, and Latinos have flowed into the countries that have often dominated diem. Nation-states often impose greater conformity on their peoples than do empires. The imperial syndrome also involves a particular relationship of rulers to ruled. An imperial regime searches not for discussion and deliberation, but for approval and acclamation. It measures popularity . The media replace parliamentary debate, and if there is any symptom of empire, it is the attrition of representative bodies. Perhaps they are formally kept in being—even Hider preserved a mock Reichstag . But government by debate loses its integrity and capacity. Granted, these tendencies afflict modern democracies in general, especially when they face complex social choices. Indeed, the attrition of legislative procedures in a democracy usually arises from the complexity of issues; in a proto-imperial situation it results as a response to alleged security dangers. Parliamentary delegates accept the executive 's diagnosis of danger rather than risk being seen as antipatriotic. They pass blanket delegations of power. And even if they insist on legislation, the executive claims the right to interpret the laws that they might pass. Popularity becomes the ultimate measure . If rulers fail in their enterprises, they can lose popularity very quickly. But until public opinion turns adverse, acclamation, photo-ops, spectacular games, and staged pageants replace debate. There are exceptions: rule by committee or by party can continue, as it did in die French Third Republic. But even here the issues that define empire and foreign policy are withdrawn from the arena of debate and discussion. Empire, like authoritarian government more generally, involves the rule of the exception: there is always an exceptional danger that defines imperial politics. The imperial syndrome embodies Carl Schmitt's notion that he who controls the exception in effect controls even democratic politics. The imperial syndrome involves a rampant growth of privilege and inequality that corrupts civic spirit. Empires can be democratic at home—the British expanded the suffrage as they expanded their empire; the French Third Republic was Europe's most democratic regime and it conquered Vietnam and Morocco—but empires cannot let their subject peoples share the same democratic ground rules. And even as they may extend formal equality, and even income equality, toward the bottom, they give die top immense new opportunities for enrichment. This presents grave difficulties of judgment. If millions of middle-income families are each given a small tax rebate, while at the same time several thousand wealthy citizens can each reduce their bill by tens of thousands or more, the redistribution may increase formal measures of equality. But who can doubt which distribution has a greater impact on civic participation? And this is the transaction that the imperial syndrome usually involves: not robbing the poor to pay the rich, although the periphery may be despoiled to pay the center, but fobbing off the humble so that privilege becomes more and more spectacular. For a while, public games, reality TV, philanthropy, and the admirable but hardly taxing charitable deeds of those enriched may counteract the emergence of populist class politics. How long that will last is not at all clear. Let me return to the initial question: Is America an empire? Does it diminish historical understanding , when asked whedier die U.S. is an empire, to say that it has come to behave (at least in recent years and perhaps decades) like an empire and exhibits the syndrome of empire? As a political and moral challenge , perhaps even more than an epistemological one, we must take the current analog of empire very seriously. Charles S. Maier is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University. His most recent book is Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Harvard University Press, 2006). 1 I am not trained as a philosopher and the philosophical problems of analogy are difficult. But for some recent discussions I...

Teaching the Cult of Literature in the French Third Republic

Leon Sachs University of Kentucky Guiney, M. Martin. Teaching the Cult of Literature in the French Third Republic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Pp. 288. As he explains in the preface, M. Martin Guiney's study of the teaching of literature under France's Third Republic is motivated by a desire to understand what he sees as a paradox at the core of the republican school, namely, the institution's "persistent authoritarian character" that exists alongside its emphasis on autonomous rational thinking. Guiney locates the origins of this contradiction in what he describes as the deceptive educational policies and practices of the early Third Republic. He argues that republican leaders and education reformers, while appearing to uphold Enlightenment principles and fulfill the aspirations of the revolutionaries of the First Republic, were simultaneously implementing a pedagogical program modeled in large part on the practices of ancien régime institutions, in particular those of the Catholic Church. To put it another way, while claiming to implement a modern, democratic educational system that granted autonomy to the individual student, republican leaders were actually perpetuating a "top-down, dogmatic transmission of values" (207) more characteristic of the institutions that the Republic sought to displace. Guiney thus presents late nineteenth-century republican education reform not as a true break with the past (as defenders of the myth would have it) but rather as "continuity disguised as change" (xii). Privileging literary studies in both primary and secondary education as the site for observing this republican stratagem, Guiney analyzes school manuals (e.g., G. Bruno's Le tour de la France par deux enfants), textbooks, syllabi, and many of the classic reference works of the period (such as Gabriel Compayré's history of educational doctrines or the monumental Dictionnaire de pédagogie et d'instruction primaire edited by Ferdinand Buisson) to make his case. This study belongs to a growing body of scholarly reassessments of the history and legacy of republican education. While others have studied the fundamental conservatism of both Jules Ferry's school reform1 and literary studies in fin-de-siècle France,2 the originality of Guiney's contribution lies in the analogy he establishes between Catholic notions of "sacredness" with respect to Scripture and the idea of "literariness," a term Guiney uses to describe the "sacred" status of literature in republican education. In contradistinction to the Russian Formalists' use of the term to define "scientifically" the object of literary study, literariness for Guiney refers instead to that quality of literature that eludes precise definition and which, like the "sacred," "resists empirical [End Page 135] analysis" (206). Guiney shows how this "sacred aura of literature" was exploited by republican educators in their effort to fashion a coherent national culture that would buttress the French national identity still healing from the turbulence of 1870-71. Leaders of the Third Republic faced a problem that had already emerged under the First Republic: how to spread literacy for the purpose of creating a democratic citizenry, without exposing the people to the dangers of literature, an elitist, aristocratic art form marked by rhetorical vacuity, obfuscation and abstraction. It was far preferable to discover truth through the direct study of concrete things and to communicate it in a transparent – i.e., non-literary – language. In short, the problem with literature was that it did not "heed the call to reason" (38). The Third Republic's educators solved this problem, says Guiney, by misrepresenting the literary tradition and limiting students' opportunities to interpret literary texts. For example, with respect to formulating the national canon, Guiney observes that only those works would be "consecrated" that could be shown to illustrate the qualities or principles that the Republic wanted to promote. Thus, the predominance of seventeenth-century literature in the canon is explained by the fact that such works exhibited the qualities of reason and restraint, while avoiding those of irrational genius and inspiration, which the conservative Third Republic, eager to separate itself from the radical Jacobin legacy, sought...