The Enemy Within I

The Enemy Within i Culture Wars and Political Identity in Novels of the French Third Republic GILBERT D. CHAITIN T H E O H I O S TA T E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E SS C O L U MB US Copyright © 2009 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chaitin, Gilbert D. The enemy within : Culture wars and political identity in novels of the French Third Republic / Gilbert D. Chaitin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-0231-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-0231-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. French fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Politics and literature—France—His- tory—19th century. 3. France—History—Third Republic, 1870–1940. I. Title. PQ653.C43 2008 843'.80935844081—dc22 2008015617 This book is available in the following editions: Cloth (ISBN 978-08142-0231-9) CD-ROM (ISBN 978-08142-9044-6) Cover design by Fulcrum Design Corps Typeset in Galliard ITC Text design by Juliet Williams Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS i Acknowledgments v Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Universal Education, Culture Wars, and National Identity 17 Chapter 2 The Disciple, by Paul Bourget: A Dangerous Experiment in Education 45 Chapter 3 The Novel of National Energy, by Maurice Barrès: Maurice Barrès Protofascist? 79 Chapter 4 The Novel of National Energy: Nationalism, Identity, and the Transferential Novel 109 Chapter 5 Contemporary History, by Anatole France: The Memory of the Present 139 Chapter 6 Contemporary History: Filling the Emptiness Within 167 Chapter 7 Truth, by Émile Zola: Zola’s Daymare and the Truth of Vérité 195 Chapter 8 Truth: True Treason, or the Rape of the Republic 219 Conclusion The Erotics of Politics 248 IV ~ C ONTENTS Appendix A Chronology of Historical, Intellectual, and Literary Events 259 Appendix B The Dreyfus Affair 264 Notes 268 Bibliography 280 Index 293 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS i The research for this book was carried out thanks to grants from the Indiana University Office of Research and the University Graduate School, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to those who have sup- ported my project through their recommendations for these research grants, without which I could never have brought this book to comple- tion: David Bell, Oscar Kenshur, Rosemary Lloyd, Gerald Prince, Joan Wallach Scott, and Samuel Weber. My thanks go to Christophe Charle for his guidance and suggestions at the early stages of my research; to Jane Fulcher for her intervention on my behalf with French scholars; to Christin Ross for her friendship and moral support during my stay at the Institute for Advanced Study; and to Tom Broden for his help in finding a home for this manuscript. I am especially grateful to Joan Wallach Scott, who has taken the time to read early versions of my manuscript and has given me valuable suggestions for revision, and whose encouragement and confidence in my project has helped to sustain my efforts through the many years it has taken me to complete it. Portions of this text have appeared in Australian Journal of French Studies, Cahiers Naturalistes, MLN, Yale French Studies, and Revolutions in Writing: Readings in Nineteenth-Century French Prose. INTRODU CTION i N THE YEARS 1880–1882, Jules Ferry, then minister of public education and president of the Council of Ministers (akin to prime minister),1 presented a series of laws to the French parliament designed to establish a system of universal primary education that would, according to the political slogans of the ruling party, be “obligatory, free and laic.” At the same time, he vigorously defended the bill introduced by his close collaborator, Camille Sée, instituting a nationwide network of public secondary schools for girls. With these actions he raised a firestorm of controversy pitting Catholics against proponents of lay education that would embroil the nation for the ensuing thirty-five years. Culminating in the Dreyfus Affair, which divided the country into two warring camps, roughly from 1897 to 1900, and in the official separation of Church and State in 1905, the internal strife lasted until the beginning of World War I, and the effects of these educational reforms are still felt even today (see Chatin, “‘France Is My Mother’” 129). The linchpin of the curriculum in the new schools was to be its course in “moral and civic education,” designed to replace the classes in “moral and religious education” of the Catholic schools. The new system was to be universal not only in the sense of being obligatory for all children but also, and more importantly, in that of being grounded in the principle of universality asserted in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, issued in 1789 and incorporated into the 1 2 ~ I NTRODU C TION Constitution of the First French Republic. Branding Catholicism as just one religion among several in France, Ferry and his Opportunist col- leagues sought to unify the nation and justify the secularization of the schools under the banner of an “independent morality” allegedly com- mon to all peoples of all times. When inculcated into the children of France, this morality, consistent with the positivist notion of a univer- sally human social sense at the basis of morality, or with the Enlight- enment conception of a universal human subject whose personhood resides in the dignity of a rational being capable of moral action and thus of governing himself, and in either case independent of any particular set of beliefs or dogmas, would serve to form true and loyal citizens of the Third Republic, worthy of participating in the self-government made possible by universal suffrage. From the start, the Catholic opposition argued that a school without God must be a school against God, that is, a breeding ground of vice and iniquity that would destroy national character and unity. In subsequent years, both the nationalist right and the anarchist left asserted that, by ignoring or overriding particulars of history, region, and race, republican universalism eliminated the creative spontaneity of history, the uniqueness of different cultures and individuals, and true human freedom. The abstract Enlightenment subject, they claimed, was nothing but an “empty simulacrum, a philosophical marionette” easily tyrannized by the centralized powers of Jacobin government (Taine, Révolution jacobine 9). The education the Republic proffered to its peas- ant and working classes led to the creation of a mass of declassés, people who had lost all sense of their prior identities and who could not find a home among the upper classes either. In short, the new identity of the republican citizen, the enemies of the Republic alleged, signified in fact the destruction of both individual and national identity. The same disputes between the universal and the particular have often resurfaced in both politics and education until today.2 Since the Langevin-Wallon report in 1947, professors of education on the left have argued that democratic schooling should balance universality, providing equal opportunity for all pupils, and particularity, developing each child’s individual aptitudes to the fullest, in order to serve both the collective good and individual happiness. While endorsing these principles, later educators such as Louis Legrand, Antoine Prost, and Philippe Meirieu have contrasted the increasing democratization of admission to the secondary schools with the ever-growing abstraction, formalism, and theoretical bent of the subjects taught, not only in math and science but in the social sciences and humanities as well. Like their university I NTRODU C TION ~ 3 counterparts, they target the prevalence of universalizing abstract reason as a major source of the crisis in the schools, for technocratic education gives exclusive preference to the “abstract intelligence” that many immigrant and working-class pupils lack, and it ignores the education in multicultural values they believe would fulfill the socializing task of today’s schools. Critics of the center right counter that universalism is the essential characteristic of French schooling, and that it is actually the ideology of the left that supports the technological mentality in the schools that both sides profess to fear and deplore. In the 1980s, Jean-Claude Milner reasserted the main claim of the Ferry schools: that they alone shape the identity of French children into the true republican citizens of the future by providing universal access to the knowledge that guarantees civil rights in a country with neither the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Con- stitution nor the principle of habeas corpus in Britain. Expanding Mil- ner’s argument at the start of the new millennium, Denis Kambouchner constructed the problem as a quarrel between the “schools-that-teach [content, knowledge]” and the “techno-pedagogues” of the left, who worry about principles and methods at the expense of subject mat- ter. He contrasts Condorcet’s universal humanism with the ‘German Romantic’ particularism of ethnicity, in order to argue that attention to the multicultural backgrounds of the pupils will inevitably detract from the cause of national unity it is supposed to support. Criticism of higher education has followed a similar pattern. The modern French university system was created at the turn of the twen- tieth century and modeled on the German system initiated by Wilhelm von Humboldt in Berlin at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

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