Modern Languages and Literatures, Department of
Title
French Historv Textbooks as a Tool for Teaching civilization
Document Type
Article
Date of this Version
October 1985
The recent controversy in France over the new history textbooks based on
the reforms promulgated under René Haby in the middle 1970s can serve as a
reminder of the many uses such textbooks can have in our civilization classes.
In the past ten years the Haby programs have become the symbol for what
many observers in France take to be a serious weakening of the teaching of
history since the late 1960s. At the primary level, history was joined to
geography and the sciences as an activité d'éveil; no longer was it the privileged
instrument for fostering national identity as it had been in the schools of the
Third Republic where the manuals of Ernest Lavisse ran through edition after
edition. Critics charge that the changes at the secondary level have been equally
damaging. The number of hours devoted to history has been reduced. Thematic
study has weakened the traditional chronological framework punctuated by the
dates of battles and political regimes. Finally, French national history has been
diluted by situating it in a wider current of international affairs.
The debate over these changes has not been confined to educational circles:
it is widely reported in the popular press and has been raised at the highest
levels of state. In August 1983, President Mitterrand addressed the issue at a
cabinet meeting where he professed to be "scandalisé et angoissé devant les
carences de l'histoire" that threatened to lead to "la perte de la mémoire collective
des nouvelles générations."
However, the quarrel over the Haby syllabi is not my subject, even though
it is symptomatic of the changing role of tradition in the French value system.
My concern is not so much the modalities of initiating French youth to their
past as the role this heritage should play in our own civilization classes. Teaching
contemporary civilization has made such tremendous progress in the last thirty
years that French history has often been taken for granted and left to fend for
itself, if not overlooked. To be sure, a consensus exists among instructors that
the antecedents of current culture must be invoked, and there is good evidence
that students in our civilization courses have a strong interest in history which
can serve as a powerful motivating force. Just the same, there is a certain
complacency about teaching the past, as if history were an acquis whose main
lines are frozen in time and whose pedagogy has been successfully elaborated.
Thus most of the attention in our professional literature has been given to
courses dealing with present-day France. Nonetheless, the increased emphasis
on contemporary civilization has called into question the rationale of history in
our classes. The traditional panoramic course composed of a succession of
grandes étapes seems less and less appropriate. The alternative of referring to
history chiefly as antecedent for some current phenomenon has the disadvantage
of ignoring the specificity of the past era.
We need a pedagogy that recognizes the unique achievements of every era
of French civilization both past and present and that takes into account the
subtle interplay between French culture today and its previous manifestations.
Ideally this approach for dealing with history will involve the same combination
of sociology, anthropology, and semiotics which Francis Debyser has argued
constitutes the most suitable method for dealing with contemporary civilization. We can gain insight into one form such approaches might take if we reexamine
some of the ways French history textbooks can be used in our classes.
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Published in The French Review, 59:1 (October 1985), 30-41. Copyright 1985 American Association of Teachers of French. http://www.frenchteachers.org/
Used by permission.
The French Review is online at JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/journals/0016111X.html