Democratization of Education, Literary Citizenship and Protest in France’s Trentes Glorieuses (1945-1975)

• In Event: Protest, Activism and Education

Proposal

The post-WWII (1945-1975) modernization, urbanization, population increase of France created an epistemic break, news ways of knowing and experiencing the world, that ushered in a reconceptualization of time, space and visuality (Sirinelli, 2008; Rémond, 2003; Ross, 1996). Alongside these changes, the French school system underwent its second most important educational reforms of the 20th century that lasted from the mid-1960s to 1980s. The objective of these reforms as human rights issues was to democratize education by making it more inclusive and establishing a common-core education system.
Broadly, my research examines the historical assemblage that made possible the conditions of democratization of French education, and of specific interest is the expansion of teaching French authors and literature to make a new ‘literary citizenship’ for the future of France. I explore how this democratization of French literature deemed an educational right with its promise of a more inclusive educational future found itself faced with the May 1968 student protests that challenged this newly democratized education.
A classical French literary education became part of the discourse around the democratization of education because “French authors, read, studied, commented (…) seemed to offer common cultural reference needed by a democratic society” (Cardon-Quint, 2010). This democratization of French literature and new ‘literary citizenship’ as a “common cultural reference” was not specific to education but was embodied in a larger historical assemblage to which the educational space belonged. The focus of this paper is this ‘literary citizenship’ that formed outside and around the boundaries of the school system asking: How were different texts and discursive practices around the ‘literary citizen’ made intelligible, visible and plausible in the 1950s and 1960s? How were these discourses and texts circulated and assembled in different media? How were spaces around the democratization of the ‘literary citizen’ entangled in the student protests of 1968?
This interdisciplinary study borrows from philosophers Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and literary theorists Julia Kristeva and Édouard Glissant to help think about the conditions that make it possible for France to imagine new spaces around the democratization of the ‘literary citizen’ and to challenge this educational endeavor by the May 1968 student protests.
To discuss the educational reforms of the 1950s and 1960s, this paper draws on Deleuze’s reappropriation of Foucault’s concept of historical formation to unpack how this democratization of French literature and new ‘literary citizenship’ emerged. Deleuze’s reformulation of Foucault helps this research rethinks what is naturally assumed about the educational field. Instead of presupposing that schools have always made the same kind of students, with the same outcome and future timeline, the concept of historical formations asks from what place of visibility and regime of utterance did this new ‘literary citizenship’ emerge.
I also use Deleuze’s notion of deterritorializations and reterritorialization to discuss the formation of new historical assemblages; however, to decolonize language, I re-termed it ‘de-formationalization’ and ‘re-formationalization’ because ‘territorialize’ implies a human activity within a geographical location that has connotations of colonialism. Also, this research is interested in the creation of new entities that may not be geographically specific but could be new intellectual spaces or ideas, new kinds of people, or new assemblages of different entities.
I adopt Glissant’s concept of ‘Tout-monde’(Glissant, 1997) to discuss the reciprocity of relations that are not understood as belonging to one world but belonging to multiple worlds and not understood as being in the world but with the world. What I take from this concept is the idea that education cannot exist as a field in-and-of-itself and be self-generating. Rather, it co-exists within a larger cultural assemblage. In other words, it is not the field of education alone that put forth the idea of the democratization of education, the making of the ‘literary citizen’ or galvanized the May 1968 student protests, rather it is entangled in a complex historical formation. I also borrow Glissant’s concept of ‘opacity’ and keep certain concepts in their original language as an act and form of resistance.
As a method to address written and visual texts around the democratization of education, the ‘literary citizen’ and its entanglement with the student protests of 1968, I borrow Julia Kristeva’s concept of ‘intertextuality’ (Kristeva, 1969) which posits the idea that all texts have some kind of relationship or connection, deliberate or not, to other texts and through any medium to form an intertextual assemblage. The concept of intertextuality exams how ideas around the ‘the literary citizen’ circulate, un-form, re-form, and in-form and are made visible and plausible in mediums that exist outside of the field of education. For example, I examine how ideas of the democratization of education and the ‘literary citizen’ were formulated and interrelated in educational research, children’s book like Le petit Nicolas (Goscinny, Sempé, 1960), and the television shows Le temps des copains.
My research materials as historical artifact include Les Héritiers, Les étudiants et la culture (Bourdieu, Passeron, 1964), L’explosion scolaire (Cros, 1961), La Révolution scolaire (Natanson, Prost, 1963), Le petit Nicolas (Sempé, Goscinny, 1960), and Le temps des copains, television shows produced in the 1960s.
This research offers a theoretical and methodological framework to think about how educational discourses circulate cultural and historical assemblages that are complex and fluid. It also highlights the ambiguity of causality. What this research found is that the democratization of education and the making of a national ‘literary citizen’ did not solely emerge from the education system, and students were not the passive recipients of education as the May ’68 protest demonstrated. Rather, the relationship was reflexive, but this reflexivity included participants from outside the field of education as demonstrated by the children’s book and the television shows. A secondary result of this paper is that it also offers a context to the works of Deleuze, Foucault, Glissant and Kristeva and suggestions for how to use these theorists.

Author

• Britt-Marie Zeidler, UW-Madison