Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
Because of their strict copyright policy, Harvard Education Review does not allow me to post
this manuscript online. Anyone wishing to read or cite that piece, I would direct to:
http://www.hepg.org/main/her/Index.html.
The piece below is a substantially earlier piece I wrote about contemporary French students and
their national identities. This manuscript was presented at the annual conference of the American
Educational Research Association. I would ask that it not be cited or referenced under any
circumstances.
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
Forty-five years ago, Eric Hobsbawm (1962) proclaimed that “the progress of schools and
universities measures that of nationalism” (p. 166). And though it is only one possible reading of
a large body of literature, one which has since developed a history of its own, Hobsbawm’s 1962
text can be read as marking an opening moment in the subsequently much-debated questions of
nationalism. Given the prominence of compulsory public schooling to the explanations generated
by this body of literature, it is perhaps surprising that within the field of education, it has largely
been overlooked. This paper seeks to fill that gap by bringing to the field’s attention the rich
theorizing that has happened around these most commonplace of concepts—nation, national,
nationality, nationalism—and by arguing for their continued relevance, even utility, in an age of
massive economic and social change.
Important literature subsequent to Hobsbawm’s 1962 formulation—by Hobsbawm again
(1983, 1993), as well as Ernest Gellner (1983) and Benedict Anderson (1983/1992)—all pick up
the theme of the crucial role of schooling in both generating and sustaining the national
imagination. While educationalists have not generally taken up the historiographical literature of
nationalism, there is, on the other hand, a very strong body of international work in history
education that has critically explored the links between school history and national identity. This
work has emerged out of research and theorizing about the case of North America (Barton &
Levstik, 1998; Rosenzweig & Thelen, 1998; Seixas, 2000), East Asia (Kan & Vickers, 2002), the
United Kingdom (Barton, 2001a, 2001b; Daddow, 2006; Shemilt, 2000), and continental Europe,
including work done in France (Audigier, 2005; Borries, 2000; Lantheaume, 2001; Leeuw-
Roord, 2000; Tutiaux-Guillon, 2007).
This paper begins, then, by building connections between these two bodies of literature,
both of which in some manner address the questions of national identification, national
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
narratives, and schooling. This paper seeks to construct these bridges between the two bodies of
literature by constituting France as a case studying in how the nation was built historically and is
reproduced today. That is, in the second half of this paper, I will examine a group of French
students in the context of their local school, and then seek to explain how it is that one particular
form of social identification (the national) gets accentuated at the expense of other possible
forms of social identification (social class, religious, regional, or racial). As a central argument, I
will explore the reproduction of the nation by paying particular attention to the implicit
curriculum as it is constituted in one particular localized case. This focus on the implicit
curriculum—informed, as it is, by my own position as a researcher foreign to the French national
context—provides researchers with new insights into the workings of French public schooling.
The case of France not only provides a rich legacy of theorizing about the nation, but a
multiplicity of historical examples speaking to the way in which diverse subjectivities are
“made” national. As the historian Eugen Weber (1976) has noted that, “the French fuss so much
about the nation because it is a living problem, became one when they set up the nation as an
ideal, remained one because they found they could not realize that ideal” (p. 112). This paper
seeks, then, to take advantage of that fussing. It will do so by first reviewing scholarship on
French nationalism and French schooling. It then turns to defining this nation by examining
scholarship on collective memory. The paper then moves to an examination of two contemporary
narrative strategies practiced by French secondary students as they construct their own locations
within the national collective. Finally, the paper ends by considering the lessons that might be
drawn for educational scholars: the potentially positive manner in which an implicit curriculum
(Eisner, 1979) of informal civic apprenticeship can engage the explicit curricular practices which
play a part in constituting a nation’s collective memory.
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
Nation and Nationalism in France
Historical scholarship on nationalism has continued to evolve since the important early
writings of Hobsbawm (1962, 1983, 1993), Ernest Gellner (1983), and Benedict Anderson
(1983/1992). All three authors tended to focus slightly less on France and more on slightly later
waves of nationalism in central Europe, the Balkans and South America. Within the field of
scholarship on the French Revolution, their work on nationalism was continued and refined most
effectively by David Bell (2003). All four authors tended to view nationalism as a project of
civic integration—nationalism understood as an explicit program for nation-building. That is,
nationalism is understood through a vertical model whereby governing elites sought to bind their
subjects into a united body who shared similar modes of speaking (the elimination of local
dialects, patois), consumption (the spread of internal markets of trade), where religion was
gradually relegated to the realm of private experience (the “disenchantment” of the world), and
where secular bureaucracies worked to form a strong and centralized state apparati. Nationalism
as thus defined is primarily a product of the later nineteenth-century, though the groundwork for
such phenomena were clearly developing centuries prior (see Marx, 2003).
In this paper, I will follow the work of David Bell (2003) in defining and distinguishing
between the terms “nation” and “nationalism.” For Bell, the use of the term “nation” reflects a
larger eighteenth-century shift in how the peoples living within the Kingdom of France
experienced communal life. He writes about the terms, “société, nation, patrie, civilisation, and
public,” that each:
described an entity which did not owe its existence to any religious or political
authority or indeed to any principle external to itself. If anything, each was
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
conceived as something that existed prior to both politics and organized religion
and that delineated elementary forms of human relations. (p. 26)
Bell therefore locates the rise of the nation amongst a constellation of other concepts, all of
which sought to displace the notions of a divinely-ordered and historically-sanctioned monarchy.
Bell goes on to argue that the rise of personal identification with the nation was a society-based
process, largely anchored among dissident elites, and triggered by the rise of print capitalism as
well as the decline of religious outlooks. Indeed, much of his work describes the process
whereby eighteenth-century literate elites would fight over the right to “represent” the nation.
It was not until the French Revolution passed to the Third Estate the task of governing
that another crucial shift took place. National sentiment, developed through social interactions
among the literate elite, led to the paradoxical realization that the nation—defined in the French
context as the united body of the people, self-governing, ground of all authority—did not indeed
yet fully exist. Nationalism, as state-based project to be realized, would hence gain ground. As
Bell (2003) states:
national sentiment and nationalism are by no means the same thing, even if
modern theorists frequently conflate them. More than a sentiment, nationalism is
a political program which has its goal not merely to praise, or defend, or
strengthen a nation, but actively to construct one, casting its human raw material
into fundamentally new form. (p. 3)
Primary among the tools employed by the state to build this nation would be the common,
compulsory, secular school.
University education in later nineteenth-century France, rather than focusing narrowly on
the training of professionals, aimed instead at developing a body of research knowledge that
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
would create a more effective elementary and secondary teaching corps (what in France is
known as la pédagogie nationale). Pedagogical courses, followed by chairs in pedagogy, make
their first appearance in France at this time. As George Weisz (1983) has noted, “if teachers at all
levels were to train citizens for democracy and solidarity, it was necessary to provide them with
adequate training for their role” (p. 280). This focus on the creation of a unified teaching corps
therefore marked the principal nation-building strategy of nineteenth-century France. Indeed, as
Eugen Weber (1976) has noted, the “revolutionaries of 1789 had replaced old terms like
schoolmaster, regent, and rector, with instituteur, because the teacher was intended to institute
the nation” (p. 332). The Ferry Laws of 1881-82, which provided for free, obligatory and secular
elementary education for the French population, therefore brought to each village in France
teachers whom scholars have likened to secular missionaries.
The curricular subject whose nation-building “mission” was mostly clearly formulated
was that of history—taught, of course, in the French language. The France of 1880 was a country
“in which French was a foreign language for half the citizens” (Weber, 1976, p. 70). If
nationalism is the project whereby the state engages the allegiance of the people, the absolute
precondition of such allegiance is the extension of the people’s imagined communities outwards
so as to embrace the nation as its natural and essential form. The combined study of the national
past in the national language were twin vehicles for the achievement of just such an extension.
Just as the mother tongue was not the tongue of their mothers, so the fatherland
was somewhere more (indeed, something else) than where their fathers rather
obviously lived. A vast program of indoctrination was plainly called for to
persuade people that the fatherland extended beyond its evident limits to
something vast and intangible called France. (Weber, 1976, p. 334)
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
In this campaign, systematic use of common national textbooks and maps would be employed in
classrooms. What Benedict Anderson (1983/1992) calls the “map-as-logo” would work to create
in the minds of children a sign instantly recognizable, the idea of France as a hexagon whose
borders were fixed and natural.
It is in school textbooks, then, where one can therefore best read the gospel of the French
Republic. And as the French historian of memory, Pierre Nora (1997), has noted in this regard,
those widely-used textbooks written by nineteenth-century French historian, Ernest Lavisse, are
in this sense exemplary. For as Nora (1997) notes, the primary focus of these textbooks was on
the nation’s ability to synthesize all differences, to create a national body out of the
particularities left by history, environment, and climate. If the nation were a jigsaw puzzle,
Lavisse’s school histories were written so as to explicate and justify the complete assembly of
the whole through time, province by province, conquest by conquest. History becomes the story
of nation-building, told as a romantic adventure. In this, the golden age of France’s Third
Republic, with its metanarrative of national progress, is at is ascendancy.
The Nation Defined by its Commemorative Practices
What, then, is the essential element of this nation which elites sought to build through the
school? For contemporary French scholarship, the answer has to do with a specific set of social
practices—practices that mobilize certain common, historical memories and images (Birnbaum,
2001; Nora, 1996; Rousso, 1991). In defining the nation like this, French scholarship is drawing
upon a long tradition, one first established by the nineteenth-century scholar, Ernest Renan. For
as Renan would famously note in a speech delivered in 1882, “the essence of a nation is that all
individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things”
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
(1882/1996, p. 45). That is, as Henry Rousso (1991) will note in more recent times, national
unity is essentially nothing else than “structured forgetfulness” (p. 4).
According to Pierre Nora (1996), the Third French Republic constructed its schools as a
milieu de mémoire, a total environment constructed around the texts and practices that would
continually invoke the nationalistic legacy of the French Revolution, as a patrimony meant to
unite a fractured and divided society. French schools could thereby ensure that national history
was the dominant target of commemorative practices—seeking to eliminate thereby religious,
immigrant, and social class frames for remembering the past.
However, Nora (1996) continues his argument by claiming that contemporary French
institutions no longer function as milieux de mémoire. They have adapted, becoming instead lieu
de mémoire. As Nora (1996) notes:
Societies based on memory are no more: the institutions that once transmitted
values from generation to generation—churches, schools, families, governments
—have ceased to function as they once did. And ideologies based on memory
have ceased to function as well, ideologies that once smoothed the transition from
past to future or indicated what the future should retain from the past, whether in
the name of reaction, progress, or even revolution. (p. 2)
Traditional institutions therefore no longer serve their commemorative function in quite the same
way as they did in the past. Schools and their curriculums no longer saturate their students
exclusively with national forms of consciousness, as recent debates about the role of religion in
French schools makes clear (Judge, 2004).
Nora (1996) claims that commemoration of the national past has largely given way to
anticipation of a globalized future; similarly, the apprehension of social continuity has given way
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
to the lived experience of constant social change. Nora (1996) therefore claims that collective
national memory has migrated to local “pockets” of continuity, becoming embodied within sites,
what he (1996) calls lieux de mémoire. “Lieux de mémoire exist because there are no longer any
milieux de mémoire, settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience” (Nora,
1996, p. 1). Massive economic, social, and technological change—these have ensured that the
nation’s memory no longer functions as it once did.1
The spontaneous anticipation of the nation’s “destiny,” based upon living memory of its
“glorious past,” is therefore gone. Among those populations left most vulnerable by the decline
of a protectionist nation-state (industrial workers, managers in globalizing corporations, cultural
workers), reaction, fundamentalism, and nostalgia have therefore become very real dangers.
With the nation’s memory threatened by economic globalization and technological revolution,
national forms of identification have become more problematic. Clearly, then, these are
important social phenomenon which public schooling must work to understand and confront. In
the case of France, such a confrontation can be played out as a specious rehashing of nineteenth-
century nation-building techniques, such as the insistence upon secularity in the schools
(Birnbaum, 2001; Judge, 2004; Langlois, 1996). Or it can be played out in ways that are more
positive, as my paper will seek to demonstrate. The remainder of this study, then, seeks to
examine the issue of national reproduction as it is played out in one particular instance in France,
before finally turning back to the field of educational scholarship, so as to reflect on the gain the
French context might provide.
Uncovering the Experience of Nationality
1 Nora believes that all forms of social commemoration now revolve around these distinct sites—not just national forms of commemoration. I stress the nation’s memory here so as to provide continuity for the reader.
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
The data gathered for this study sought to describe and analyze student experiences
which would shed some light on the processes whereby a French national identity is
(re)produced. In this regard, it is important to note that since the 1970s, comparativists in the
field of education have questioned the project of describing and comparing national systems of
education. Intercultural education, both within and across national units, has increased the
attention of comparativists towards “the micro-level of education, namely of individual schools,
communities and social mini-groups” (Mitter, 1999, p. 406). Patricia Broadfoot (2000) has
argued, though, that the focus of comparative scholarship has nonetheless remained on the
(admittedly important) problems of provision, equity, and access.
Broadfoot (2000) instead advocates for a neo-comparative approach, one that would free
scholars “from the conceptual blinkers which the existing apparatus of educational assumptions
represents.” She argues that “the heart of such a project for comparativists” must be “the
recognition of the central role of culture in facilitating and shaping the process of learning and
thus, of the need to study the part played by the perception and feelings of the individual learner”
(Broadfoot, 2000, pp. 369-370). This study builds on Broadfoot’s neo-comparative perspective
by attending to the experiences of French students in all of their locality, while nonetheless
keeping national, historical, and institutional factors in play.
The experiences under examination in this paper were collected as part of a transnational
comparative study, one part of which was conducted at a French high school (lycée) located in a
mid-sized industrial city (population of approximately 66,000) in the historic province of
Brittany. As with all qualitative research, its findings must be continually read in relationship to
the position of the researcher. And as will become clear below, my own position as a white, male
citizen of the United States opened up particular perspectives for my particular research project.
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
My primary entry to the school, the Lycée Jules Verne, was secured by a history teacher, Marc.2
Using the American racial categorization system, Marc is white.3 At the time of the study, he had
ten years of teaching experience, all of them in the city where Lycée Jules Verne is located.
Lycée Jules Verne, like other French lycées, was composed of students in the last three
years of their secondary studies: seconde (what in the United States, would be called
sophomores), première (juniors), and terminale (seniors). While I observed students in all three
grades and in various tracks, the majority of my interviews came from Marc’s “favorite” class,
his senior literary students. Generally speaking, there are more females in the literary tracks, and
therefore, a preponderance of my interviews were with females.
The students at Lycée Jules Verne were mainly of working-class and middle-class origin.
Most of the students I spoke with planned to either attend the regional University in Nantes for
various sorts of post-baccalaureate studies or to take some years off from their formal studies,
with several indicating that they wished to work abroad to improve their language skills. Only
one student I spoke with planned to continue his studies in Paris and no students I talked with
planned to attend either a Parisian university or one of the highly prestigious grandes écoles.
Because repeating a year in French high schools is not uncommon, many of the students were
older than a typical United States high-school student (19 and 20 years-olds not being
uncommon). A majority of the students at the Lycée Jules Verne I would classify as white.
In this paper, I sought to access and uncover important life experiences through the
narration of personal stories (Elbaz, 1991). The primary research method for accessing formative
2 Pseudonyms are used throughout this paper for both places and participants.3 The reader will note that I have chosen to racialize my French participants. While the French Republic does not recognize racial categories as relevant to one’s public identity, and while it is doubtful that most of my “white” French participants would have described themselves in this manner, I have nevertheless chosen this representational strategy for two reasons. First of all, I write this study primarily for an international educational audience that is often interested in such categories and finds them relevant to any analysis. More importantly, such categories will play a part of the analysis presented in the study.
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
national experiences was the unstructured, phenomenological interview (Van Manen, 2001). The
primary prompt used to invoke these stories was the following: Tell me about a time in your
schooling career that really marked your education. I chose this interview prompt because I
wanted to avoid making assumptions about the specific nature of the link between nationalism
and schooling (for example, by predetermining that I would ask for stories about the explicit
history curriculum, or about specific classroom learning experiences). I instead assumed that
since discourses about the purposes of schooling nearly always contain a national-civic
component, the stories students tell me should say something about how, and how well, those
national-civic purposes are achieved.
I made initial contact with my participants by spending time observing in Marc’s history
classes. I invited students in these classes to become formal participants in the study by agreeing
to be interviewed. Each interview took place and was audio recorded during my time in the field.
I later transcribed and translated these interviews for extended analysis. During my time in the
field, I interviewed a total thirteen white students and one black student; eleven of the students
were female and three were male. Five of these interviews were conducted in the English
language, while the other nine were conducted in French.4 Interviews were between thirty
minutes and an hour in length. Eleven of these interviews will be shared in this paper for
purposes of looking at two particular narrative strategies employed by participants in the act of
story-telling.
In undertaking phenomenological interviews, it is important to invite participants to dwell
in the pre-reflective lifeworld (Van Manen, 2001). That is, one encourages participants to put
into a narrative format their own experiences, with as much concrete detail and context as
4 These five students volunteered to be interviewed in English. I had made contact with them by observing their English language courses, and their teacher released them from their courses to conduct these interviews with me. The language in which the interview was conducted is always noted in the text for the reader.
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
possible. I encouraged a narrative format to the experiential accounts by asking such questions as
“what happened next?” When I sensed that the participants were speaking in generalities, I asked
them to connect what they were saying to a particular time and place. When participants said
something particularly evocative, I asked for clarification and elaboration of the phrase. In
addition, within the interview context, researchers work to bridle or bracket their pre-
understandings of the topic at hand (Dahlberg, 2003). The protocol for phenomenological
interviews is generally kept simple and remains orientated towards openness: after introducing
the initial topic, one stays alert for moments that are conducive to elaboration and reflection, and
generally does as little talking as possible.
In doing my data analysis I was first led to a particular set of themes: view of schools,
relationship to teachers, and understanding and use of national history curriculum. Rather than
coding for frequency of occurrence, I worked hermeneutically by putting my pre-understandings
into dialogue with the sections of each participant story that seemed to me particularly evocative
(Gadamer, 2003). I then spent time analyzing differences among these initial themes, which in
turn led me to posit the existence of relatively distinct narrative practices—practices which in
turn became the basic structures through which I could purse my interpretive work (see Wertsch,
2002). Employing a form of imaginative variation (Van Manen, 2001), I finally delved deeper
into the narrative structures I was positing and attempted to confirm not only that they seemed
historically and theoretically sound, but also that my findings were educationally significant.
That is, I attempted to keep the political and the theoretical dimensions of research work in
tension (Hall, 1992).
As anyone who has ever undertaken such work will understand, working across national
borders presents qualitative researchers with unique challenges. For in doing comparative work,
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
it is clear that there is a degree of border-crossing that well exceeds the literal act of locating
one’s self in a “foreign” context. Inevitably, certain meanings will remain unexplored in this
border-crossing process. Not only must I “write France” for an international, English-speaking
audience, but the participants of this study needed to (indeed, felt compelled to) “write France”
for a researcher from the United State. This is to foreground, then, the reflexivity required for
reading these interview transcripts. It is highly unlikely that a native-born French researcher
would have gathered the exact interview data that I did, nor even is it likely that another
American researcher differently positioned than myself would have had an experience similar to
my own. Indeed, working across national borders reminds us that data is never simply “gathered”
but is instead always generated and produced within a particular set of localized contexts.
Reading such contexts (in addition to the primary interview texts), and reflecting upon the way in
which they open up particular avenues of insight, therefore becomes a key stage in data analysis.
I will return to this important point in the conclusion of this paper.
Two Narrative Practices of French National Identity
In this section, I would now like to look at two national, narrative practices performed by
participants in the course of our interviews. These practices draw upon well-established
discourses, ones that reference distinct versions of the nation’s collective memory. And while
each narrative practice is distinct to the degree that it can be separated analytically, it nonetheless
is also clearly interrelated to other narratives and discourses, through the ability to both
acknowledge, confront—and at times, actively ignore—other, competing national memories and
discourses.
Narrative Strategy One: The Républicains, A Political Narrative about France’s Fight for
Objective, Social Progress
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
The United States is, of course, a republic. But the rhetoric of republicanism is something
long since past from our collective national memory, evoking instead the ages of Thomas
Jefferson and Horace Mann in the post-independence era. Such is not the case in France. As
French historian Maurice Agulhon (1993) has noted:
In France, the “Republic” then designated the constitutional system, as in
Switzerland or America. But unlike the term “Republic” in the United States, in
France “Republic” evoked far more than a juridical system; it embraced a
complex set of values, and for a long time was the object of opposing
interpretations and rival passions. France’s originality in 1880 lay in adding to all
those objective political anxieties experienced by other countries an endless
debate on its own history and rules of play. (p. 1)
To invoke the Republic, in the French context, is therefore to take sides in a historical debate,
one that was begun in 1789 during the French Revolution with the struggle against church and
monarchy. As Agulhon notes, this debate had reached a new and crucial phase by 1880, the time
during which the Third French Republic became solidified.
The solidification of the Third French Republic came at exactly that time, it is important
to note, when Jules Ferry was introducing legislation for free, secular, and compulsory
elementary education. Indeed, “school” and “Republic”—the two words go together so well in
France that it is difficult to separate one from the other—l’école républicaine. And for this first
group of participant experiences that I wish to analyze, the school is exactly that: republican. For
these participants, the republican school represents not only a formal legal status (as opposed to
private religious schools, of which there are many in France), but as Agulhon notes, “a complex
set of values.”
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
Thierry, among all my participants, best expressed this view. Indeed, the reader may
notice just how much Thierry works to not only share an experience in the course of our
interview, but to also explain republican schooling to me, the “outside” researcher. When I at one
point in our interview asked him about the source of his political commitments (which he had
been in the process of explaining), he told me:
To answer the question more clearly, this idea of revolution is everywhere,
because of our liberté, égalité, fraternité, it’s the Revolution, the idea of
revolution, and so the school, it’s a school of revolution when you see it. Our
public schools—liberté, égalité, fraternité—it’s always the same, it’s always this
idea of keeping our citizenship in mind and not accept all the things from our
leaders. (interview transcript, English-language interview)
For Thierry, and other participants like him, the school holds a special place in French life. It is
not experienced, as Marxist theorists have posited, as an arm of the state, as an ideological
apparatus that seeks to interpellate an oppressive subjectivity (Althusser, 1969/2001), but rather
the school is experienced for Thierry as a mechanism for revolutionary social justice. As he
noted, “I think we have the good fortune that school isn’t directed to the government [and its
policies], it’s, I think school is the last place where Republican ideology can still live. Here all
the people can live free, and can have the freedom to express themselves” (interview transcript,
English-language interview).
The bulwark of this republican school is of course the republican teacher. Yet the lived
reality of this teacher is highly ambiguous, demonstrated by the case of Marc, who was a strong
critic of the rigidity of the French classroom tradition (where lecture and recitation dominate),
yet equally a solid defender of the republican tradition, especially its commitment to secularity
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
(laïcisme) and the common good. Teachers in France are civil servants (fonctionnaires). In some
ways, this explains for me their commitment to a pedagogy of telling and examining—it is as if
their job is simply to dispense information, validate its mastery, and pass the student along.
Power is therefore completely visible in French classrooms, and there can be little doubt that it is
the teacher who exercises it. Yet republican teachers’ status as civil servants must always be put
alongside their traditional pedagogical calling to transmit both connaissances historiques and
valeurs politiques communes (Lantheaume, 2003). This fact which was lost upon none of the
students to whom I talked. As Thierry again remarked,
the teachers are paid by the government, it’s very interesting because maybe you
suppose that the school [curriculum] is with the government. And maybe the
teachers could be with the government . . . but in fact, I’m sure it’s not. The
teachers here are very into the left, they are left, they are very in this way.
(interview transcript, English-language interview)
That is, the teachers were very much models for the students in their own republican activism.
This brings me then to the main narrative that was constructed by this first set of
republican students. For them, the key dates in the formation of their own civic identity are quite
clear: 1789 and 2006. This is a simple narrative, but all the more effective for that, in that
remembering the national past in this way speaks to an essential continuity of values across the
“nation’s life.” For as Nora (1996) notes, “memory is always a phenomenon of the present, a
bond tying us to the eternal present . . . it thrives on vague telescoping references, on hazy
impressions or specific symbolic details” (p. 3). Or, put another way, the narratives in which
memory lives conjoin a lived experience to a historical one. As such, the participants in this
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
study always draw upon a lived present (one which is, of course, never static) in order to perform
a remembrance of something in the past.
Among the fourteen students I interviewed, eight of them mentioned the massive student
demonstrations that took place in April of 2006 against the CPE (contrat première embauche), a
government-inspired reform that would have liberalized the labor laws for young French
workers, allowing them to be laid off within their first two years of work without need of cause.5
Six of these students saw these events as positively influencing their own school careers, and by
extension, I would add, their own sense of civic identity. In what follows, I will draw upon these
six interview transcripts to illuminate this relationship.
Lycée Jules Verne provided these study participants with the forum from within which
they could exercise their republican values in their fight to have the CPE overturned. As another
participant, Louis, explained:
The day where I really felt French was when everyone around us was battling for
the same thing, for the cause of the revolution of social rights, for example. It was
an aberration: when somebody can be let go during the first two years without any
motive, without justification. Just the fact of participating in a demonstration, and
for getting together to do something reasonable, for such a person, for such a
world. We blockaded the school . . . So the CPE, it was an opportunity to bring
together everybody, all the generations, there were demonstrations, with teachers,
students, and workers who supported us too. (interview transcript, French-
language interview)
5 The CPE was imbedded in a larger law entitled, “The Law for the Equality of Opportunity.” According to Roger, in the March 8, 2006 edition of Le Monde, the law would do the following: “[The law] would be applied, in businesses of more than 20 workers, to youth of less than 26 years of age. Those parts of the previous Labor Code that deal with the breaking of the contract will not apply during the first two years of work. A termination notice of fifteen days will be required between the second and the sixth months, and a warning of one month thereafter.” The CPE was withdrawn by the government.
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
As with Thierry, Louis helps the “foreign” researcher by noting how important common struggle
is for his sense of French national identity. As he notes, anti-CPE radicalism brought students
together with other students, labor union members, and their teachers. The primary action at
Lycée Jules Verne was the blockade of the school—that is, a complete occupation of the school,
where classes were cancelled through a complete work stoppage—but there were other actions
taken by the students as well.
Louis was very supportive of the school blockade, and therefore took a large role in it. I
asked him to describe how a typical day would unfold during the demonstrations. He told me
that:
Well, during the blockade I had to verify that none of the doors were open to foot
traffic. I would get up at five o'clock. Then there was a tour of the buildings, I
would return home, have some breakfast, at seven o'clock the first person arrived,
and I would then stay in the buildings to make sure nothing happened. There was
often a meeting, for example there was a meeting with the teachers sometimes at
one o'clock to discuss things. There were messages to pass along, by cell phones.
There was a real rhythm. (interview transcript, French-language interview)
Louis therefore committed himself to getting up quite early, and working throughout the day.
Even nearly a year after the demonstrations, he remembers the experience as marked by a
distinct and pleasant rhythm. Clearly, being away from class did not at all make him feel bored
or aimless. Indeed, it seems to me quite plausible to interpret Louis’ words as implying that, for
him, the protests were an educative experience, an opportunity to live out the republican values
that the school and his teachers represent.
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
Many students mentioned the meetings with the teachers, which were called by all the
participants a “general assembly.” Thierry described these general assemblies in this manner:
Thierry: [The teachers] were against the CPE, there were a lot of teachers who
were with us in the cafeteria, and in it we made a general assembly, we say what
we are going to do, and the teachers were with us, they were with us.
Researcher: All of the teachers?
Thierry: No, not all, but they were with us, they were with our struggle. They
were with us, were with our struggle, and they support us.
Researcher: Who organized the students to go to the cafeteria?
Thierry: It was students, at the base, it was only students. Afterwards there were
the [labor] unions, but they came after. Before the unions, we were only students.
There was less organization. We need the unions to help us print tracts . . .
(interview transcript, English-language interview)
Therefore, it was the students who, with the closer cooperation of the teachers, took the initiative
to form a representative body. Like the Third Estate, which, in 1789, took upon itself the title of
National Assembly, and then proceeded to obtain support from the clergy and the nobility—so
too did the students of Lycée Jules Verne constitute themselves as a representative assembly,
imagining thereby that they represented the common good of the nation (as opposed to just their
generation or age cohort). In inviting the support of their teachers—those who traditionally
exercised power in the everyday experience of these students—I would like to point out just how
exactly these students reproduced the traditional narrative of French republicanism in making
sense of their own life experience.
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
Anti-CPE radicalism, which succeeded when the government withdrew the reform bill on
April 10, 2006, therefore allowed these students an apprenticeship in republicanism. This
apprenticeship primarily drew upon the example of teachers. Teachers not only helped students
form the generally assembly, but they more generally took the opportunity to openly encourage
and praise the students, while also helping to ease the consequences of missing so much class
time. Therefore Liliane noted:
There was a great solidarity last year between teachers and students, because the
teachers, certain teachers created an Internet site, so that we could get caught up
on our courses. Because when the school was occupied, there were no longer any
courses. Therefore certain teachers made this site to help us get caught up in our
courses, so that we weren’t penalized, because it lasted nearly a month. (interview
transcript, French-language interview)
Indeed, if anything, certain teachers I talked to implied that the current generation of students did
not go far enough. During one class that I observed, Madeleine, a Lycée Jules Verne history
teacher, contrasted the current generation of students with those of May 1968. During the course
of a lecture on the events of that year, she remarked on how the students at the University of
Nanterre had provoked the government by pushing the Minister of Sport into a swimming pool
during a visit to campus. As I recorded in my field notes, she almost wistfully said that the
current generation could never go that far, given the relative precariousness of their employment
prospects.
In exploring with this group of participants the larger meaning of their experiences, many
of them made direct reference to the early phases of the French Revolution. For them, it was this
event which quite simply defined their civic identity, as a model to which French republicans
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
could return again and again. So Louis said, “it's part of the history of France, it goes back to the
French Revolution, the fight for social rights. The French model goes back to 1789. It’s really all
I can say about it” (interview transcript, French-language interview). Similarly, Thierry claimed
that:
when I see our history, I understand most of the facts about our way to think. We
had some of the worst leaders of the country, I mean, all of history, Louis XIV of
course, all of the kings were quite bad. A few people were quite happy, the most
part of people were living in very bad conditions. Like a country of Africa, like
Somalia today. And it was a very bad country, a very rough life for the French.
And one day, they decided that it was enough . . .There is this idea of revolution,
still in our blood and in our feelings. We are still, this idea of revolution, you can
bow your head, that is the spirit of being French for me, you can bow your head
for a long time, a very long time, bow your head before a king, or a dictator, you
can do it for a very long time. And when the French rise up, they rise up. They
can [give] rebirth [to] themselves against the oppression. (interview transcript,
English-language interview)
Drawing upon a romanticizing historical discourse (with clear parallels to that of nineteenth-
century French historian, Jules Michelet), Thierry therefore sees “the people” on a journey
towards justice. It is a universalizing discourse, one that would equate the France of Louis XIV
with the Somalia of today. And finally, the discourse says that the people can be reborn through
the remembrance and re-enactment of revolution, again and again.
By invoking history, which the republican students generally saw as an objective
discipline, these republican students were similarly invoking their history teachers, whom they
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
also saw as generally objective. This, interestingly, went against the grain of how the history
teachers saw themselves. The history teachers I met at Lycée Jules Verne were quite aware of the
problems involved in doing historical scholarship. Yet many of these republican students had a
difficult time accepting this. Witness this encounter, where I am finishing my interview with
Evelyne, with Emilie also present, when Lucien, another history teacher at the school, decides to
break into our conversation, making a point for the students, but also drawing upon his
knowledge of the US to make links with me, the American researcher:
Emilie: I think it’s necessary to try and be objective as you can in history. I think
that teachers, I like a history teacher who really tells things as they were. And
then later I can decide how to make use of it. You can’t just sex it up, sure they’ve
got a point of view, but if they just tell it however they would like, it’s dangerous.
Lucien (breaking into the conversation): The curriculum is already orientated in
one direction.
Students: Yes but . . .
Lucien: The curriculum is politically correct. In the United States there is
certainly more liberty, for example, certain people think that Roosevelt provoked
the Japanese, even that he was well informed of the attack, and that’s why he sent
a cargo plane . . .
Evelyne: Yes . . . This way of teaching that allows the teacher to be for or against
something, it’s a [bad] method, for example, I can say, “it’s like this really.” The
goal is to be objective . . .
Lucien: Even in a book, there is the choice of text, choice of photos, it’s not
neutral . . . In the United States, the view of the Indians has changed, for
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
example, in the cinema, it’s clear. In some old films the Indians were bad, but in
films like Dances with Wolves, with Kevin Costner, that has totally changed. And
in recent censuses, there are a lot more people reclaiming their Indian roots, in the
census during the 1990s. (interview transcript, French-language interview)
It is perhaps easy to imagine why students might be uncomfortable with this discussion. If
teachers are the ones from whom students are to learn republican values, values which are
supposedly universal, a discussion about teacher bias is troubling. Teachers are politically
orientated, that is true, but they are orientated towards a universal, republican left—a position
that admits of no bias, only progress towards “the” common good. Viewing republicanism as just
one more value among others, and teachers as only one more interest group among others,
jeopardizes the way in which these students conceive of their own national identity.
Finally, then, it is this nagging doubt about the universality and justness of one’s own set
of values, choices, and actions—it is this doubt which most strongly marks the republican
students. This undercurrent of doubt was expressed by nearly all of these students, usually as a
critique of other students who had participated in the anti-CPE demonstrations. So Thierry said,
“sometimes you see the general assembly, it’s like a game for everybody, the adults are very
happy to be on strike, because it reminds them of May of ‘68. And the children are very happy
because they think we are going to make a May of ‘68 too” (interview transcript, English-
language interview). Emilie observed that, “I felt a little, like everybody, was carried along by
the crowd, everybody” (interview transcript, French-language interview). Finally, Paulette stated
that, “The demonstrations were too superficial . . . Because the people who were demonstrating
didn’t know why they were demonstrating . . . It was for dodging classes, or because they liked
the demonstration” (interview transcript, French-language interview). The notion that political
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
work could be carried out lacking a full commitment to traditional republican ideals, and that the
meaning of both lived and historical experiences can and do conflict—such notions left these
republican students deeply ambivalent.
Narrative Strategy Two: The Social Pluralists, A New French Identity through Recognizing the
French Melting Pot
1789 leads to 2006—that is, the opening phase of the French Revolution provides the
“template” with which the republican students understood their own lived experiences and out of
which they constructed their civic identities. Absent from this brief chronology, of course, is the
Revolutionary Terror of 1793-1794. Hence, republican students are not simply borrowing a
schemata suggested by their history texts; rather, they omit certain aspects of the French
historical record which are inconvenient for the sake of building a “usable” past. Such omissions
can presumably operate on all levels (from the highly intentional to the completely unconscious),
but generally speaking, the act of omission works to preserve the continuity of republican France
and its “eternal” values. These values may be betrayed by certain historical actors at certain
historical moments (e.g. the use of terror during the Revolution, or more recently, collaboration
with Nazi Germany during World War Two and the use of torture during the War in Algeria),
but never are these values themselves implicated by any particular historical actor or event.
Memory externalizes all things unpleasant.
Likewise, also absent from the republican narrative is May of 1968. May of 1968 is an
extremely important date for many contemporary French citizens—many of whom have personal
memories of those times. As such, it is another interesting event that can be noted by its almost
complete absence. As to the “events of May” themselves, they can for the purpose of this paper
be reduced to the follow: from March of 1968, university students had been protesting over a
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
range of issues, and beginning in May, were subject to unusually harsh police tactics. This
elevated and expanded the protests, to the point where (against the advice of their own unions)
industrial workers, civil servants, and many other workers in French society went out on strike.
French society was essentially paralyzed for several weeks, as shops closed, trains stopped
running, newspapers halted their presses, and television went off the air. President De Gaulle
briefly fled the country and considered resigning, before eventually returning and leading a
“return to normalcy.” Unlike 1789, where historiography, pedagogy, and mass media have had
ample time to impose a particular set of meanings around the event, 1968 continues to exist as a
set of strongly contested meanings.
It is therefore well nigh impossible to locate a stable, popular meaning for May of ’68—a
meaning upon which participants might draw in constructing their national narratives. In this
manner, the second narrative strategy I would like to analyze departs quite radically from the
first. Yet for this second group of participants, a group I shall call the social pluralists, I would
like to argue that May of 1968 nevertheless enters into their narratives in very important ways.
That is, the social pluralist national narrative draws upon discursive features which link it to May
of 1968. Chief among these discursive features are a displacement of traditional political
practices (a questioning of the “proper” domain of politics), the emergence of a relational
political subjectivity (a critical reappraisal of the antagonistic relations historically constructed in
republican France between workers and students, colonizers and colonized, etc.) and a desire for
recognition among different social groups (a questioning of the “secular” identity of the
traditional republican political subject). In assigning such a meaning to May of 1968, I am
drawing upon more recent critical work on May of 1968, much of it undertaken by American
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
academics interested in the very questions I am pursuing here (see Bourg, 2007; Ross, 2002;
Starr, 1995).
Among the narratives that the social pluralists shared with me for this study, always
foregrounded then was a (implicit) critique of the traditional republican narrative. These
narratives were about a new form of politics, oftentimes one that took the form of an incipient
multiculturalism. It also took form in how these students viewed their teachers: as equals (whose
interests and views were neither objective nor universally shared), rather than as strict political
mentors. It is almost as if these social pluralist participants were following the May of ‘68
slogans they could find in their textbooks, demanding that teachers and students relate to each
other in more active and informal ways.6 For the social pluralists, I would ultimately like to
argue that May of 1968 represents the causes of social recognition, contact, and fluidity—as it is
precisely these values which marked their national narratives.
Five of the fourteen interview participants in this study mobilized a social pluralist
narrative in our interviews.7 Interestingly, they could be quite critical of the anti-CPE
demonstrations at times, as well as of their teachers. For example, Françoise told me that “I
thought it was just the blockade, it was nothing important really . . . the CPE, I knew it was not
for the history of France” (interview transcript, English-language interview). Audrey stated the
case much more strongly, especially regarding her teachers and their role as political mentors.
She stated that, “in all subjects, in everything they say, it is subjective. For example, revolution,
6 “We students are occupying our schools. WHAT DO WE WANT? Modern society denies us . . . the slightest contact with our teachers outside of the classroom; not the slightest possibility of exchange with each other . . . Students listen but do not participate in active life. Will we ever become real citizens?” (Bourel & Chevallier, 2004, pp. 260-261).7 I will additionally draw upon an informal conversation I had with another student in the school. It is also important to note that three of the study’s interview participants are not discussed in this paper due to reasons of space and thematic coherence. These three participants mobilize a strategy I refer to as “isolating,” in that their narratives put into play a discourse of social mobility and individual improvement. That is, the past they commemorate seems to be related in interesting ways to the end of France’s Thirty Glorious Years of economic growth after World War Two, and the rise of globalization and neo-liberal economic policies.
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
the French Revolution is taught [as if] it’s the only thing . . . Whereas it is something very
horrible, dreadful, so bloody, the real history” (interview transcript, English-language interview).
A common practice among the social pluralists was to use another country to gain a
perspective on the meaning of the French national identity; in particular, three participants used
class trips abroad to reflect on the broader meaning of French national identity, French history,
and French society. Participants were quite clear about these trips’ purpose. On the one hand,
they aided in creating a certain esprit de corps among the students assigned to a particular class.
But they also aided in getting to know the teachers. In this, these students’ relationship to
teachers was much different than that of the republican students: they viewed their teacher not so
much as a political mentor, but as a potential equal. The ever-present power of the teachers in
their institutional incarnation was not so much desired and pursued as it was displaced. Witness
Sylvie, who told me about her class’ trip to Spain and the route to Santiago de Compostela:
In fact it allowed the class to come together, because we went 20 kilometers each
day, and all of this walking, it finally allowed for everyone a common experience.
We talked with our teachers too, outside of the class, therefore, a different type of
relation, we could get to know them. I talked a lot with them. (interview
transcript, French-language interview)
This trip to Spain, where the students walked the last 100 kilometers of the famous medieval
pilgrimage, therefore opened up for students a new side of their teacher, one they were not
permitted to see in class.
This same trip was also mentioned by Marie. In her case, the trip opened up a whole new
perspective on the inner life of the teacher. Witness this exchange, which builds upon her
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
previously telling me that “we [the students] could visit all we wanted, we could leave at night,
to meet other people, to go in bars, in pubs.”
Researcher: So like going to the pub, or letting you go out at night, that wasn’t a
surprise for you?
Marie: Not really because teachers who lived with us are cool. In class, they are
serious, but we see in their personalities that they, they know that we are young,
and we need to go in bars, to make, to go to parties . . . I would like to go again,
and it, teachers were nice with us, when you returned, it was different. The
atmosphere was more [relaxed] . . . In class, we worked a bit, but it was a new
relationship with the teachers, because we know them better than before we left.
(interview transcript, English-language interview)
This exchange should be contrasted with the role of the teacher in the republican narratives. For
the social pluralists, teachers are potentially “cool” people outside of the classroom, people who
are, in Marie’s words, “young in general” and “remember that they were [also once] young.”
Nevertheless, despite of all these characteristics of the social pluralists, there was one
word that generally reoccurred in all of these narratives, a word that would immediately engage
my attention: melting pot. In the United States, the phrase is of course generally associated with
attempts to assimilate immigrants, and has a fairly negative connotation. Yet such negativity
does not attach itself in the French context. There, to speak of the melting pot (le melting pot),
was to speak of openness to new experiences, to new cultures, and to new possibilities for
France.
We should compare this valorization of the French melting pot with the republican
students, whose narrative is silent about November 2005, the month during which the riots
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
against police brutality which began in the Parisian banlieue of Clichy-sous-Bois took place.8
While republican participants would sometimes insert references about the dangers of extreme
nationalism (usually represented by extreme right-wing parties such as the National Front), the
republican students generally made no reference to the riots or to movements which would make
France a more multicultural society. Neither did any of them make mention of the French
melting pot. I found this silence telling. So while the republican students viewed their own
activism in 2006 as justified by the events of 1789, I would therefore argue that the social
pluralist narrative was most legible when it brought together two other dates: May of 1968 and
November of 2005.
For the social pluralists, the shame of the November 2005 riots was represented in the
possibility that former Interior Minister, Nicholas Sarkozy—who called the 2005 rioters in
Clichy-sous-Bois racaille (scum)—could be elected president of France. Yvette, during an
informal discussion, told me that if Sarkozy were to be elected president, she would emigrate to
London (a place she had visited on a class trip), where, according to her, “you can see Indian
people walking down the street, and broadcasting the news.” For her, London represented a true
melting pot of peoples. For her friend and classmate Françoise, the situation was similar:
That’s what was really great, with the people, because in my opinion, [London] is
a great city. We said this in class. Yvette, my friend, she really loves English and
London, because for her it’s a big melting pot of cultures, civilizations, many
people from all around the world. This side, this view of England is really
attractive for us, because even the English, England as we see it every day, is
really great. And not just [London], all the country, everyone in class loves the
8 In November 2005, two young French citizens of color, chased by the police, were electrocuted as they hid in a power substation in the Parisian banlieue of Clichy-sous-Bois. This set off a month of rioting in banlieues across France.
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
foreign countries. With the English, we could talk and share our cultures, our
ways of life, which are completely different from [their] peoples’. (interview
transcript, English-language interview)
London represented a way of life, and it provided a critical perspective on what the social
pluralists perceived as a great shortcoming in French society. Interestingly, when I asked some of
these students about Paris, they could only reply that they had never been there. A connection to
the traditional center of national power was absent; yet rather than “fall back” upon particular
ethnic, racial, religious or regional identities, these students instead made use of other lived
experiences so as to reimagine a national community that would be more open to cultural
differences.
With Michel, the use of the melting pot analogy was also in play, but in a slightly
different context. Michel, rather than talk about a trip abroad, told me about his experience as a
student-journalist for the regional newspaper, Presse-Océan. Michel explained his work for me
like this, “I spend a lot of time reporting on the cultural scene. On the weekend, I go see
something at the theater or go meet with the French political parties, current events, things like
that. You spend a day with a doctor, every day you meet somebody.” Included among the people
he had interviewed for the paper were former Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin and former
President Jacques Chirac. Yet more than these political leaders, he also stressed his joy at
meeting “just really simple people.” Witness this exchange:
Researcher: And you like this job a lot?
Michel: Enormously.
Researcher: How come, explain a bit.
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
Michel: Because being a journalist is work that takes you everywhere. That is, it’s
hard. Still, you meet a lot of different people, people from lots of different
backgrounds: White, Black, Arab, Catholic, everything.
Researcher: This is important for you?
Michel: It’s important to speak with people who have different cultures. (italics
added for researcher emphasis, interview transcript, French-language interview)
Among all the students I interviewed—indeed, among all the people with whom I spoke in
France—Michel comes closest to using an explicitly racialized discourse, one that names
whiteness as well as blackness, and thereby comes closest to recognizing the privilege inherent
in being recognized as a “real” (i.e. “white”) French citizen. Such racializing practices strongly
counter the traditional republican discourse, which maintains a “secular” attitude to all identities
that complicate that of the national.
For this group of students, then, those that I have characterized as the social pluralists,
France is a society in continuing need of reform. The overt republican activism of their teachers
(and fellow classmates) was either critiqued or ignored, with teachers instead being viewed as
concretely embodied and socially positioned members of a traditional republican hierarchy who
would hopefully come to recognize students as social equals. Yet most characteristic of the
social pluralists was their use of another nation—one perceived as more open to difference and a
“melting pot” of peoples—to gain greater insights into the state of contemporary French society
itself. In this, their experimentation with discourses that critique the traditions of republicanism,
secularism, and a body of objective knowledge which is tied to social progress, these participants
serve to commemorate “a whole terrain of scattered resistances derived from ‘68” (Ross, 2002,
p. 9).
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
Prospects for Intervening in Collective Social Memory
Coming from the United States, where there is at least one line of tradition which
supports student-centered pedagogy, French classrooms seemed to me particularly strict places:
power was continually and constantly on display, and exercised almost exclusively by the
teacher. In this, my reading does not significantly differ from that of French researchers. For
example, Nicole Tutiaux-Guillon (2007) has argued that:
Most history teachers in France are inclined to identify teaching with the
transmission of knowledge, even if they allow some room for interactive teaching
supported by documents. Pupils are expected to comply with the teacher’s
agenda. Teachers ask questions, they accept or reject answers, complete or correct
them, and incorporate them in their own discourse. Most of the time, they
dialogue briefly with just one student, and then inform the whole group what must
be memorized and written down. (p. 182)
For Tutiaux-Guillon, such practices represent a true dilemma. Training for citizenship, schooling
and theories of knowledge are intimately related in theory, yet in France (as elsewhere),
contradictory in practice. As such, the effects of such history teaching and citizenship education
must be understood as mixed.
Tutiaux-Guillon (2007) notes that French teachers tend to resolve this dilemma by
pointing to a certain natural maturation process. She writes that:
The ability to judge, debate, or solve problems is supposed to arise from
knowledge. Having learnt the “truth,” the citizen is presumed to know how to act
responsibly. Of course, teachers recognise that this will not immediately work
with their pupils, but they really believe in a sort of natural germination of
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Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
responsible action out of the rich soil of knowledge . . . This conviction allows
them to reconcile their adhesion to the civic objectives of history teaching with
their everyday knowledge-centred practice, which is almost wholly dissociated
from such objectives. (pp. 182-183)
Tutiaux-Guillon goes on to argue that if the French “canon” is to be reformed, it will have to
address not only the state-mandated curriculum but also classroom pedagogical issues as well. In
this, I agree. But what has interested me in this representation of French classrooms is its
blindness to something that I, as an American researcher, am perhaps in a better position to
observe and demonstrate: the complimentary role of the implicit school curriculum in French
history education. That which is implicit can often remain hidden, so it therefore makes sense
that an “outsider” might better be able to read the significance of such parallel learning practices.
The data presented in this paper demonstrate that the power exercised in French schools
is not uniformly experienced by students. On the one hand, a group of participants in this study
narrated their “personal” experiences of schooling via the mechanism of a traditional, French
republican narrative and its attendant discursive features. That is, the meaning of these
participant experiences was tied to practices which served to commemorate the founding event
of republican France, the Revolution of 1789. The self which is (re)produced in and through such
practices is one that appears to me, in my position as an American researcher, as a positive social
good, in that it brought into the realm of the possible a notion of citizenship which stressed
national solidarity and civic activism. Yet it maintained a blindspot to social diversity, an aspect
I found less appealing.
On the other hand, there was also a group of participants in this study who narrated their
“personal” experiences of schooling via a newer set of discursive practices, ones I have tied to a
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set of processes which emerged most clearly during the events of May of 1968. Drawing upon
historiographical work that identifies more in the events of May than a family drama whereby
“youth” revolted against the strictness of their “fathers,” I have argued that the participants in
this study commemorate a different national past, one that is critical of the republican tradition,
and that represents a “flight from social determinations . . . with a disjunction . . . between
political subjectivity and the social group” (Ross, 2002, pp. 2-3). This disjunction is operated by
means of invoking the French melting pot, a discursive move which strikes at the very heart of a
French republican tradition which oftentimes equate pluralism with a rigid, identity politics. The
self which is (re)produced these practices seems equally benign, in that it could help to usher in
the more hybridized identities upon which a post-modern and globalizing world thrives.
A civic imagination—the stock of images which we come to recognize as embodiments
of “our” community to which we feel a sense of belonging—is, of course, socially constructed.
In my own country of origin, the United States, the desire for “social cohesion” has most
typically played itself out in an atmosphere of fear, nostalgia, and scapegoating. This study has
renewed my admiration for a set of educational practices wherein a variety of civic discourses
attached to the notion of social solidarity can play themselves out. Such solidarity teaches
students to take greater cognizance of what the “common good” might mean in our increasingly
complex world.
Clearly, then, not every attempt to extend the boundaries of the civic imagination is a
straight-forward attempt at colonization, assimilation and homogenization. The nation-state, as a
political entity whose cultural and political boundaries perfectly overlap, may be (perhaps must
be) an ideal whose time is over—yet it has been my purpose here to suggest that the nation itself
35
Kyle GreenwaltNarrative Practices, National Identity: The Case of France
need not be discarded in the process. A national ideal which can balance both pluralism and
social solidarity seems a worthy goal to pursue in all forms of civic life, schooling included.
French nation-building no doubt has historically exceeded that done in the United States,
where racial, religious, and regional identities have more strongly persisted. Yet national
identities must too be continually reproduced, they too must be practiced in the course of
everyday living (just as surely as gender, racial and social class identities), and it is through
institutionalized discourses and practices that this happens. In the case of France, students are
able to practice multiple routes, utilizing different commemorative practices, to connect to a
national “center.” In this paper, I have analyzed two of them: a route based upon a traditional
French republican narrative, and a route based upon a newer narrative of social recognition and
diversity. Multiple paths toward inclusion insure that the process is not one of “terrorist”
inclusion, an assimilation that will tolerate no difference or dissent—for each path mediates and
complicates the other.
When a school’s explicit and implicit curriculum align—the subject matter to be learned,
along with the attendant civic experiences provided in the course of learning that subject matter
—a nation’s heritage can remain vibrant, flexible and alive. In the United States, this finally
entails historians, history teachers, and educationalists asking: what parts—if any—of the
national past(s) do we wish rehearsed in collective social memory? For what social purposes?
Through what types of explicit and implicit curricular experiences?
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Endnotes
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