The Radical Bourgeoisie: The Ligue de l'enseignement and the Origins of the Third Republic

...Auspitz insists on first understanding the democratic radicals as they understood themselves...

...This was the very disjuncture Tocque-ville had deplored (in Democracy in America) as "intellectual squalor...

...Charles R. Kesler is a teaching fellow in the Department of Government at Harvard University and a contributor to National Review...

...In America, after all, Tocque-ville saw a nation that had been born—and would be baptized—in the faithful knowledge that the "laws of nature and of nature's God" are the foundation of the great proposition "that all men are created equal" that "the Supreme Judge of the World" may be appealed to for the rectitude of our intentions...

...The first thing you want in a new country, is a patent office...

...The bulk of Mrs...

...Auspitz's book traces the ramifying activities of the league as it fought for secular public education in every commune and department, culminating in the great victory of 1881-82, the passage of the lois Ferry...

...and after that, out with your [news]paper...

...In this respect the bourgeois radicals (as well as the ultramontane bitter-enders) never learned Tocque-ville's larger lesson...

...Unlike the Bourbons," Mrs...

...and so the republican radicals determined to make France free by undertaking the gradual work of liberating it from the Catholic Church...

...as it would be over the Elephants Lions Tigers Panthers Wolves and Bears in the Royal Menagerie, at Versailles...

...Their principal mistake had been not to foster mores appropriate to republican government, or at least to underestimate the difficulty of establishing les moeurs republicaines in a nation still saddled with emperor and Church...

...then work up your school system...

...Happily, there is not one syllable of such nonsense in this learned, spirited, elegant book...

...For the choice posed by both radicals and clerics was between the "ethic of the Revolution," a morality "immanent in man and the consequence of his dignity,'' and the ethic of ' 'feudal Christianity," based on what Mrs...

...A few years later he added, "Is there any instance [in history] of a Roman Catholic monarchy of five and twenty millions at once converted into a free and rational people...

...A n short, the success of the Third Republic (it would last until anothe German victory overwhelmed it in 1940) was decisively prepared by the patient sowing and weeding of the league...

...J. he beginning of the radicals' self-understanding is the fact that France had the misfortune of having to number her republics...

...Of all the voluntary associations that sprang up in the 1860s and 1870s—chambers of commerce, trade unions, masonic lodges, free trade clubs, popular libraries, animal husbandry circles—the most comprehensive and influential was the Ligue de I'enseignement...

...a chronicle of the war, to use Twain's language, between the nineteenth and the sixth centuries—between science and liberty, on the one hand, and superstition, despotism, and (his bete noire) the Catholic Church, on the other...

...The story is told crisply and well, and it is an important story...

...To this end the radicals looked beyond the slogans of liberte...

...the League of Education founded by Jean Mace (a tireless organisateur and vulgar-isateur) in 1866 to "encourage education" and to strive "through legal means to change laws and practices incompatible with the freedom of conscience and the equality of citizens...

...Its prose engages, and often delights...

...there is none of that leaden piling of noun upon noun that pulls so many scholarly works straight down to the murky bottom, never to be seen again...

...To have ranged on one side "the men who value morality, religion, and order," he wrote, "and on the . other those who love liberty and legal equality" is—wrong-headed, unnatural, even impious...

...that, finally, it is only with "a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence" that a just revolution is to be commenced...

...As Professor Auspitz concludes, it was precisely the battle over public educaton that forged the "infrastructure of the Third Republic, the cadres patiently but actively preparing themselves to govern...

...Auspitz challenges this view by showing that the republican radicals, thrown down from the heights of political power, spent the intervening years busily, indeed lustily, preparing to storm them again...

...This law reiterated the place of religion in the elementary school curriculum, empowered the clergy to inspect the schools for orthodoxy, exempted religious teachers from the certifying power of the state, expelled philosophy and modern history from the classroom, and restricted the budgets and changed the admissions policy—from competitive examinations to nomination by the mayor and parish priest—of the provincial normal schools, the principal recruiting grounds of lay teachers...

...Auspitz accurately calls hereditary and supernatural "pretensions...

...To ignore the conceptions through which people defined themselves and identified friends and adversaries is not to be objective but to be, literally, impertinent...

...Auspitz observes, "republicans remembered their mistakes and learned from them...

...and the dramatic fall of the First, together with the melodramatic collapse of the Second, provided the background for the schools movement of the 1860s and 1870s...

...For in the Declaration of Independence the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are coordinate with "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor": the pursuit of happiness is held to the standard of the highest human honor which is, of its very nature, open to the divine...

...She does not set out to write "scientific" history, but history as an art of imaginative understanding, taking its bearings from political life as known to actual citizens and statesmen...

...But the continuing problems of French republicanism, all too visible in the Fourth and even the Fifth Republics, suggest a pathology in those mores that Mrs...

...THE RADICAL BOURGEOISIE: THE LIGUE DE L'ENSEIGNEMENT AND THE ORIGINS OF THE THIRD REPUBLIC Katherine Auspitz/Cambridge University Press/$29.50 Charles R. Kesler When the Connecticut Yankee set about reforming Arthurian society, he paused to reflect on the priorities...

...fraternite and borrowed a lesson from Tocqueville: how to use* the science and art of association to transform isolated, narrowly self-interested subjects into republican citizens...

...Auspitz does not investigate...

...Until now the standard historical interpretation has held that the hi Falloux signified the quiet disappearance of bourgeois radicalism after the debacle of 1848, and that radicalism reappeared only by accident in 1870, when Napoleon III was surrounded at Sedan by the nation-building, scientifically educated Prussians...

...The importance of mores— of habits, customs, manners—had been a central theme of French political thought ever since Montesquieu, and the immense hardships involved in republicanizing France had been well ventilated on both sides of the Atlantic since the Revolution of 1789...

...John Adams wrote Thomas Jefferson (in his best purple prose) that "a project of such a Government, over five and twenty millions people, when four and twenty millions and five hundred thousands of them could neither write nor read: was as unnatural irrational and impracticable...

...One reason for such admirable lucidity is that, before moving on to evaluate them, Mrs...

...Thanks to its work, republican ideals were at last rooted in republican mores...

...Although America has its own history of disestablishment battles and of exaggerated tensions between the Free Exercise and Establishment clauses of the First Amendment, it may not be presumptuous to suggest that instruction on the harmony between religion and human liberty and equality can be had from our example...

...egalite...

...Auspitz can hardly be faulted for slighting America when she has produced a truly outstanding work on the political history of France—a book sure to change accepted interpretations...

...Admittedly, the volume's title, The Radical Bourgeoisie, is a little suspicious, redolent of the infelicitous sermons on unholy subjects—the mixture of Marxist flim-flam and liberal do-goodery—that passes for social science in the contemporary academy...

...But Mrs...

...a book commendable to anyone who is concerned with the relation of religion, education, and free government, or who wonders what sort of mores are essential to the perpetuation of our own political institutions.ical institutions...

...but understanding— finally—that France could never be safely republican until workers, peasants, and bourgeois alike were ready to be citizens...

...The answer, of course, was No...

...Katherine Auspitz has written a book that the Yankee would appreciate, despite the fact that it skips the patent office: a study of the struggle for free, compulsory, secular primary schooling of both sexes in France...

...the Ligue de I 'enseignement itself remained in need of further education...

...This meant in particular from the Catholic Church's control of education, which had been most recently consolidated, and extended, by the hi Falloux of 1850...