Marseille’s Cathédrale Sainte-Marie-Majeure sits upon the coast facing out toward the vast Mediterranean Sea. The towering Byzantine-inspired construction has stood as a symbol of France’s enduring Catholic identity in a maritime region historically situated at the crossroads of the Christian–Muslim frontier. In the autumn of 1852, Louis Napoleon arrived in the city to lay the cornerstone for the newly commissioned cathedral. Two months before the declaration of the Second Empire, the prince-president of the republic adeptly intended to use the public ceremony as a means of rallying Catholics to the Bonapartist cause and thereby ensure a popular base of support for the future government. “My government, I say it with pride, is perhaps the only one that has supported religion in itself, ” he declared after laying the ceremonial keystone. “It does not support it as a political instrument or to please a party but only by conviction and by love for the good it inspires and the truths that it teaches.”1 The import and meaning of the message was clear: the Bonapartists, while revolutionary in spirit, were not anticlerical. Catholics, as well as all confessional groups, could expect to find a friend in Louis Napoleon, a man who, according to the minister Adolphe Billaut, considered religion “one of the social bases on which morality and civilization rests.”2
Promoting his platform of reconciliation and unity, Napoleon III persistently sought to extend a hand to religious moderates and draw them closer to a government nominally committed to the principles of the Revolution.3 This rapprochement between church and state not only aimed to soothe the confessional tensions that had agitated the country for over half a century; it was also a Napoleonic tradition tracing its origins back to the Concordat of 1801 when Napoleon I placed state controls over religious institutions in the country.4 According to Napoleon III, the Second Empire abided by the same “principle of religious freedom” as its predecessor, and as the ruler of a multiconfessional empire he was obliged to serve as the protector of France’s faithful.5 Not forgetting that “the great majority of French are Catholic,” the emperor showed no reservations in making appeals to the millions of Muslim subjects that inhabited French soil. Presenting himself as a new sultan to his Algerian subjects, Napoleon III incorporated Qur’anic verses into his speeches and encouraged France’s Muslims to consider him a benefactor of dar al-Islam, the refuge of all practicing Muslims. “[These speeches] have provoked and led some to believe that the Emperor might well not be a Christian as previously supposed,” one colonist amusingly noted in 1865. “He is familiar with the Qur’an and not afraid to cite it.” 6
Napoleon III’s ability to craft and project multiple identities may have been one of his most appealing qualities, but it could also prove difficult to ascertain where the self-fashioning ended and the actual man began. Speeches and public spectacles assumed the air of a masquerade, and this ambiguity could and did come to extend to the Second Empire itself.7 Yet in the wake of 1848, supporting religion while cultivating a modern identity proved tricky. Hardline Catholics riled by the June Days vented their contempt for the liberal and scientific movements hailed across Europe as definitive triumphs of modern society. “What about those who find modern society wrong, who estimate that this fantastic—and perhaps imaginative—entity is rife with the most iniquitous pretensions?” the Catholic polemicist Louis Veuillot asked in 1866.8 For Catholics who saw the secular and nationalist facets of modernity as both alienating and heretical, modern society could, indeed, seem more fantastic than real at times. Religious militants like Veuillot prided themselves on their resistance to the “modern spirit” and the ruses of blasphemers spreading profane ideas under the pretext of “modern society.” For conservatives, there could be no middle ground when it came to accepting the trappings of modern society. As expressions of support or disdain for modernity assumed poles around which antagonistic political and social identities were constructed, the Second Empire found itself confronting an identity crisis. If Napoleon III fancied himself a patron of science, industry, and the modern spirit, he equally imagined himself as a peacekeeper and unifier. These twin objectives appeared, however, increasingly contradictory as “modern” and “traditional,” “secular” and “religious,” “old” and “new” became highly politicized and contentious terms.
Committed to a policy of tolerance and reconciliation, the Second Empire encouraged a measure of diversity within French public life that often ran counter to hard-line demands for conformity from both the left and right. The government’s support for religion had dovetailed with conservative aspirations for “moral order” and consequently gave Catholics a more pronounced public identity in the country. Napoleon III similarly showed a willingness to accommodate Muslims publicly prior to announcing his Arab Kingdom policy in 1863. As early as 1852, he had made conciliatory gestures aimed at warming North Africans to French rule. Upon meeting the Islamic scholar and vanquished resistance leader Abd al-Qādir at the Palais Saint-Cloud that January, Louis Napoleon treated him with an air of dignity befitting his notoriety in the Muslim world and permitted the bête noire of the Armée d’Afrique to carry out the traditional Islamic salāt. “Today, for the first time ever,” the official broadsheet Le Moniteur declared, “the Palais de Saint-Cloud heard the prayer of a Muslim.”9 The Nativist policies of the 1860s, with their emphasis on Islam’s historical place in Arab national life and religious tolerance, certainly marked a continuation of the emperor’s accommodating stance toward Maghrebi Islam, but they were never completely removed from more general attitudes regarding the compatibility between confessional identity and French national life held by the regime.
To quell the vicious battle between Reason and Revelation unleashed during the eighteenth century, the Second Empire intended to arbitrate between these warring camps and unify a divided country around common nationalist sentiments. It has often been forgotten that for most of the nineteenth century in France, the relationship between religious institutions and the state was more often than not interdependent rather than antagonistic. Postrevolutionary governments commonly made use of religious values and church institutions for the purposes of upholding public order and providing social services to the community.10 In this respect, Bonapartist support for revolutionary ideals coupled with its responsiveness to religious opinion did not appear contradictory in principle. It was primarily the events and political atmosphere of the late 1850s and early 1860s that brought the government’s modern identity into question. As rightwing Catholics increasingly came to articulate an identity in opposition to modern society and opponents of the regime adopted a confrontational stance in defense of French values and modernity, the government found it problematic to sustain a platform that was at once revolutionary and conciliatory. Attempts to retain a middling position translated into appeasement and inactivity as North African colons, reformers, and radical student protestors expressed their grievances in terms that fundamentally challenged the integrity of the government. In the ensuing debates surrounding issues of national education, colonization, and the role of religion in public life, the identity and legitimacy of the imperial regime was clearly at stake as protest movements during the 1860s coming to the defense of “modern society” brought into question the ideological premise underpinning Bonapartist modernity.
Tensions between modernity and religion in France have tended to be most dramatic in the classroom, a feature of French national culture that has extended right up to current controversies over the wearing of the Islamic hijab in public schools. Prior to the Revolution, the Catholic clergy served as the moral educators of society, administering schools that were attended by a select few of the aristocratic elite. At the tail end of the eighteenth century, the Directory championed the notion of freedom of education (liberté de l’enseignement),which effectively removed religious influence over education and gave nominal academic liberties to teachers. Possessing only disdain for these reforms, clerics persistently clamored to reestablish their control over schools. From the First Empire through the July Monarchy, the struggle between lay and clerical control over education remained a contentious issue and in 1833, with the passing of Guizot’s legislation supporting national reforms in primary state schools and a secular curriculum for citizens, the clergy found itself on the losing side of the debate. Spurred into action, Catholics placed education at the center of their program in an effort to compete with the state for the hearts and minds of the coming French generations.11
Debates over education took place against the backdrop of evolving outlooks concerning the role of schools and the functions of educational institutions in the nineteenth century. Since the Revolution, state schools have persistently been held up as “modernizing” institutions in France, a feature made most evident in the education reforms carried out under the Third Republic. The republican education system established in the 1880s is largely given credit for replacing the collective and oral cultures of the rural French peasantry with a written, individualistic, and uniform “modern” one.12 Yet a uniform culture ultimately meant a national culture, entailing that state schools were not just modernity’s reformatories; they were equally the place in which modern national identities were cultivated and internalized, an instrument for transforming “peasants into Frenchmen,” to use Eugen Weber’s turn of phrase.13
Imperial officials were neither indifferent to the linguistic and cultural diversity found throughout the country nor oblivious to education’s potential in effacing these differences. As Napoleon III’s minister of public instruction, Victor Duruy, informed him in 1866, “I intend to undertake the most energetic activity in primary education and . . . exercise the lofty methods avowed by civilization and equality to extend our national language.”14 Reluctant to foot the bill for obligatory primary education, however, and seeking to allay Catholic fears of a state monopoly over education, the Second Empire did not actively pursue a national education system comparable to the one created by republicans later in the century. In light of the chronic social ills and divisions afflicting the country, imperial officials were more inclined to view education as a prophylactic against insurrection and a means of turning rebellious and “savage” groups into productive members of society. In its annual report to the legislature in 1863, the government contended that primary instruction should “respond to the true demands of our time” and vigorously disseminate “all the elementary notions proper to enriching both intelligence and work among the laboring classes in the cities and countryside.”15 As Duruy maintained, “the social question is essentially a question of education.” His conviction that education constituted a vehicle for social and ideological reform was, moreover, understood as an empire-wide project. Having served as a rector in Algeria for the military administration during the 1850s, Duruy was aware of the evident parallels between social reform at home and the nation’s African civilizing mission. “It is necessary to contain the Arabs by the sword and win them over through material interests but we can penetrate their ideas and, by consequence, their mores only through education,” he advised the emperor. “Your ministry of public instruction has a great task to fulfill in the colony as well as the metropole.”16
The slow turn toward mass education over the course of the century was representative of the new power dynamics endemic to what one historian has labeled the “Age of Control.”17 Rather than simply developing knowledge and imparting erudition, schools began to function as institutions of “social reproduction” where the values, forms of knowledge, and normative behavioral codes of society were to be instilled and reinforced in young minds.18 In a France destabilized by aggressive ideological and social conflicts, reformers hailed education as the corrective instrument that would promote social cohesion and produce the type of individual befitting the stable and productive society envisaged by French leaders. Duruy’s remarks on the French working class were revealing, if not ominous: “they ignore that we have become bourgeois through order, work, and economy. It is necessary to teach them.”19 The sprit and intention underpinning such sentiments was not, however, all that different from Prince Jérôme Napoleon’s stance on North African natives in 1858: “We are in the presence of an armed and tenacious nationality that it is necessary to subdue through assimilation.”20 While reputedly aspiring to “enlighten” and “modernize” the population, education remained closely associated with questions of social assimilation and order, exposing the patent “colonial” character of nineteenth-century French education institutions.21
From the beginning of the Bonapartist ascension in 1851, education was employed in promoting the government’s modernizing agenda. Selected to head the Ministry of Public Instruction in 1852, Hippolyte Fortoul announced his intentions of renovating French higher education by establishing courses in technical instruction and making French universities receptive to the needs of “modern societies through a fuller organization of the teaching of science, the source of the wealth and political supremacy of nations.”22 More than a decade later, however, such promises had yet to materialize. Conservatives saw the education system as a crucial weapon in consolidating Bonapartist power and were inclined to agree with reactionaries that revolutionary ambitions were nurtured by student agitators and wayward educators. Accusations that schools and students had fomented the disorder of 1848 were primarily fictions endorsed by conservatives and clerics with little basis in reality. Student activism in the 1840s had concerned itself with issues of academic autonomy and education reform, remaining largely aloof from overt political concerns on the whole.23 As one critic later charged, the restraints placed on education after 1848 constituted “a spiteful reaction against secular instruction” and nothing more.24
The events of 1848 imbued Catholics with a new crusading spirit that was publicly encouraged by the Vatican. The salute of cannon fire that marked the beginning of Pope Pius IX’s reign in the summer of 1846 had signaled an exuberant optimism in Rome over the prospect of a new liberal era for the Church. Warmly referred to as Pio Nono, Pius IX had outlined a papal agenda intent on reconciling the Catholic Church with the democratic ambitions of the age. Granting a constitution and pressing his desire to reform the papal bureaucracy, he was hailed as the “liberal pope.” “The events in Rome are such to delight us all,” wrote the Piedmontese official Massimo d’Azeglio. “The appearance of a Pope who has entered the realm of moderate liberalism is a fact of new and immense importance.”25 This optimism was, however, quashed in 1848 when Italian nationalists challenged the temporal powers of the pope and declared a secular Roman republic, forcing Pio Nono into exile. The extreme nationalism and anticlericalism of Italian republicans was a sobering slap in the face that was not to be forgotten when he was restored to power in 1850 with the aid of none other than France’s new president, Louis Napoleon. Returning to Rome, Pio Nono renounced his former liberalism and urged a systematic opposition to the degenerative forces corrupting Europe.26 The papacy’s retreat to conservatism was made explicit in 1864 when, provoked by Italian unification and the progressive sentiments infiltrating the clergy under the banner of “Liberal Catholicism,” Pius issued his notorious Syllabus Errorum (Syllabus of Errors). In no uncertain terms, the Holy See asserted “it is an error to believe that the Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself to and agree with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.”27
Taking its cue from Rome, the French clergy stepped up its opposition, blaming the violence and disorder of the June Days on the absence of religious instruction in lay education. “All the disasters of 1848 came from contempt for religious authority,” seethed the Abbé Gouget, who accused the middle classes of accepting an education that cared nothing for God and encouraged support for socialism and other profane ideas.28 In the aftermath of revolution, Catholics exploited social anxieties, insisting that the danger residing in state-run institutions had to be checked by fervent religious instruction. As the Abbé Hébert-Duperron, an education inspector at the Académie de Besançon in the Jura, claimed in 1859, there was now an obligation to spread “healthy and religious ideas” throughout French communities, “forming docile children . . . , citizens devoted to order and the country, and Christians faithful to God.”29 Ironically, clerics came to support the once revolutionary notion of liberté de l’enseignement in their campaign to challenge the state’s monopoly over primary education and make Catholic schools competitive with state institutions.
Always sensitive to public opinion in the country, Louis Napoleon proved receptive to Catholic demands. Although averse to the position taken by right-wing ideologues, he was not above courting conservative support for his election to the presidency in 1848 and perceptively understood that his electoral platform of social order could be joined with Catholic concerns over education. That year, he met with Charles Forbes René de Montalembert, a man of moderate political conviction who, as the leader of the influential Parti Catholique, enjoyed significant clout in the Catholic community. In return for his endorsement in the presidential campaign, Louis promised to support the freedom to teach if elected and break the state monopoly over education. The stratagem worked as planned, with Catholic leaders throwing their support behind the Bonapartist candidate that winter and effectively sealing an alliance with the state against the pernicious forces of socialism and revolution.30 True to his word, the following year Napoleon made good on his promise, ordering his minister of public instruction, the Legitimist Count Alfred de Falloux, to assemble a commission and draw up new legislation. Composed of reactionaries and religious reformers, the commission set out to limit the scope of primary and secondary education and allow religion a more direct influence on national curricula. The Falloux Law (loi Falloux), as the legislation became known, passed in March 1850. Under its guidelines, Catholic schools were given a virtual carte blanche while state schools became subject to rigorous inspection. In addition, religious officials were selected to oversee the important baccalauréate examination required for entrance to the universities, with the state reserving the right to inspect all schools in order to guarantee conformity of instruction.31
Although secular in principle, the Bonapartist regime saw the utility of drawing Catholics and the Church closer to the state. It held the prospect of luring the provincial notables faithful to the royal Bourbon dynasty and the Catholic Church closer to the Bonapartist cause. The government also expected clerics to support imperial polices in return for their privileged status, an expectation that became problematic in later years.32 Yet the so-called alliance of Moral Order cemented under the Second Republic was never the counterrevolutionary cabal opponents insisted, nor were state polices necessarily beholden to an overarching reactionary agenda either. The loi Falloux scaled back the anticlericalism of previous administrations by allowing Catholic instructors who had not attended state-run schools (and hence not received official diplomas) to teach in public and private institutions. It allocated mandatory seats on educational councils for religious officials and sought to make religious schools overall competitive with state institutions. The intent was to protect the independent status of religious educational institutions in the country against secular interference and furnish a basis for reconciliation between Catholics and secular authorities. While ultraconservative ideologues could and certainly did use this arrangement to their advantage, support for religious instruction remained consistent with Bonapartist efforts to end the cultural rifts inherited from the Revolution and reintegrate Catholics back into French national life.
Desires to minimize conflict in education were similarly evident in the realm of higher education not subject to the Falloux legislation. Wary of the freedoms permitted to the French université, the government targeted the institution after 1852 as part of the general consolidation of Bonapartist power. Carrying out this task fell to Hippolyte Fortoul. A former art critic and Saint-Simonian, Fortoul was a moderate who had curried favor with the emperor through sycophantic overtures. Convinced that “detestable doctrines” had contaminated the national education system, he believed the state was compelled to battle the “secret peril” threatening French universities and set out to undermine the autonomy of the universities.33 Fortoul stacked the governing Conseil with his own men to ensure that higher education was “directed by a single hand,” guided by a “unity of direction” and, above all, compliant to the state.34 To this end, the minister of public instruction appropriated the power to design academic curricula and appoint or dismiss professors at will to ensure that public instruction was “in harmony with the same principles of the new government.”35 According to Fortoul, pedagogical lectures were to be “dogmatic and purely educational.”36 “The proper mission of universities is to teach the most undisputed parts of human knowledge,” urged an official circular. “It is not to encourage the inventive spirit nor propagate discoveries that are not fully verified.”37 The constraints placed on higher education in the name of social order impelled instructors to give insipid lectures to an apathetic audience. The effect, as Ernest Renan commented, lowered educated men “to the ranks of public entertainers.”38
Reducing secular interference in religious schools and encouraging an anodyne curriculum in state institutions failed, however, to produce the desired social order and tranquility the Bonapartists anticipated. The regime proved unable to rein in rightwing clerics, and as Napoleon III’s foreign policy drove a wedge between the government and its Catholic support, the alliance of the early 1850s showed signs of strain. The emperor’s patronage of Italian nationalism, aimed at bringing a weak and unified Italy under French influence, placed the government in a precarious situation when Italy demanded the annexation of Rome and the Papal States. Catholics condemned support for an Italian nation-state, and often took their opposition directly into the pulpit. Clerical resistance became so great that prefects were ordered to shut down pro-papal journals and arrest clergy members caught insinuating politics into their sermons. Beginning in 1861, Persigny set out to break up prominent Catholic societies and organizations operating outside of the government, specifically targeting the Société de Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, an influential association dedicated to charitable works and social Catholicism with networks extending throughout the country.39 Intransigent clerics responded to this harassment by fulminating against the government’s profane foreign policy and even comparing the emperor to the Antichrist.40
The reactionary stance of Pope Pius IX and his virulent diatribes against “modern civilization” equally posed a problem for the Bonapartists. The Syllabus of Errors seemingly validated anticlerical opinion that the Catholic Church was nothing but a medieval relic out of touch with “the modern spirit.” 41 It was now beyond doubt, the liberal journalist Edmond Scherer seethed, that the Church was not only a “foreign element in our civilization but also a rebellious element that modern society seeks to assimilate in vain.” 42 How could a government priding itself on its commitment to nationality and modern society lend its support to a religion and Church blatantly hostile to the cause of national liberation and “modern civilization” in all its guises? The growing obduracy of the papacy and Catholic radicals put Napoleon III in a hazardous position. With critics assailing the Catholic crusade against modern society, the identity of the Second Empire was now placed in question. In an intellectual and political atmosphere where it was becoming necessary to choose sides and declare one’s self either for or against modern society, clerical resistance became a thorn in the side of the regime that threatened to undercut its dual objective of religious tolerance and national unity.
Navigating between the poles of secularism and religious tradition was no easier when it came to administering the population of more than two million Muslims inhabiting French soil. While Napoleon III’s efforts to present himself as a patron of dar al-Islam may have evoked memories of his uncle’s attempt to cast himself as a “Muhammad of the West” a half century earlier in Egypt, Algeria did present a unique case in which the tensions between religion, modernity, and education intersected in novel ways. Having suppressed Muslim resistance during the initial conquest, the military administration understood all too well the incendiary implications that confessional politics could assume in the colony if left unchecked. Muslim leaders periodically used calls to jihad and chiliastic prophecy to rally supporters and forge political alliances with their brethren against the French infidel. In the early 1840s, the emir Abd al-Qādir had solicited aid from influential Sufi orders and generated a wide-spread resistance movement in the west that took nearly a decade to suppress. No sooner was Abd al-Qādir’s rebellion put down than further revolts sprang up in the Kabyle territories and the Sufi-dominated Za’atsha. In the process of suppressing these movements, the military quickly discovered that local religious authorities were actively fueling Muslim resistance and assisting in recruiting combatants against the French.43
The links connecting Muslim educators and Islamic authorities to the resistance reinforced strong mistrust for the Qur’anic schools and mosques operating independent of French supervision. In 1865, Baron David denounced madrassas as bastions of Islamic militancy and warned of the dangers that would result if native education was not effectively subordinated to French oversight. “Without exception,” he charged, “the methods of instruction given in these establishments encourage a belief in the superiority of the Muslim and contempt for the infidel.” 44 Filling impressionable minds with fresh prejudices and hatred, educators imparted their message of defiance to Muslim youths, cultivating a wild “fanaticism” that, according to one journalist, undermined peaceful coexistence in the region.45 Following a revolt led by sheikh Ouled Sidi in 1864 that roiled southern Oran, Auguste Vital was inclined to put credence in the ubiquitous accusations of Muslim fanaticism levied by colonists and officials. “There are still those magic words that goad [the Muslims], and every time someone speaks to them of nationality, Islam, and the Holy Land to be purged of the infidel they are ready to march.” 46
Prior to the French invasion, the regency of Algiers possessed neither a unified administration nor central education system. Customarily, instruction was the prerogative of local communities, with Muslim children attending schools affiliated with mosques or receiving secondary education abroad in Tunisia or Cairo. Education curriculum varied from school to school and region to region, but in general Muslim learning remained centered on religious instruction given by ulema at madrassas, Qur’anic schools dedicated to studies in theology, Sharia law, and Islamic pedagogy, or through local awliya’ (marabouts) who dispensed religious and legal advice in independent schools. These institutions were responsible for producing the ranks of judges, officials, and educators who presided over Maghrebi society and, therefore, became a primary target of the French administration as it attempted to consolidate its control and influence over Algerian communities.47 These security objectives were, moreover, broadly consistent with the modernizing thrust of French colonial ideology and ideas of African conquest as a French national mission. “We have declared our intention of applying the French Revolution to the Arab people,” General Louis-Christophe-Léon Juchault de la Moricière declared. “Unfortunately, the Muslims have only seen this act as a brutal attack on their religion and an absence of faith.” 48 As the Revolution that had begun in Europe spread to North Africa, the Muslim world, as many French administrators saw it, was now poised to enter its own struggle between Reason and Revelation, as the architects of the future battled against the prophets of the past.
During the first years of the conquest, the state opened schools intended to provide the children of European colonists with a French curriculum and education, anticipating that native elites would eventually succumb to the pressures of assimilation and seek to promote the advancement of their children through French institutions. These so-called écoles mutuelles failed, however, to attract students and remained largely unpopular among Algerian Muslims.49 With native elites unwilling to accept the French curriculum and language, certain military officials expressed reservations over reopening mosques and sending children to the madrassas before French authorities had a chance to thoroughly purge and reform the education system. In the opinion of Captain Jean-Auguste Margueritte, a seasoned soldier and administrator in the Armée d’Afrique, it was “better to allow the Arabs to follow their natural inclination to learn nothing.”50 By the closing years of the July Monarchy, these attitudes had begun to change as officials came to accept the inevitability of developing specific institutions attractive to Muslims. “Islam is not absolutely impenetrable to enlightenment,” a state-ordered committee of inquiry reported in 1847. “It has often permitted certain sciences and arts at its core. Why not seek to make them flourish under our empire? Let’s not force them to attend our schools, but help them to rebuild theirs, to multiply the men of law and religion that Muslim civilization cannot do without any more than ours can.”51 This approach developed over the coming years set the tenor for the Nativist policies to come, outlining a program aimed at renovating and restructuring the Muslim education system and bringing about what Urbain later described as a “slow initiation into our habits and mores.”52
In the summer of 1850, a series of decrees authorized the creation of six Franco-Muslim schools (écoles françaises-musulmanes) in the colony. The reforms signaled a new effort on the part of the French state to influence the indigenous education curriculum and establish an administrative apparatus capable of monitoring and controlling Muslim pedagogy. They also reflected growing outlooks among French political and cultural elites regarding the utility of education in molding young minds.53 “It is with the children that it is necessary to start,” as the anthropologist Louis Pierre Gratiolet explained. “It is in the nascent generations that the seeds of civilization will be planted.”54 Urbain agreed, arguing that the school was “the hearth where the boy [was] transformed into a man.”55 In the perspective of prominent Nativists, influencing Muslim education offered an effective means of transforming the population and slowly integrating them into colonial society. The Bonapartist propagandist Eugène Fourmestraux summed up these arguments concisely in 1866 when defending the government’s education policies in the colony: “By developing the intellect, education works to lower the barriers between two peoples separated by differences in customs and beliefs.”56
The development of a native education system complemented the military’s segregationist policies and demonstrated a further willingness to cooperate with local Muslim notables “for political reasons and in the interest of conquest.”57 Yet because the purpose of these reforms was tied to issues of security rather than purely academic concerns, officials argued that native education ought to be the exclusive preserve of the military. The authority of the state education ministry was to be limited exclusively to French and European education in the civilian provinces. This arrangement ensured the primacy of the Arab Offices over native affairs and extended the dual civilian-military administration into the realm of education.58 The écoles françaises-musulmanes founded after 1850 prescribed a twofold curriculum for native youths, offering instruction in both Arabic and French. Muslim instructors gave religious and grammar studies while courses in language, mathematics, and the sciences were run by French officials. This double curriculum both encouraged the development of the Arab national identity supported under the Arab Kingdom program as well as placed controls on Muslim educators. French officials were responsible for supervising the new madrassas charged with imparting a traditional Qur’anic education to children while the Arab Offices attended to the recruitment of native instructors and school masters with the objective of curtailing the spread of Islamic “fanaticism” and subjecting Islamic educational institutions to state surveillance. The objective was to create a curriculum that was at once familiar to Algerian natives yet accountable to colonial administrators, establishing an allegedly “indigenous” education system that would ideally produce a cadre of native bureaucrats and educators compliant with French authority.59
In tandem with these efforts to place administrative controls on Muslim education, the military endorsed a second curriculum aimed at promoting secular studies and professional training. At the behest of Urbain and other Nativists, the governor-general Jacques Louis César Alexandre Randon authorized the creation of the collège arabe-français, an institution opened in Algiers in 1857 and later replicated in Constantine and Oran. The collèges were intended to initiate natives into a French-inspired curriculum and prepare them for admission to the colonial lycées attended by the Europeans. The courses offered at these colleges focused on scientific learning and the development of industrial skills essential to integrating natives into the colonial economy.60 In Randon’s estimation, the collèges would “spread instruction throughout the tribes . . . and make it accessible to the elevated classes of Arab society, whence it will descend to the masses.” 61 Urbain similarly lauded the new institution as a bastion of progress, claiming that the specialized and secular education they offered would develop the “agricultural and industrial habits” of the natives and pave the way for the advent of an Arab “middle class” traditionally stymied by conservative Muslim notables and religious authorities content to preserve the status quo.62
Despite this ambitious program, state efforts proved largely unsuccessful. Local elites regularly protested against French instruction while Muslim pedagogues resented the administration’s attempts to curb their autonomy. The écoles françaises-musulmanes set up in the Arab territories remained consistently unpopular among Muslims, with only some 1,300 students attending them throughout the colony by 1870.63 These figures were even more disappointing in reality since the number of registered students reported by officials did not take into account high absentee rates. It was not uncommon for French teachers to give instruction to two or three Arab children during any given class session while the instructors at the collèges arabe-française more often than not found themselves delivering lectures to a primarily European student body.64 Suspicion and resentment for foreign institutions were not, however, the only factors discouraging native attendance. In designating North Africa an “Arab” territory, French administrators failed to take into account the ethnic diversity of Maghrebi society, subjecting non-Arab populations such as the Berbers and Turks to an education given in Arabic and partial to an Arab culture to which they could not easily relate.65
If Algerian natives saw the military’s policies as intrusive, the European population in the colony was inclined to view state education initiatives as too passive. Catholics and missionary groups operating in North Africa were among the fiercest critics, seeing the military’s efforts to promote Qur’anic education as anti-Christian and profane. As the “eldest daughter of the Church,” France was called upon to bring civilization to Africa and, as the Catholic historian Jean-Joseph François Poujoulat proudly declared, “reconstruct the edifice of the Christian faith” after centuries of Muslim dominance and desuetude.66 Espousing a strong crusading rhetoric that cast the French invasion in terms of reconquest and re-Christianization, Catholic spokesmen envisioned a reborn Christian Africa under French rule, and education was one of the key instruments in “regenerating” the region’s Christian heritage.67 In this war between Christian civilization and Muslim barbarism, missionaries were soldiers in a “Catholic army . . . devoted to the moral conquest of our African possession,” according to the priest Antoine Horner.68 Missionary objectives ran counter to Nativist aspirations of creating a Franco-Muslim Algeria. Catholics were among the most vocal detractors of the segregation and “tolerance” practiced by the military, ridiculing Islamic schools as strongholds of Muslim fanaticism and anti-French sentiments. In 1867, the newly appointed archbishop of Algiers, Charles Lavigerie, spelled out the Catholic position clearly: “It is necessary to renounce the errors of the past, to cease sequestering those of the Qur’an as has been done for a long time and continues to be done in a futile effort to create a so-called Arab Kingdom.” 69
Military officials could brush off these criticisms because, in reality, they posed little danger to the administration’s integrity. The minister of war Alphonse Henri d’Hautpoul revealed the flimsy position of Catholic opponents when remarking in 1850: “I ask you if we can command three million Arabs and Kabyles with a black habit?”70 Yet this did not mean that missionaries and clerical officials were innocuous. Catholic proselytism had the potential to ignite sectarian conflicts between Muslims and Christians in the colony and imperil public order. Officials repeatedly emphasized the importance of circumscribing missionary activities and prohibiting them from the territories attended to by the Arab Offices. Catholic polemicists in turn stepped up their opposition to Nativism and the Arab Kingdom, applying pressure on both the colonial administration and the emperor to end the segregation that sequestered natives from the colony’s Christian population.71 Reflecting on the tense atmosphere in his mémoires, Ismael Urbain accused Catholic militants of dividing Algeria into two hostile camps and seeking to foment a veritable holy war in the colony. “Reconciliation and sympathetic relations between the two races had become impossible,” he recalled sadly. “It was necessary to choose and take social positions with the Christian French or the Muslims.”72
Yet religious conflict was not the only obstacle to Nativist designs. Settlers assumed an equally critical stance against the military administration, albeit for reasons distinct from those of Catholic polemicists. Faced with the pressing and more immediate concerns posed by Algeria’s underdeveloped economy and lack of skilled labor, colons saw little value in debating the merits of religious instruction. What use did religion serve when the majority of colonists sitting on the rural municipal councils were illiterate and lacked a basic knowledge of arithmetic?73 How could colons be considered “agents of civilization” in North Africa or even be expected to take an active role in the affairs of the colony, critics argued, if they continued to remain uneducated? Émile Thuillier, a radical republican deported to Algeria in the early 1850s, showed his anticlerical colors when it came to colonial reform and heaped scorn on religious officials ill-suited to attend to the practical needs of the colony. In his opinion, the vapid instruction given by priests was insufficient for turning out the type of productive and energetic individuals required to colonize and develop North Africa. “Neither the confessional priest concerned with directing young souls nor the religious-minded, who have all the confidence in the world regarding their students, can inspire in [our children] the true sentiments and responsibility befitting the new existence that awaits them.”74
Thullier was representative of the republican and liberal outlooks germinating in the settler community under the Second Empire as political exiles and deportees averse to Bonapartism adapted their ideology to the situation in the colony. Anticlericalism encouraged consideration for the practical skills and knowledge essential to colonial modernizing and often translated into sharp critiques of state policies. Frustrated by the slow pace of economic growth in the colony, the journalist Clément Duvernois chided the government’s feeble industrial policies, which had failed to either attract metropolitan investors or establish a viable colonial infrastructure. These shortcomings underscored the dire need for an education curriculum composed of courses in economics and management that would produce homegrown elites knowledgeable in the practices and theories of market capitalism. “Public instruction exercises a remarkable influence on production as it turns out competent individuals prepared to take the lead in useful enterprises,” Duvernois reminded his readers in 1858.75 In 1868, the newspaper L’Echo d’Oran reiterated Duvernois’s point, stating its support for a secular and “special” education curriculum that would promote the interests of the colony. “Give to the masses that demand it the means of acquiring a positive instruction that conforms to individual needs and social interests,” the paper urged. “It is through these methods that we will come to form honest citizens.”76
As contentions over secular and religious instruction divided public opinion during the 1860s, the colonial administration found itself square in the middle of this emerging conflict. Inspired by lofty ambitions of spreading civilization across Africa, many officials sympathized with colon demands for progressive educational institutions, believing, as one official claimed, that France’s civilizing influence must “[open] minds to the marvels of modernity” and combat superstition and ignorance.77 Conversely, however, promoting or forcibly imposing a European-inspired education curriculum on the native populations clashed with the ostensible cultural relativism and tolerance adhered to by military officials and Nativists. Much like the Bonapartist government in the metropole, colonial officials were confronted with questions of how to minimize conflicts between Reason and Revelation while shaping an education system that was at once progressive yet tolerant of religious traditions and specific cultural practices. This end was to be sought in a policy that would expunge religious zealotry and inspire what General Nicolas Theodule Changarnier deemed “a more rational direction” within Islamic pedagogy without directly imposing foreign influences on Muslim teaching methods and forms of knowledge.78
For colonists, however, these measures signified nothing short of accepting “Islamic barbarism.” In an open letter to the prefect of Algiers in 1860, Clément Duvernois frankly admitted that preserving the authority of the ulema and marabouts would only fan the flames of resistance and exacerbate sectarian strife. “Believe me, Monsieur,” he urged, “the spirit of tolerance does not guide the partisans of all things Muslim in Algeria.”79 A colon professing a staunch dedication to France’s civilizing mission, Duvernois avowed that “the day the French flag was hoisted above the walls of Algiers, a new era was inaugurated for all of Africa.” 80 Yet the progress promised by French rule required resolve and dedication. The first step was combating the refuges of Muslim sterility and savagery, the Qur’anic schools. “Far from spreading enlightenment [these schools] perpetuate religious prejudices among the vanquished and distance them from the vanquishers,” he inveighed.81
Duvernois’s convictions of French superiority and unyielding hostility toward Muslim culture constituted popular themes in an emerging colon ideology that could, at times, appear just as fanatical and intolerant as the alleged “prejudices” and “hatreds” harbored by Algerian natives. Muslim religious authorities and educators were commonly accused by colonial polemicists of propagating a medieval religious mentality that encouraged resistance to progressive change, accusations that justified marginalizing Muslim cultural elites and suppressing Islamic religious institutions.82 In the view of the colonial publicist Henri Verne, Islam was “the largest obstacle to the fusion of the two races.” Social accord between the indigenous and European populations would continue to be a vain dream unless the state committed itself to purging education of its religious influences and encouraged a secular curriculum.83 Wilfrid de Fonvielle concurred in 1860, arguing that such a policy would “calm the religious susceptibilities of a people who attach too much importance to the exterior forms of their sect.” 84
An amateur scientist and republican journalist deported to Algeria in 1851 after the Bonapartist coup, Fonvielle neither concealed his disdain for the dogma and irrationality that religion inspired in man nor wavered in his beliefs regarding the importance of education for a progressive and democratic society. He spurned the efforts of Catholic missionaries and Islamic clerics alike, asserting that “in this environment of confused opinions” religion only served to inflame passions and jeopardize civilization. Lest the French state assume an active role in assuaging religious hatreds and nurturing a commitment to secular ideals in the coming generation, Algeria would, Fonvielle warned, remain plagued by chronic instability and internecine struggle. “Each religion has its temple [in Algeria], but humanity continues to lack one. The school [will be the place] where all young Algerians, whatever the color of their skin or nuance of their faith, receive a common instruction.” 85
Reason and science offered the foundation for a mutual education encompassing all Algerian children, and Fonvielle was not alone in insisting that “taught side by side [and] learning something as essential as science” the future generation would “forget the sad prejudices of their fathers” and come to see themselves as a single people.86 Victor Duruy came to a similar conclusion during his work in Algeria in the 1850s. Aware of the confessional divide distancing Europeans from Muslims, Duruy posited that science alone held the prospect of social unity and “achieving the moral conquest of these three million men whose hostility is a continual danger to us.” 87 Despite this promising insight, Duruy soon became preoccupied with affairs in the metropole, leaving the question of colonial education in abeyance. Writing in 1858 at a time when Napoleon III was examining possible alternatives to military rule in the colony, Duvernois used the opportunity to attack the army’s support for Qur’anic schools, remarking sharply, “these establishments cannot contribute greatly to the spread of enlightenment” in Algeria.88 His indictment of Muslim pedagogy digressed into an attack on the segregationist policies of the military regime tout court. By isolating Muslim children from the colonists and abandoning them to the tutelage of religious extremists, the military failed to recognize that “continual contact with the Europeans at an age where prejudices have not yet taken root habituates them to not consider us as enemies.” 89
As a modernizing and civilizing force, education was expected to temper religious extremism through the cultivation of reason and scientific knowledge. Its potential to foster sociability across ethnocultural lines rendered it “the most energetic instrument of pacification and racial fusion” in Duvernois’s estimation.90 Yet if colonial critics noted the social utility of secular instruction, whether in combating “fanaticism” or promoting social unity, there was little question that secularizing the education curriculum ultimately meant Gallicizing it as well. In a typical criticism of native segregation published in 1869, the pamphleteer Arthur Ballue expressed his support for mixed schools “where all religious speculation [would] be severely curtailed.” “When the reason, intelligence, and judgment of the Arabs has been developed through study they will understand what our true superiority consists of.” 91 Enlightenment and the cause of civilization may have furnished colons with a rationale for cleansing education of its dogmatic and medieval influences, but such perceptions were never detached from questions of power and ideological hegemony on France’s North African frontier. If the future of the colony was imagined in terms of state schools imparting scientific learning and practical skills to European and Arab students, this future was arguably one in which Islamic cultural elites were severely marginalized, if not irrelevant.
By the 1860s, the Second Empire’s attempts to chart a middle course and encourage a pluralist policy had, ironically, contributed to rather than reduced conflict. Moreover, this was only the first in a growing number of problems facing the regime. With the opening of a new decade, the prosperity and stability that the Second Empire had ushered in was rapidly waning. An economic downturn generated by ill-conceived trade agreements, large deficits resulting from the government’s public works projects, and the revival of political rivalries in the Corps législatif indicated that the halcyon days of the 1850s were coming to an end. “In the past ten years, never has France faced such a worried situation,” one Bonapartist dignitary commented in 1862. “The great party of order is disorganized, there is anxiety everywhere, and a sort of silent agitation is creeping throughout the country.”92 Following the coup in 1851, Napoleon III had carried out an effective purge, driving republicans underground and confining their movement to the local level. “[The republicans] lack cohesion,” one official reported in 1854. “The suspicion, which exists even between the most militant, prevents them from establishing a united group influenced by the same ideas.”93 Yet in 1857, the government was shocked by the election of five moderate republicans to the Corps législatif. The victory of Les Cinq, as the five deputies became known, portended a revitalization of the republican movement, and in 1863 republicans made further electoral gains in Paris, this time returning former Forty-Eighters (quarante-huitards) who did not hide their loathing for the government.
The weakening of the clerical alliance and the growth of political opposition had a sobering effect on the emperor, indicating the need for a shift in the government’s political orientation. Hoping to mend fences with disaffected liberals, Napoleon III searched about for a suitable minister of public instruction, one who was progressive yet moderate. In 1863, he settled on Victor Duruy, a former teacher and academic inspector who had served in both Algeria and Paris. A confirmed Deist, Duruy was not antipathetic to the applied sciences and, while serving in North Africa, had promoted scientific education as a means of diffusing religious tensions in the colony. With religious conflicts currently agitating French society, cultivating an appreciation for scientific rationality in young minds, although controversial, was not altogether undesirable, especially if carried out slowly and pragmatically so as to usher in a “quiet revolution.” To achieve this objective, however, Duruy realized that the imperial government could not continue to pander to Catholic reactionaries. He expressed his misgivings to the emperor bluntly: “The bishops are closely linked to the Pope and his polices, which are in absolute contradiction with the institutions of modern society.”94
A proponent of modernization, Duruy believed it essential to devise a curriculum capable of developing the applied sciences and technical skills that sustained industry, the motor of economic and “moral” progress. New industrial needs required a novel type of education, one capable of fostering “a new spirit and new men” in the country.95 Despite the opposition of clerics, the imperial government, in his view, was not theoretically at odds with the demands of reformers, offering hope that his reforms could be sufficiently realized. The question, however, was how to endorse such measures without further estranging Catholics or offending religious sensibilities. Unable to devise a pragmatic solution, the emperor and his entourage of conservative ministers preferred to appease Catholic reactionaries rather than sanction liberal reforms that could possibly endanger the government’s authoritarian policies. In spite of Duruy’s hope of inaugurating a “quiet revolution,” he found his freedom of action hampered by staunch conservative opponents and the emperor’s futile attempts to please everyone.
Upon taking up his post in the ministry at 110 rue de Grenelle, Duruy announced his intention of reversing the damage done during Fortoul’s administration.96 No sooner was he in office, however, than a controversial situation presented itself. In 1862, Ernest Renan, a theologian recently elected to the Collège de France, gave the first lecture from his forthcoming book The Life of Jesus. Intent on presenting a humanistic history of Christianity, Renan went as far as to deny the divinity of Christ and attributed the working of miracles to apocryphal accounts by the apostles.97 After delivering his lecture, he was suspended from the collège by the education ministry. With the government desiring to mollify clerical acrimony and reaffirm its Catholic support, it could scarcely tolerate such a contentious subject being taught in a state institution. Renan was defiant, however, and continued to give private lectures attended by students at his own home. In 1863 he published his Life of Jesus, which, by the following year, had gone through ten editions and sold some fifty thousand copies, much to the government’s chagrin.98
The conflict soon mushroomed into a controversy as Catholics unleashed a venomous criticism of Renan and Duruy, and fiery arguments erupted in lecture halls. Although a supporter of academic freedom, Duruy disdained instructors prone to controversy, abiding by a personal maxim of “first order, then liberty.” Judging it imprudent to give in to the demands of the clergy outright and generate a cause célèbre that would give Renan “the baptism of persecution,” Duruy pressed the government to proceed delicately with the matter. His suggestion was, however, ignored in favor of appeasing Catholic opinion and Duruy was compelled to dismiss Renan from his post. Much as the minister had anticipated, Renan’s dismissal provoked student protests in support of academic freedom and free thought, obliging Duruy to enforce his prerogative despite their disapproval.99
The Renan affair set the tone for Duruy’s troubled career as minister of public instruction. Reviled by conservatives and attempting to initiate a slow but progressive reform policy, he became the target of both the left and the right, at once appearing either too conservative or too radical depending on the critic. With Catholic extremists and student activists constantly seeking to exploit academic contentions for their own ends, grievances had the potential to escalate into controversies quickly, and Duruy found himself reacting with a heavy hand when it came to divisive ideas arising in the universities. Student protests rose throughout the 1860s in response to the regime’s unpopular education policies. Writing in 1862, a vice-rector at the Académie de Paris complained of the growing disorder he noticed in schools, claiming that unruly students “fashioned themselves apostles of skepticism and materialism.”100 Support for science and materialism was rarely apolitical in nature, according to the official. Due to the “pernicious influence” of militant student activists, French higher education was quickly becoming a veritable breeding ground for dangerous ideas and radical political ideologies.101
While the police and imperial authorities expressed concern over the growing radicalism in schools, various liberals and democrats interpreted the politicization of French youth as an auspicious sign.102 Following the favorable mention of former republican luminaries in the pages of the student newspaper Journal des Écoles in 1862, the quarante-huitard Edgar Quinet sent a personal letter of gratitude to the paper’s editors from exile in Switzerland. “It is natural that old men will support their own, and it is often their single consolation,” he wrote. “But when the young in their turn conserve and recall such things and men in their fresh memories, lifting them from obscurity, then it is certain that moral life continues, that truth persists to germinate in passionate hearts, and that we may still hope and believe.”103 The republican Jules Simon similarly offered words of encouragement to the student movements taking shape in France, remarking, “What makes youth so magnificent is its enthusiasm for all great causes.”104
What the socialist Benoît Malon deemed the “veritable awakening” of French youth marked the advent of a new movement directed by young middle-class elites committed to reform and political opposition.105 Student newspapers became the chief organs of this protest movement, with editors circumnavigating the imperial censors of the commission d’examen while they remained in print. Most of the papers had a short existence, with many of the editors having their presses shut down by government officials or finding themselves serving brief prison sentences for the publication of unauthorized material. Charles Longuet, editor of Les Écoles des France, received a four-month prison sentence in 1864 before relocating to Brussels and launching his second and more successful journal, La Rive gauche. Georges Clemenceau, a medical student and journalist in the 1860s who would become a leading republican politician and eventually premier during the Third Republic, narrowly avoided arrest one afternoon when authorities appeared at the door of his residence on the rue du Bac where he kept an illegal printing press. He managed to conceal the criminal device from the police at the time of their visit but the following day it was moldering at the bottom of the Seine.106
Clemenceau had already served a short sentence in Sainte-Pélagie prison for his underground political activities and had little desire to return there. Others, however, were not as lucky, nor did they necessarily want to be. Sainte-Pélagie became a popular meeting place for like-minded student radicals, and serving a prison sentence was in some cases considered a badge of honor and a testament to one’s dedication to the cause of liberty. As the young Blanquist Gaston da Costa boasted when reflecting on his arrest in 1867, “through my polemics I was talented enough to earn my first prison sentence and a fine of two hundred francs.”107 Attempts by the imperial regime to root out and discipline young militants often had the unintended effect of strengthening their ideological resolve and further associating demands for academic freedoms with the broader call for political liberty that had begun to enliven political opponents. Noting the uniformity of purpose and shared hostilities expressed by French students during the 1860s, Charles Longuet did not hesitate to proclaim that he and his cohorts constituted a “new generation” possessing its own aspirations and mission distinct from the past.108
Although stressing generational solidarity, Longuet was not blind to the “diverse tendencies” existing among the various student groups. He was especially troubled by the discrepancies he saw arising between militant Jacobins on one hand and democrats averse to “excessive and outmode displays of force” on the other.109 United by shared revolutionary and republican aspirations, activists remained, nonetheless, divided over the issue of how exactly to inaugurate this extensive social and political transformation. For a radical like Gustave Tridon, a Parisian law student notorious for fraternizing with Jacobin terrorists and waxing lyrical on the “men of blood” who orchestrated the Great Terror in 1793, political struggle was, in its very essence, a violent enterprise befitting men of stern will and iron conviction. “The Revolution can only be accomplished by force,” he declared in 1865, “and that force is in us.”110 Yet not all democrats subscribed to these extreme opinions, and even a radical like Longuet admitted that certain “concessions” would have to be made on the part of militants if the student movements hoped to retain a unity of purpose.111
Tridon and his ilk made up one of the most extreme and militant camps within the student resistance. They pledged their allegiance to the notorious Jacobin revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui, a shadowy figure considered the scourge of bourgeois society whose repeated incarceration as a political prisoner over the decades had earned him the sobriquet l’enfermé, the “imprisoned one.” The prominent activist and friend of Longuet, Paul Lafargue later claimed that Blanqui “provided the revolutionary education” for his generation, an assessment that proved quite accurate in light of the events that would unfold during the 1860s and early 1870s.112 Convinced that “the nineteenth century will only justify itself through science,” Blanqui nurtured an aggressive appreciation for materialism and atheism in his young acolytes. Science was the definitive weapon in the battle against Catholic dogma and clerical authority; violent rhetoric and revolutionary action the true politic.113 His followers took these words of wisdom to heart as the aged Jacobin reared a fresh generation of political militants whose strong dedication to social revolution and terrorist tactics would prove exceedingly difficult to tame.114 In light of the Blanquist faction, Longuet’s hope of softening extremist opinions within the ranks of the student movements and discouraging violence would have to be able to trump the influences of notable revolutionary icons and build a radical platform capable of drawing the support of insurrectionists and more temperate activists alike.
The “new generation” promoted by Longuet and his followers constituted a rallying call to French youth. It intended to forge a common identity and purpose across ideological lines and orient the student movements around a set of core republican values. This new generation, united by its loathing for servitude and intellectual tyranny, was carrying on the traditions of French student activism and collectively paid homage to its forbearers by continuing the revolutionary struggle, in Longuet’s opinion.115 Despite the fact that the student activists of the late 1840s had rarely expressed support for revolutionary ideas and remained cold to overtly political concerns, Longuet understood the importance of constructing a past and common heritage.116 Cultivating an identity that students could associate with necessitated locating it within a specific cultural context and fostering solidarity through appeals to tradition and acts of collective memorialization. Veneration for the past was, however, coupled with conceptions of rupture and discontinuity to highlight the revolutionary and novel character of the student movement. One could have accused Longuet of insincerity when his newspaper La Rive gauche declared that while their predecessors abided by the credo “God and Patrie,” the current generation proudly obeyed a new one: “Reason and Fraternity!”117
As brothers in arms, students upheld a tenacious devotion to the cause of free thought, identifying schools and universities as the definitive battlefield on which the coming revolution would either be won or lost. “Education is the supreme salvation [and] solution to all the problems of our time” a student petition drafted in 1867 declared.118 Drawing upon Blanqui’s notion that education constituted the only “real revolutionary agent,” Paul Lafargue echoed the teachings of his mentor when affirming “revolution must be social and not political, and education is the most powerful revolutionary force I know.”119 Faithful to their republican principles, activists vented their spleen at clerical influence over French education. Religion instilled subservience and “a profound disgust for terrestrial affairs” in young minds.120 A new generation now demanded enlightenment. In the opinion of the neurological student Albert Regnard, the debates over faith and reason had reached a fever pitch, and it was now essential to take sides in this struggle. For Regnard and his generational coevals, the choice was simple. “All men of progress are for materialism today,” he affirmed. “On our flag, one reads progress through science.”121
Science constituted a core ideological tenet of the new generation, vaunting a modern identity that student activists proudly celebrated to demonstrate their break with established traditions and beliefs. “Our light is human science . . . our criterion is human reason and our principle is human law,” wrote a student journalist in 1865.122 More forceful, the Blanquist Germaine Casse declared before an international student congress in 1867 that youth had let out its “war cry” while “the entire past trembled.”123 His generation stood for science and freedom, Casse insisted, and it was, he added, willing to wage war against the forces of intellectual and political oppression to attain them. “We are strong and young,” claimed Tridon, “we have a hunger for bread and ideas, for justice and science. . . . Why should we continue to wait? Do we not have a faith, Atheism; a goal, Justice; a method, Revolution?”124 Science and revolution produced an intoxicating mix in the thoughts and writings of student activists speaking on behalf of a new generation, and their message sought nothing less than to expose “the radiant image of the approaching future” built by the “great revolutionary work” calling forth a new republic, as La Rive gauche informed in 1865.125
This social vision was not merely a French vision either. According to many leading publicists, student activism possessed a continental purview offering a future in which “all men, united by science, marched in common accord toward the definitive conquest of liberty.”126 In an antiwar proclamation scripted in the midst of the Austro-Prussian conflict in 1866, students made an impassioned appeal for solidarity among Europeans, urging that the time had come for the youth of the continent to detach itself from the “old world” on the verge of collapse. “United and marching together,” Europe would cast off the slough of the past and accomplish its “sacred mission, the mission of the nineteenth century.”127 International student congresses held in Belgium during the 1860s emboldened hopes that the “cult of science” and democratic aspirations germinating among a younger generation might consolidate the “fraternity of schools” from Lisbon to Saint Petersburg, promoting peace and liberty across Europe.128
These dreams of an irenic and cosmopolitan Europe certainly played upon the minds of various student activists as they made their way to Liège in 1865 to attend a student congress. In a letter drawn up to advertise the congress in the foreign press, the organizers invited students from across Europe to discuss “the question that touches us most directly, that of education.” Emphasizing the cosmopolitan intentions of the gathering, the announcement unequivocally stated: “The congress of Liège will not be a gathering exhibiting a passionate political agenda. It calls for calm and fraternal deliberations from young men coming from all schools, all sects, all parties, as well as all countries.”129 In mid-October, Parisian students set up an organizational committee to make plans for attending. With Lafargue sitting on the committee, it was no surprise that invitations were extended to the Blanquists, who readily saw the gathering as a public forum to make their ideas known to France and Europe despite the request for “calm and fraternal deliberations.”
The opening of the congress on 29 October began with controversy, to the dismay of the organizers. At the inaugural ceremony, national representatives were asked to march into the hall carrying their respective flags as a symbolic gesture of European unity. As the procession of flags proceeded and the national colors of each country were hung beside one another, the Blanquists delegation entered the hall carrying a black flag. As they marched through the room, students exchanged puzzled looks. When one student asked what the black flag signified, the Blanquists replied, “the mourning of French liberty.” Mortified by the behavior of his compatriots, the French student Paul Giraud-Cabasse sent for the standard tricolor to be hung among the others and requested that the black flag be removed. The Blanquists protested, remarking sullenly, “France’s flag was red. . . . There was no need for those stripes added by tyrants.”130
The Blanquists’ allusion to the drapeau rouge of the Jacobin Republic and their insistence on using the congress as a platform for nationalist polemics and political criticism prefigured the events that would transpire over the next three days. Once debates got under way, the Blanquists attracted much of the attention with ribald antics and inflammatory declarations. Stating his contempt for established religion, Lafargue went on to denigrate the current intellectual atmosphere in France and proclaim his dedication to scientific materialism. Affirming that science was the “tremendous narrative undertaken by man against God,” he continued his harangue, declaring: “Science doesn’t deny God. It does better. It renders him useless. . . . War of God! That is progress!”131 Tridon joined in the tirade, lauding science and the French Revolution as the destroyers of an insidious Catholic dogma that, although once powerful, was diminishing day by day. “The struggle at the moment is between man and God,” he insisted, “between the future and the past.”132
The flagrant antireligious diatribes announced in Liège were intended to buoy the spirits of radical free thinkers and repulse moderate and Catholic sensibilities, and they had their desired effect. The Bonapartist newspaper Le Pays deplored the “implacable and savage war” preached by the young radicals across the Belgian frontier, writing them off as “furious madmen.”133 The Catholic press was no less critical and, as expected, exploited the spectacle to illustrate the poisonous ideas circulating through French universities. The liberal Catholic journalist Gustave Janicot implored moderates to maintain their principles of tolerance in spite of such vicious attacks mounted by extremists, commenting sullenly that “such radical, audacious and subversive doctrines as these have not been heard since the worst days of our revolutions.”134 “The fact is nobody believes in the red specter anymore,” the writer Edmond About opined that December. “It was necessary that a half dozen young men, in an unhappy escapade that we would like to attribute to their age, have served to furnish a pretext to those who refuse us our liberty!”135
As About indicated, the “unhappy escapade” brought a conservative backlash and a deluge of comments disparaging the inimical influences that liberty and free thought posed to social order. Demands for more rigid controls over French schools echoed in the press. The events at Liège also delivered a powerful blow to Longuet’s hope of effacing the ideological divisions within the student movements and transforming student activism into a progressive and revolutionary force committed to broad social change. If the solidarity of the “new generation” proved to be illusive following the Liège fiasco, Blanquist radicalism had equally torpedoed the campaign for peace and European fraternity. The astringent nationalist rhetoric and irreligious attitudes of extremists was clearly in conflict with the irenic and cosmopolitan ideals extolled by the spokesmen of Europe’s “new generation,” driving a further wedge between the leadership of the student movements.
The events in Belgium did not go unnoticed by imperial statesmen infuriated by the public show of opposition. In December, the Counseil Académique of Paris summoned the student participants, but only a single person bothered to acknowledge the summons. This refusal to appear incensed the council, which summarily expelled seven students for desecrating the national flag and attacking the “principle of social order.”136 The authoritarian manner in which the proceedings were handled brought criticism from liberal opponents and greater demonstrations of resistance from students.137 Once news of the expulsions became known, protests broke out in the Latin Quarter as indignant demonstrators disrupted lectures and openly heckled professors. The constant disturbances prompted the government to send in the police to maintain order, and the sight of armed officers only aroused further protests that resulted in street brawls between students and the police. In such a heated atmosphere, students were forced to show identification cards or matriculation papers in order to enter academic buildings, and by late December classes were canceled altogether.138
While Duruy’s reluctant decision to dismiss unpopular academic officials and the coming of winter recess brought a reprieve, the open resistance to the state reflected poorly on the imperial government. Coming to his post in 1863, Duruy had hoped to promote science and industry through education reform, giving an impetus to Bonapartist ambitions of forging a modern French society. Within two years, however, Duruy’s idealism had been quashed, as students, educators, and radicals denigrated the education minister as yet one more example of Bonapartist obstinacy and parochialism. Lambasting the Second Empire as the embodiment of an “old” and moribund society that conspired with clerics and impeded scientific advancement, radical republicans and student activists stridently declared themselves representatives of a “new generation” imbued with the spirit and resolve necessary to found the modern society the Bonapartists could not. The politicization of the Second Empire’s education policies provided young militants with the opportunity to construct and articulate a new identity that bolstered resistance to authority and nurtured a strong commitment to the radical republicanism that Napoleon III had set out to purge from the country. As was evident, by the middle of the 1860s the master narrative of Bonapartist discourse was beginning to unravel as a revived republican movement began to speak in the name of modernity.
In her study on colonial education, Yvonne Turin has claimed that the preservation of Qur’anic schools and the institutionalized segregation imposed by the military administration in Algeria gave rise to what she accurately describes as a “double culture,” one that remained a defining feature of French Algerian society right up until decolonization.139 Yet as French officials attended to madrassas and vetted Muslim educators, the metropole was contending with its own “double culture” of sorts, one given official recognition in 1850 with the passing of the loi Falloux. The cultural divide between Catholics and secularists ran deep within French social and intellectual life, and the conflicts surrounding education at midcentury were a microcosm of these larger ideological splits. “The more I look at everything, the more I am convinced that there are only two parties in France, the clerics and the liberals,” Taine claimed, and many would have agreed with him.140 On the North African border, these divides were infused with existing racial and ethnic tensions that distinguished Europeans from Muslims, colonizers from the colonized.
As a unifier, Napoleon III intended to suture these divisions through a platform of “forgetting and reconciliation” that extended to the government’s education policies.141 Bonapartist modernity rested upon the premise that an ambitious program of state-driven development and reform could effectively remake individuals and rally them to a progressive, tolerant society. This aspiration ran through the various civilizing and modernizing discourses espoused by the regime. In its various incarnations, Bonapartist modernity promised stability, prosperity, conciliation, and social fusion. These themes cut across nation and empire, contributing to an image of a trans-Mediterranean French community unified, ultimately, through the modernity and progress delivered by a new Napoleon.
The problem, however, was that modernity also proved divisive. In the nineteenth century, the question of modern society stood at the center of various cultural conflicts in which there appeared very little ground for compromise. The schism between implacable clerics and liberals noted by Taine persisted. Colonists upheld their intransigence to a hostile and inferior indigenous Muslim culture. In the conflict-ridden atmosphere of the 1860s, professions of faith in modernity tended to accent existing cleavages as critics challenged “traditional” authorities through appeals to modern society and secularism. For the most radical thinkers, uniformity rather than tolerance was the panacea, eliciting calls for an overtly secular and national education curriculum that would advance modern society as they understood it. The discords of the period were charged by what Louis Veuillot deemed the “vague monster that everyone calls ‘modern society’. ”142 It was, moreover, this same “vague monster” that stalked the imperial regime. Rather than pacifying these contentions, the government found itself embroiled in them as it attempted to steer a middle course. The tensions emerging within France’s national and colonial policies at midcentury were producing a common set of criticisms that reformers on both sides of the Mediterranean could direct toward the regime, calling into question the modern identity it coveted.