IN May of 1968, when Latin was officially removed from the first year of the lycée in France, the minister responsible justified the step by presenting teaching of the language as the preserve of “cultural heirs” (“héritiers de la culture”) and as “an obstacle” to democratization” (“un frein à la démocratisation”). In the egalitarian climate of the period, Latin was considered “bourgeois,” and this was one of the reasons for its suppression. This symbolic episode shows that Latin was not just a school subject; it was a social tool. It raises a historical point about the conversion of a scholarly discipline, a body of knowledge, into a means of differentiation. We need to look back to discover how Latin acquired such a role in Western society; how it was used to draw a line between those who knew it and those who did not. Reserving knowledge of the language for a social elite and excluding lower classes from it reinforced its worth as a tool of differentiation. The status that Latin had acquired over time reveals itself again when girls, who had long been excluded, were permitted access to the language, not on intellectual, but on social grounds.
It is fitting to start with the humanist school as it established itself during the classical revival in fifteenth-century Italy. At a time when any training beyond basic education was rare, school was an elite phenomenon, intended for elite children who were being prepared to carry out elitist roles. The teaching that a school was able to provide developed skills of acknowledged practical value for performing high-level civil or religious functions. However, this training carried a danger inherent to its own methods: there was a big risk that commenting on the ancient authors could be reduced to technical observations and that the text might disappear under an excess of scholarship. In fact, there were many cases during the last part of the fifteenth century in which masters and students could be found gratuitously flaunting their knowledge, smugly picking out the errors of Homer and Virgil and then arguing among themselves over the minutiae. Associated with such behavior, the humanist school strayed from its high educational ideal to end up merely training specialists or technicians.
In Italy, too, the elite then saw another model appear: that of the courtier. Baldassare Castiglione’s Libro del Cortegiano (Book of the Courtier, 1528) taught that anyone living at court should always display sprezzatura (“studied carelessness”): he should “conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it”; on the other hand, continued Castiglione, exposing the art “robs a man of all credit and causes him to be held in slight esteem” (Book 1, chapters 25–26; Castiglione 2002).
From the beginning of the sixteenth century in Italy, and then later elsewhere, one character who did reveal his art was roundly condemned: the pedant. This figure was ridiculed in numerous comedies, including Il pedante by Francesco Belo (1529), Il candelaio (The Chandler) by Giordano Bruno (1582), Edward Forsett’s Pedantius (1581), then later Le pédant joué (The Pedant Tricked) by Cyrano de Bergerac (1654), and Molière’s Les femmes savantes (The Learned Ladies, 1673). One of the traits which these satires invariably came back to was the pedant’s penchant for excessive use of Latin, often of a particularly pompous variety, as well his deep concern to demonstrate a brand of learning that reveled in the details. These foibles appeared predominantly among regents and schoolmasters, moreover in “souls of little worth” (“âmes de bas aloi”), as Montaigne described them in his Du Pédantisme (On Pedantry) in the Essais (Montaigne 1962, 141). “Pedant” and “Latin” even came to be confused, as is evident in the expression “gens à latin” (“Latin people”) coined by Molière to refer to pedants such as Trissotin in Les femmes savantes. It was not Latin itself that was the object of such mockery, rather a degeneration in its usage and notably an excessive fondness for citations and etymologies. This misuse of Latin was all the more ridiculous because it contrasted with the ideal of polite behavior among the ladies and gentlemen at court and then of the mondains (Stäuble 1991, 14–115; Royé 2008).
However, Latin was in no way driven out of fashionable society. It was actually integrated to some extent. The nobility considered a classical education crucial for fulfilling certain functions or for participating in courtly life: it was necessary to refine the taste and judgment of would-be patrons and to educate spectators so that they would be capable of decoding mythological references at court ballets and reading the Latin inscriptions at festivals. The goal, however, was not to turn the children of aristocrats into scholars. The erudite path, which required long years of study, was rejected. Preferred instead was a training based on translation, with the child working on political, historical, or military texts more suited to his requirements. This education was at first conducted at home, but things changed later with the appearance of the Jesuit colleges. In France, nobles sent their sons to these institutions. The duration of their studies reflected the career envisaged for them, either in the army or in the church. In this way, children received Latin instruction for varying lengths of time in the context of institutions that produced men of the world—it is worth bearing in mind that these colleges also taught the arts of the gentleman. In this way too, the noble education, far from rejecting Latin, integrated it, but in stripping it of everything that might make it pedantic (Motley 1990, 68–121). Latin, then, became a “noble” subject, regardless of whether the teaching in the colleges went into the minutiae.
Latin had become the symbol of society’s upper-class education, and its increasing lack of real use—Latin would play an ever-smaller role in the future professional life—confirmed its symbolic function. This function lasted. For this reason we find numerous assertions in the nineteenth century that a classical education ought not produce Latinists. This is also the reason for the disdain in France and perhaps even more in England for the German philological approach, which was thought to turn students into specialists.
Under these conditions, Latin abandoned its scholarly leaning, which, in polite society, might have been fatal. In the process, it had changed its status. It was no longer purely useful or utilitarian knowledge, associated with professions lacking prestige. It was, for the elite who exposed their children to Latin in high doses, purely honorable knowledge, as Thorstein Veblen described it in his analysis of classical studies among the “leisure class” (Veblen 2007, 240–59). In this way, Latin “classified”: it made the gentleman in England and the bourgeois in France; that is, it served to signal a person’s belonging to a social class in which it was possible to spend money, time, and energy on acquiring knowledge that was not, in professional and economic terms, purely useful. It was part of a “culture of luxury” (“culture de luxe”) in the words of the philosopher and sociologist Edmond Goblot (1925, 125).
These remarks summarize the opinions, current within society since the seventeenth century, on the need for Latin training among upper-class children. John Locke (1632–1704) was very clear on this point when he wrote: “Latin I look upon as absolutely necessary to a gentleman” (Locke 1823, 152). A century later, the English aristocracy, which had long looked down on the classics, had adopted different views altogether. An education without Latin was now inconceivable. Lord Chesterfield, in letters to his son, frequently insisted on a sure and steady training in Latin and on May 27, 1748, explained to him: “Classical knowledge, that is, Greek and Latin, is absolutely necessary for everybody; because everybody has agreed to think and to call it so” (Armstrong 1973, 130).
In France where, since the Revolution, no one talked of “the gentleman” anymore, and where, in the course of the nineteenth century, the demand had grown for teaching more adapted to the needs of modern society, even among the bourgeoisie, this same bourgeoisie, above all its richest components, kept teaching their children the classics. Latin and the elite went together. The words of contemporary commentators are revealing on this topic, such as the educationalist Monsignor Dupanloup’s (1802–1878) statement to the National Assembly: “The ruling classes will always remain the ruling classes … because they know Latin” (“Les classes dirigeantes resteront toujours les classes dirigeantes … parce qu’elles savent le latin”; Prost 1968, 332).
Thus, Latin signified belonging to the ruling group. Conversely, the lack of any Latin skills indicated lower-class origins. “A man who does not smile knowingly at a citation from Homer or Virgil is a man condemned,” noted Émile Zola. “That man is not one of ours, he has not polished school benches for ten years with the seat of his pants; he knows neither Greek nor Latin and that is enough to consider him one of the poor blokes” (Zola 1969, 239). One could not wish for a clearer expression of the distinction that Latin enforced. Zola’s quote has its counterpart in an equally short passage by Paul Valéry. On the subject of teaching as it was in the France of 1945, he noted in his Cahiers: “it develops only what distinguishes (according to the conventions) a class and what allows a person to move or manoeuver within a restricted circle—like a password, because Greek and Latin are just a password. It is not a question of knowing them” (Valéry 1974, 1674).
Here we see a practice, often the only one, that demonstrates classical-language learning: adorning one’s speech with a citation in Latin, without falling into pedantry. Being able to make appropriate citations in Latin was a distinguishing mark, a visible symbol of belonging to the world of cultivated people. For this reason, works such as Pierre Larousse’s Flore latine des dames et des gens du monde (Latin Pocket-Book for Ladies and Men of the World, 1861) were published. It had at least six editions before 1914. At a time when French prose was peppered with Latin citations, this book offered itself as a type of “convenient and discreet translator” (“un traducteur commode et discret”), for those who had never learnt Latin or who had forgotten it, which they could consult without fear of making an error and above all without being humiliated (Larousse 1861, xxix–xxx). Now we understand the advice that in 1846 Andrew Amos gave to boys on their way into the trade professions: obtain some additional classical training. It would provide them with the social ease and respectability of gentleman, and, above all, it would save them the embarrassment that would befall them if, in urbane society, their ignorance of Latin should be uncovered because of a quotation (Clarke 1959, 170).
While Latin and the social elite were merging, some groups whose inclusion in that very elite was under threat passionately affirmed their dedication to classical studies as a way of preserving their social standing. The situation of the penniless gentry in Victorian England is revealing. In 1860, as part of a consideration of secondary teaching, the question arose over what sort of education to give to children according to their social class. The Schools Inquiry Commission of 1868 defined three types (“grades”) of education according to the duration of schooling: “first grade” education, “which is to continue till 18 or 19”; “second grade” education, “which is to stop at about 16”; and “third grade” education, “which is to stop at about 14.” Parents of “first grade” pupils, including the aristocracy, the gentry (rich or poor), professionals, and the clergy were not hostile to teaching innovations that gave a place to the sciences and modern languages, provided that they did not affect their children. For their own families, they wanted education to remain classical. This conservative attitude was particularly evident among members of the poorer gentry, for reasons that the Schools Inquiry Commission stated in very clear terms (Bamford 1967, 170–71):
They would, no doubt, in most instances be glad to secure something more than classics and mathematics. But they value these highly for their own sake, and perhaps even more for the value at present assigned to them in English society. They have nothing to look to but education to keep their sons on a high social level. And they would not wish to have what might be more readily converted into money, if in any degree it tended to let their children sink in the social scale.
Following the same logic, that powerful social bias in favor of the ancient language reappeared in France. Until the 1960s, it led the elite routinely to put their children into classical education and to consider a transfer into the Latin-less track a disgrace. The expression “descendre en moderne” (“going down to modern”), current at the time to describe the relegation of a child with a poor performance in the Classics track into the modern track, eloquently translated the fall in standards that the abandonment of Latin came to symbolize. The phrase had its counterpart in “monter en classique” (“going up to classic”) to describe the opposite path that might be taken, albeit rarely, by a child who was gifted but who had been placed in the Latin-less track on account of his social background.
Goblot, who associated Latin with a “culture of luxury,” showed that at the same time it was a “barrier” that separated the different classes in society, effecting a “clear distinction … between, on the one hand those who do not know Latin and on the other,—I will not say those who know it—but those who have learnt it” (Goblot 1925, 123). Incidentally, this remark targeted the poor skills of students of Latin as much in the seventeenth century as in the twentieth: the success of a few cannot conceal that the general level had consistently been low, despite long years of training (Waquet 1998, 157–82).
Humanist schools were schools for the elite, and Latin teaching, which was their principal concern, long remained an elitist subject. This was not least due to the fact that such an education was lengthy. This length already excluded the vast majority of children who, for obvious economic reasons, did not go further than the most elementary stage at school. Furthermore, over time, the establishments offering the most extensive education, such as the French collèges de plein exercice (which offered all the classes, as opposed to petits collèges offering only two to three classes), tended towards becoming elitist. They delegated the teaching of reading and writing skills to primary schools and thus created a clean break between elementary learning and teaching Latin. This led to an over-representation of the society’s elite in the colleges, the strongholds of Latin: in the eighteenth century, the elite made up between two-thirds and four-fifths of their boarding pupils. As for the pupils who came from the town itself, social status determined the length of their studies: the majority of the nobles’ sons and the sons of officials went on to the final class (called the “rhetoric class”), while only half of artisans’ sons got that far.
Latin even came to distinguish between those who did and did not study it, between the rich and the poor in fact, within the classroom itself. The difference can be observed concretely in the classroom as arranged by Jean-Baptiste de La Salle (1651–1719), the founder of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools: the children “from a good background” (“de condition”)—those who did Latin—were seated at tables located “in the most respectable part of the classroom” (“dans la partie la plus honorable de la classe”); they were thus separated from the poorer children, who were merely learning how to read and who were seated on simple benches (Lebrun, Vénart, and Quéniart 1981, 431).
This phenomenon of distinguishing between pupils went even further in the nineteenth century. The public schools in England, which were the Latin bastions par excellence, had an aristocratic recruitment if only because of their boarding fees. Latin, which reigned supreme, was occasionally used to maintain and reinforce their social exclusivity as well. Some of these schools were required, under the provisions of their foundation, to admit local children for free or for a nominal fee. To get around this awkward social arrangement, basic classes were dropped, so that a child must either have had a personal tutor or have gone through a fee-paying preparatory school to acquire the required amount of Latin to get into these exclusive institutions (Armstrong 1973, 143–44).
If the French lycée was more welcoming on a social level, it upheld through the teaching of Latin a distinction no less marked. The reorganization of the educational system under Napoleon set in place two tracks of teaching corresponding to the two social classes that made up society at the time: the bourgeoisie and the common people. This “ségrégation”—the official term—was based on Latin as well as on the payment of a special tax, called “rétribution.” A directive of August 13, 1810, stated that: “All students admitted into an institution where Latin is taught will be subject to the rétribution” (Chervel 1993, 40). Throughout the nineteenth century, the lycée remained socially very even, and lower-class children made up the majority of the “modern” studies pupils in the twentieth century. In the mid-twentieth century, Latin still reflected social inequalities: in 1956, children of liberal professionals represented 12.6 percent of the students in the lycées doing classical studies, while the children of farmers and workers, who numbered almost double the population of the lycées, made up only 13.2 percent of Latinists (Ringer 1979, 330). In 1961–1962, the proportion of students who had done Latin in the faculties of arts at universities varied from 83 percent, for children of executives and professionals, to 41 percent for children of workers and farmers (Bourdieu and Passeron 1985, 26–27).
As well as marking off society’s different classes, Latin also traced borders within the professional world, as the following examples from France make clear. Under the Ancien Régime, Latin made distinctions between related professions such as between the physician and surgeon. The pharmacists, in their desire not to be confused with grocers, advertised their knowledge of Latin. This use of Latin did not end with the Revolution, either. Under the Empire, during the reorganization of higher education, it was stipulated that for medicine, two of the five examinations that the candidate had to undergo must be in Latin; on the other hand, health officials took all of their examinations in French. Latin also distinguished a hierarchy in the engineering profession. The increasing numbers of polytechnic students who had done the baccalauréat, that is to say who had done Latin, distinguished themselves not only from students studying arts and trades, who came from more modest social backgrounds, but also from their great rivals at the École centrale of whom 61 percent, on the eve of the First World War, had not studied the ancient language (Weiss 1984, 28). Latin had no use in these professions. It could not even claim to provide access to sources and to etymologies, which is what physicians could assert. It functioned as an indicator of social status. This emerges with particular clarity in the protests that German civil engineers staged against plans to open their profession to graduates from secondary schools that did not offer a classical education: they feared that the level of their profession would drop if Latin were abandoned as a prerequisite.
Latin went on to become even more of an elite phenomenon as it was refused to those who tried to gain access to it from outside the ruling classes. The reasons behind this rejection belong to an idea of society in which each person has a role to perform according to his or her background. Consequently, there was no point in giving Latin to people who had absolutely no need of it on account of their backgrounds and who, ultimately, did not have a right to it; there was a great risk of ruining the providential equilibrium, of overturning the established order, or at least disturbing the current harmonious state of affairs. These reasons were clearly stated throughout the Europe of the Ancien Régime. Since children should be brought up in a way befitting their background and considering the role they were destined to play in society, Latin was of no use for the sons of artisans or shopkeepers; moreover, it might give these children aspirations above their station, aspirations that they would not be able to satisfy, leading to frustration and significant risk to society. The eighteenth-century reformers certainly considered it important to educate the people and respond to their demand for education; but this was to be limited to a basic level: learning to read and write, calculations, and some moral training. Latin was not a part of the program; it was explicitly excluded from it. A panorama of eighteenth-century Europe will make this evident.
The Spanish reformers considered Latin dangerous for the larger part of the population, as if it encouraged fanciful aspirations to inaccessible professions. Ultimately, it would lead to general weakness in the nation, and even riots; for the time being, it was identified as cause of the economic problems that were affecting the country by distracting hands and minds that would have been more naturally drawn to agriculture or engineering. In 1747, Ferdinand VI imposed a limit on the number of Latin schools, upholding a decree of Philip IV on the matter. From the beginning of the seventeenth century, Latin had already been considered responsible for the decline of Spain by the group of economic reformers known as arbitristas: it turned young people away from agriculture, crafts, and commerce and pressed them towards ecclesiastical or administrative careers, which were judged unproductive in economic terms. Indeed, Pedro Fernández Navarrete wrote in his Conservación de monarquias (Preservation of the Monarchy) of 1621 that the Latin schools, numbering more than 4,000, had had a hand in the decline of the kingdom’s power (Kagan 1973, 301–2).
In Prussia, the “cameralists” thought that education should be standesmäßig—compatible with the role of the individual in the economic production and suitable for the occupation for which he was destined from birth. Among the poorer country folk, some instruction in reading and writing was enough; going any further than that encouraged their children to leave for the towns and so to swell the university proletariat, who were rendered unfit for manual labor and who, at the same time, were without the financial means to access official positions or liberal professions. Rulers, then, took action against this phenomenon. In Austria, Charles VI and then Maria Theresa gave only limited access to the Gymnasien to sons of craftsmen and farmers; in 1766, the empress declared in an edict that “not all children should be admitted to Latin schools, but only those of exceptional talent whose parents are sufficiently propertied to support them.” In Silesia, Frederick II’s officials reasoned in the same way. The education of farmers’ sons had to respond to the economic imperative of working the land, as well as to worries over social discipline. Latin instruction for them was excluded on both accounts. Moreover, it was noted that Latin “only stimulates a desire to enter the priesthood, thereby destroying their natural inclination to practice the occupation of their fathers.” In 1763, teaching Latin was forbidden in Silesia’s rural schools. This measure was driven, once again, by the belief that Latin promoted arrogance and disobedience among the peasantry. The minister in charge of Silesia was clear on this point: various officials had assured him “that the most good-for-nothing, stubborn peasants in their districts are precisely those who have studied Latin.” He was confirmed in this opinion by the archbishop of Breslau, who observed that “those peasants who have learned Latin … are in all respects the most disobedient” (van Horn Melton 1988, 114–19, 184–89).
In France, the craze among humble folk for having their children learn Latin was equally frowned upon. Louis Sébastien Mercier, in his Tableau de Paris (~ Panorama of Paris, 1781–1788), denounced the ambition of any petty bourgeois who could not himself read, to make a Latinist of his son, assuring him that “Latin leads to everything.” But long years of school made the boy “a slacker who disdains any sort of manual work”; incapable, thereafter, of finding an administrative or clerical position, he would end up at home forever at the expense of his father. “The Latinist,” Mercier continued, “does not know how use his hands anymore, and it is then too late to take up a profession, and anyway this doctor who knows four lines of Cicero would not stoop to it.” The demand for an education for the people to which Mercier, like others of his “enlightened” contemporaries subscribed, aimed at practical subjects and excluded Latin. Hence his call to the government to close the collèges de plein exercice, which were producing “a flood of slackers and loafers.” In those institutions, there was a veritable “gangrene” that was eating away at the middle-classes, a “scourge” (“fléau”) on the whole body of society (Mercier 1994, 1:205–8 and 1146–50; Chisick 1981, 135–53).
Similar remarks were made in Italy as well. In the competitions held by the Academy of Modena in 1772 and 1774 on the teaching of the lower classes, the contributors unanimously agreed that children from inferior backgrounds should be given an education befitting their status: therefore, they kept sons of craftsmen and farmers away from a Latin education, which, far from preparing them for a trade, only made them unhappy and useless in themselves as well as in society (Lucchi 1985, 39–52 and 78–80). Access to Latin was restricted, very concretely, by financial means. Latin teachers who were teaching in primary schools preparing children for secondary school could charge a monthly fee of twenty to twenty-five soldi, which excluded the children of peasants. In Piedmont at the end of the Ancien Régime, if secondary colleges were free, this was not the case for all primary schools, and the settima (then the transitional year between primary and secondary school) had to be paid for. Thus, Latin functioned as a deliberate filter, restricting access to secondary education for children thought unsuitable for it (Cigolini 1982, 1027–29).
Mutatis mutandis, the same arguments and the same processes were common throughout the nineteenth century. In France, the lycée functioned as means of social “segregation”: it was a bastion of the bourgeoisie. Concern for the education of the lower classes went hand-in-hand with a refusal to allow them access to Latin: a classical education was considered incompatible with their social background; it rendered them unfit for the trades they were destined for by their birth, which, moreover, risked deep demoralization. Exclusion and differentiation only reinforced the prestige that was attached to Latin and the fascination it held for those who did not have access to it. Those excluded came to internalize the distinction that Latin created between social classes and between the different types of occupation. They brought their views into line with those of the authorities and the elite. From the end of the seventeenth century, the petite bourgeoisie were convinced that there could be no education without Latin. Locke remarked upon this phenomenon, specifically the craze among merchants and farmers for sending their children off to Latin school when they had neither the intention nor the means to make scholars of them (Locke 1823, 153):
If you ask them, why they do this? They think it as strange a question, as if you should ask them why they go to church? Custom serves for reason, and has, to those that take it for reason, so consecrated this method, that it is almost religiously observed by them; and they stick to it, as if their children had scarce an orthodox education, unless they learned Lilly’s grammar.
With such an early text (written in 1693), one might even ask whether the conviction of the lower classes might not have preceded that of the elite. Or, at least, whether it might not have played a large role in this complex process whereby some people’s desire to imitate reinforced the need for differentiation among others.
In any case, Latin seemed a way to move beyond one’s social status, to move up in society; this is what emerges from the texts cited above. The desire to move up in society using Latin endured: it can be seen at work in the United States during the 1890s and afterwards when working-class children went into secondary education in large numbers. They widely opted for classical subjects, and this preference increased over time: in the academic year 1889–1890, 35 percent chose Latin; in 1905, the percentage rose to 50 percent. The more educationalists sought to adapt the curriculum of these children to their requirements—not to say to their status—the more those children (or their parents) chose the traditional subjects. For them, secondary education meant Latin, not metalwork or sewing. Very quickly, educationalists saw a potential danger here and the risk that these children were harboring fanciful aspirations. They took pains, then, to turn them away from choosing Latin by pushing them towards practical subjects, better suited to their probable or apparent futures. They also reduced the amount of Latin available, while at the same time recommending it to those who had the means, above all financial, to continue their studies after secondary school (Nasaw 1979, 134–39 and 145).
It was principally for social reasons that access to Latin was refused to women for so long. Charles Rollin, rector of the University of Paris, was very clear on the subject. It was not a question of intellect (“sex, on its own, makes no difference in people’s minds”), but was social: in a world governed by Providence, which defined each person’s status and duties, women were not “destined to educate people, govern states, wage war, serve justice, plead cases or practice medicine; their share is within the home.” For these domestic functions, Latin was useless; moreover, with the knowledge going hand-in-hand with it, it risked inciting unprecedented ambition, turning a woman away from her duties and leading towards disastrous consequences for her family as well as, ultimately, for society as a whole (Rollin 1734, 53–60).
With the exception of home schooling by scholars such as Gerardus Vossius, Tanneguy Lefèvre, or Charles Patin in the seventeenth century, who taught their daughters Latin, the teaching that girls received throughout the Ancien Régime was limited to morals, religion, the basics of reading, writing, counting, and handling a needle and thread. Things only changed very slowly, and, during the majority of the nineteenth century, a girl’s education included no Latin, but subjects that prepared her for her future domestic functions. Although in Germany basic schooling for girls was more extensive and the literacy rate higher, access to the higher stages of learning was impossible for the large majority of the female population. Having the same education for the two sexes was considered unreasonable, as if it jeopardized “the foundations of the natural, and therefore inalienable, difference that the inequality is” (Hoock-Demarle 1991, 152; cf. Albisetti 1988, 18–19).
However, during the nineteenth century, Latin was gradually introduced into female education. It was done tentatively, in the form of optional courses or in schools for the elite, or in institutions designed to offer further education without preparing a student for a profession as such. This tendency arose earlier across the Atlantic than in Europe. But before Latin was offered as widely to girls as it was to boys—not forgetting that it was not equally available to all boys during the nineteenth century—there was a good deal of opposition. Just as in the past, arguments were based not on the girls’ intellectual inferiority but on social reasons.
In France, secondary education for women, established in 1880, was intended to ensure stability within the households. It was supposed to help prevent a “divorce of intellect” (“divorce intellectuel”) from developing between the educated husband and his uncultured wife. It was not, then, about giving girls an education that would prepare them for a profession; even less about making scholars of them. The type of teaching that was put in place was at the level, and above all in the spirit, of higher primary education (Mayeur 1977, 9–32). Latin came into the curriculum by way of electives and was limited to a certain period of time—“the short Latin” (“le latin court”). It was only in 1924 that public lycées offered the same Latin program to girls as they did to boys. This offer was, moreover, subject to payment. Moreover, it was on the basis of primarily social arguments that the supporters of Latin for girls, mostly Latin teachers, had fought and succeeded to bring about change. They showed that girls brought their “feminine” abilities to the study of Latin, which could only support their learning of the language; in particular, the fact that Latin was difficult reinforced that feminine quality of modesty. They focused on the maternal role for which the girls were destined: mastery of Latin would allow them to keep up with their sons’ Latin studies, making them language “coaches” (“répétitrices”). More generally, Latin prepared them for their futures as house mistresses, as Léopold Druesnes, professor at the lycée in Lille and ardent advocate of Latin for girls, wrote in 1913:
The qualities necessary for management of a household are … reason, common sense, wisdom, method, a sense of order and rule. Well! All these qualities are precisely the qualities of the Latin mind and, in particular, of the Latin language. The Latin language is sensible, methodical and disciplined; it is an everlasting lesson in reason and common sense.
(Druesnes 1913, 250–52)
Since the seventeenth century at least, Latin had functioned as a means of social differentiation: it served to classify people as well as to reproduce and reinforce the structure of contemporary society. It is clear that today it no longer plays this role. However, some assign to it a new social, or sociopolitical, role. Latin, indeed just as Greek, is presented as a useful tool for integration into European society. “All young Europeans should be able to study an ancient language to return to their roots,” asserted Jean-Pierre Levet, professor at the University of Limoges and president of Eurosophia (a European federation of Classics teachers in higher education), in an interview. This benefit applies a fortiori to children from immigrant backgrounds, for whom learning Latin means having the possibility to become a member of a national community; and Levet makes this explicit: “access to the ancient language and culture, means access to a deep understanding of the host country’s culture and having an opportunity for integration” (Bernabeu 2007, 31).
SUGGESTED READING
The social status of Latin is not one of the areas of Neo-Latin studies that has received much attention, even though a considerable amount of information is available in work on the organization of Latin teaching and educational methods throughout the period (see the list of references below). For an overview of the topic in question from a Western perspective, see Waquet (1998). For the humanistic period, see Grafton and Jardine (1986). Burke (2004) provides a brief analysis of Latin as a factor of social inclusion. Royé’s (2008) work on the pedant, principally from literary texts, allows us to pin this social figure down for the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries as the representation of inordinate use of Latin jargon. Waquet, forthcoming, examines the social dimensions of girls’ access to Latin.
[Translated from the French by William Barton and the author.]
REFERENCES
Albisetti, James C. 1988. Schooling German Girls and Women: Secondary and Higher Education in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Armstrong, John A. 1973. The European Administrative Elite. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bamford, Thomas W. 1967. Rise of the Public Schools: A Study of Boys’ Public Boarding Schools in England and Wales from 1837 to the Present Day. London: Nelson.
Bernabeu, Laurence. 2007. “Les langues mortes n’ont pas rendu leur dernier souffle.” Valeurs mutualistes 247:30–31.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1985. Les Héritiers: Les étudiants et la culture. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.
Burke, Peter. 2004. “Latin: A Language in Search of a Community.” In Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe, 43–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Castiglione, Baldassare. 2002. The Book of the Courtier. Edited by Daniel Javitch and translated by Charles S. Singleton. New York: Norton.
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