Lycées, lycéens, lycéennes. Deux siècles d'histoire by Pierre Caspard, Jean-Noel Luc, and...

Book Review

Pierre Caspard, Jean-Noel Luc, and Philippe Savoie (eds.). Lycees, lyceens,lyceennes. Deux siecles d’histoire. Paris: Institut National de RecherchePedagogique, 2005. 501 pp. Cloth h32.

This volume of thirty articles is the very welcome product of a majorconference held in Paris in 2002 in honor of the bicentennial of thecreation of French lycees. The editors of the volume, who represent theorganizing bodies of the conferenceFthe Universite de Paris-IVSorbonne and the Institut National de Recherche PedagogiqueFhaveproduced a magnificent tribute to the state of historical research on thelycee. The volume’s richness is largely the product of the range ofcontributors: historians, of course, but also sociologists, specialists ofspecific disciplines (literature, mathematics, mechanics, politicalscience), as well as educational administrators and doctoral students.The central focus on the lycee, and hence secondary education, offersinsight into what was until recently the intellectual core of Frencheducation, what Lucien Febvre described as the ‘‘tout puissant Empiredu milieu’’ (the all-powerful Empire of the middle), given its positionbetween primary and tertiary education. The whole is framed by Jean-Noel Luc’s superb introductory article that offers a cogent synthesis ofwhat the lycee represented in French secondary education at its creationand its evolution over two hundred years. Perhaps most importantly, theintroduction includes a dense historiographical overview and suggestsdirections in which the field is moving. While Luc focuses on the lycee,he carefully positions the Napoleonic creation with respect to otherforms of secondary education, both public and private, as well as girls’secondary institutions. The result is a masterful presentation of the‘‘state of the field’’ that testifies to the vitality of the history of educationin France today.

The twenty-eight substantive essays are divided into four sectionspresenting a broad range in both subject matter and methodologicalapproach, although sociocultural perspectives tend to prevail. Theclassically framed first section addresses the political, social, andcultural stakes in the creation and then the reforms within the lyceebut offers new perspectives on the evolution of the institution itself,through a focus on such issues as institutional logics, on scholarshipstudents, on the presence of religious minorities within lycees, and onthe exporting of a French model through the creation of lycees in Egyptthanks to the mission laıque francaise. Taken together, these articlesreveal a far less authoritarian institution than is often depicted, and onethat offered opportunities to groups of students, most notablyProtestants and Jews, who were not necessarily from the political or

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economic elites. The lycee also evolved in a nonlinear fashion, inresponse not only to institutional developments (notably theemergence and growth of other schools situated in the ‘‘middle’’ of theeducational hierarchy), but also in response to political and pedagogicalevolutions.

The second section deals more specifically with changes inpedagogical offerings through a series of articles about specificdisciplines: history, French, mechanics, mathematics. Long a specialtyin French history of education, these studies focus less on textbooks thanon the conception of the academic discipline and the move towardincreasing specialization at the turn of the century in relation to themajor reform of 1902. Studies of the baccalaureat and of pedagogicalpractices illustrate the resistance reformers encountered from teachersthemselves but also focus our attention on the specific exercises thatunderlay the French approach to lycee education: the ‘‘dissertation,’’rhetorical speech, or exams.

The third and shortest section analyzes forms of sociability,representations and collective practices within the lycee, and centersattention on both teachers and students. Three articles focus on specificcategories of teachers: the agreges at the top of the hierarchy, the maıtred’etudes at the bottom, and the professor of philosophy. Studentsemerge primarily through studies of lyceen culture in the second halfof the twentieth century when the system radically changed thanks to thesurge in student numbers. Student culture in the nineteenth century islittle evident, however, except through the perspective of theirpunishments and their living conditions in boarding schools. Thevolume’s origin as a conference explains this absence as well as thepresence of numerous case studies on specific moments, individuals, orgroups. Of particular note is the study of the reformers Paul Langevinand Gustave Monod in the mid-twentieth century who oversaw thetransformation of lycees from elite institutions into the final level ofmass secondary education, as well as the article on Octave Greard, Vice-Rector of the Academy of Paris at the end of the century when girls’lycees were first created. It bears mentioning that girls’ lycees, theirteachers, students, and programs are scarcely present in this volume noris there much discussion of the emergence of coeducation, a subject thatremains understudied in French history of education. Instead, however,the volume ends with a section, entitled ‘‘order and change in theadministration of lycees,’’ that approaches the management of the lyceethrough administrative and pedagogical perspectives (the enactment ofdiscipline) while often noting the weight of political ideology in thismanagement. More unusually, two articles explore school architectureand its changes, and a third offers an interesting perspective on the turn-of-the-century ‘‘crisis of lycees’’ through the eyes of rectors, who

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represented the ministry at the level of the academy. In sum, this book isindispensable reading for those who wish to understand the overallevolution of the French lycee, as well as for those more interested inspecific aspects of this evolution.

REBECCA ROGERSUNIVERSITE PARIS V-SORBONNE

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