LAI ̈CITE ́in 1870, the Second Empire was replaced by the Third Republic. At the outset, the Third
Republic confronted a country divided in an ongoing struggle betweenles deux France.
The first France was the prerevolutionary ‘‘eldest daughter’’ of the Catholic Church.
After the Revolution, traditionalists and counterrevolutionaries claimed it to be (and
constructed it as) the real, authentic France, the romantic Catholic ‘‘tradition’’ that
would have been passed on to new generations had it not been so rudely destroyed by
the Revolution.^6 The other France was the post-RevolutionaryE ́tat-nation,thepolitical
nation founded during the Revolution. As the negative of the first France, which re-
ceived its rulers from God (the king) and, most frustratingly, partly from Rome, the
new, modern France constructed itself as an autonomous, self-constituting political
nation.^7
During the struggle betweenles deux France, Republicans needed to develop an ideol-
ogy that could replace Catholic morality and that would spread the ideal of secular citizen-
ship across the country. Due in particular to the introduction ofsuffrage universel, public
schooling became crucial to prevent the people from voting for an authoritarian (Catho-
lic) regime. As the famous Republican Ferdinand Buisson, one of the great proponents of
public education, aptly stated in 1899: ‘‘Two conditions must be fulfilled to set a republic
on its feet. One is easy: you must provide it with a republican constitution. The other is
difficult: you must provide it with a people of republicans.’’^8
Thus, from the beginning it was clear that Republicanism required more than just a
juridically defined secularity; it needed a pedagogy to institutionalize a culture of Republi-
canism.^9 The perception of this need gave a dimension tolaı ̈cite ́that persists in its con-
temporary understandings, where the concern is not so much with freedom of conscience
and the disestablishment of religion as with a ‘‘communitarian concern for civic unity,’’
which tries to ‘‘substitute democratic civic loyalty for religious and traditional alle-
giances.’’^10 Three political cartoons from the time of the separation of 1905 will help us
to grasp the symbolic aspects of the struggle around public education in French culture.
Figure 9, Charles Fournigault’s ‘‘The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the
Citizen,’’ is a didactic image. It has frequently been used as an educational poster to
advocatelaı ̈cite ́. We see ‘‘once upon a time’’ opposed to ‘‘today.’’ In parallel, Catholic
icons such as the castle, serfdom, and community are opposed to the republican institu-
tions of school and the vote. The transition from the premodern ‘‘once’’ to modernity’s
‘‘today’’ takes place through the teaching of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of
the Citizen. Note the strong symbolic opposition between religious belonging and the
freedom of citizenship. Public school is presented as a crucial institution for the transition
from a ‘‘natural’’ provincial situation of communal social hierarchy to a ‘‘civilized’’ urban
democracy figured through the orderly, partitioned windows, which act as mediators of a
modern, mathematized view of the natural world ‘‘outside’’ and, if we push the interpre-
tation a little, function as symbols for the equality of all individual citizens.
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