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Education and the Social Questions: The Universités Populaires in Late Nineteenth Century France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Sanford Elwitt
Sanford Elwitt*
Affiliation:
History Department of the University of Rochester
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Extract

“Between the time of leaving school and entering the barracks, during those dangerous years of adolescence when the passions are aroused, when the temptations of the cabaret and the street beckon, the youth, left to his own devices, runs the risk not only of forgetting what he has learned, but of losing any sense of morality.” That call to alarm, sounded in 1904 by Gabriel Séailles, professor of philosophy in the Sorbonne, echoed throughout the French business, political, and intellectual establishment at the turn of the century. Those Frenchmen self-appointed to defend the republican order had good reason to be alarmed. In their view, young workingclass men, cut loose from secure familial moorings and only partially integrated into the world of industrial labor, were easy pickings for those socialists and syndicalists who worked to subvert order. The “social question” dominated French political life and, for many, popular education appeared to offer the best chance of coming to grips with it. For Léon Bourgeois, “the social problem” was, “in the final analysis, a problem of education.” Séailles drew attention to a relationship and to a choice in the subtitle of his pamphlet: “Education and revolution.”

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , Spring 1982 , pp. 55 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © 1982 by History of Education Society 

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References

Notes

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