by THIERRY MEYSSAN
It is difficult to discern the personal convictions of François Hollande because as a candidate he did his utmost to maintain amibiguity for wider electoral appeal and to forge a majority. Nonetheless the new president has revealed on two occasions the true content of his thinking. He included in his inauguration ceremony an homage to Jules Ferry and sparked surprise during the commemoration of the 1942 Vel d’Hiv Roundup by his reinterpretion of this historical event.
Let us examine these two moments.
On May 15, 2012, François Hollande decided to honor the founder of public, free and compulsory education while characterizing Jules Ferry’s position in favor of colonization as a “moral and and political error.” The initiative of the new president to elevate the importance of school could have made reference to other historical figures whose records he would not have had to criticize. If he chose to pay tribute to Ferry’s legacy rather than that of others, it is because Ferry changed the objective of schooling, from an instrument of emancipation to a tool for integration. For Ferry, the school would no longer focus on liberating children from prejudice by developing their critical spirit and giving them access to knowledge in the service of citizenship. The school thus acquired as its primary function the removal of the child from the influence of his family, the Church and regional culture to create an obedient student, ready to give his life for the expansion of the French Empire.
School did not become compulsory so that all children could benefit; rather, as Michel Foucault has shown, it was designed to serve as the entryway to the barracks. Moreover, the authoritarian logic that propelled these “Black Hussars” to rap the knuckles of students speaking their native language rather than French also authorized the use of force to “civilize” the indigenous people of Tonkin. It is impossible to historically and philosophically disassociate the pseudo-laicity of Ferry from his colonial militarism.
In his time, the Radical Georges Clemenceau opposed the project of the Socialist Jules Ferry. His criticism focused primarily on the supposed “civilizing mission” of France which is the prefiguration of today’s Responsibility to Protect doctrine. Clemenceau did so not because he denied the relatively high development of Europe but because he rejected the concept of “superior races”. Similarly, today the problem is not to establish whether French governance is more or less violent than that of Syria but whether to recognize or not the sovereignty of the Syrian people.
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