This study examines the introduction of compulsory secular public primary education in France in the 1880s in the context of prevalent nineteenth-century ideas and practices. It attempts to assess the extent and nature of innovation in reforms often credited with creating education for the people of France. Using a variety of literary and archival sources, it establishes the dominant conception of primary education in France in the nineteenth century, and the existing state of the system of public primary education at the end of the Second Empire. The republican reforms did not abandon the dominant conception of primary education as a separate, limited education for the people, supportive of the existing social order. The republican accomplishment lay rather in the completion and systematization of trends long evident.;The republicans did introduce one significant innovation, the substitution of secular morality for religious instruction. This, too, is shown to contain major continuities with earlier teaching. Secular morality, while it dispensed with overt religion, taught basic bourgeois values shared with earlier regimes and reformers: discipline, order, duty, respect, etc. Just as the republican schools were designed to serve the same conservative social function as in the past, morality carried the same conservative social message. But the republicans, mistrusting the Church as anti-republican, and believing families incapable of teaching proper values, consigned the burden of socialization to the schools. The majority of this responsibility thus fell on the teachers, whom they attempted to train, certify, and control through an increasingly bureaucratized system. By 1900 the teachers are shown to have absorbed, or at least learned to repeat, the basic ideas of the republican reformers.;The Third Republic went farther in establishing, providing, and ensuring education for those at the bottom of French society than any previous regime. Yet they did so in a separate and limited system of compulsory education which was never intended to promote social mobility, a means for ensuring a literate citizenry without threatening the social order. The system they regularized and completed endured virtually unchanged until the second half of the twentieth century.
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