Instituteur Identities: Explaining the Nineteenth Century French Teachers' Movement

摘要

Recent social movement research has focused particularly on movements whose lack of organizational structures makes their emergence rather mysterious. The study of identity politics has been an important paradigm in this line of research, most of which examines the 'new social movements' of the past four decades. But, as Calhoun and others have noted, identities have always been a constitutive element of social movements. Analysis of new social movements has simply added a few new markers, like gender and race, to the standard identity repertoire of class and nation. The nineteenth century French teachers' movement is an excellent example of a resource-poor movement and, I argue, would not have been possible without a particular self-understanding on the part of the teachers. But, rather than draw from one of these standard identity markers and research paradigms, I use two tools derived from social scientific studies of how states impose identities on subject populations: categories and professionalism. I explore the rise of the teachers' movement by studying the ways that state elites sought to impose categorical distinctions between secular and religious educators. Teacher training institutions created a model for politically orthodox, professionally competent schoolmasters: hard-working, modest, and subservient to the parish priest. The attempt at introducing secular teachers into primary education, a realm traditionally dominated by the priests, created friction between secular and religious schooling authorities. The teachers' anticlericalism was the unintended consequence of the French state's school reforms. When the French state secularized the education system in the 1880s, the teachers' appropriated their teacher training institutions for the purposes of political mobilization. Their demands for professional autonomy from state employers were the legacy of decades of localized oppression by ecclesiastical authorities.