End of a secular associative model

The book that Jean-Paul Martin has signed here, with the collaboration of Frédéric Chateigner and Joël Roman, responds to a commission from the leaders of the Ligue de l’enseignement, anxious to offer the public a reference work on their movement. Who better than JP Martin could indeed trace the long and complex history of this nebulous association? A great connoisseur of the League, to which he devoted a doctorate and of which he is also one of the traveling companions, Jean-Paul Martin was given carte blanche, on condition that he publish the results of his investigation in three years, for the 150th anniversary of the association.

The author emphasizes in the introduction how restrictive the deadline was for him. In particular, it prohibited him from consulting the “Moscow” archives (57 boxes), returned by Russia in 2000 and entrusted by the League to the National Archives in 2014, leading him to rely mainly on the documentation collected for his thesis, the movement’s publications and existing research, generally focused on restricted periods.

The result is a dense book, sometimes as dense as the tangle of the League’s networks, which places particular emphasis on the political history of the movement. The structure of the book, chronological in its broad outlines, allows us to closely follow the League’s developments from three perspectives, the articulation of which is regularly highlighted by more thematic chapters: secularism, the relationship with the State, the political function of the association.

The genesis of the “secular associative model”

The first part describes the beginnings of the Ligue de l’enseignement “from its origins to 1914”. Jean Macé initiated it in 1866, around a cause that was apparently limited but fundamentally political: for this opponent of the Second Empire, the dissemination of education should indeed lead to a society finally ready to emancipate itself. The organization of the Ligue was then relatively loose: it was above all a means of encouraging and gathering under a common label various initiatives – libraries, conferences, reading groups – that the Parisian circle gradually tended to federate.

The first steps of the League thus seem to be part of the silent reconquest of the country, well described by Philip Nord ((1995), 2013): beyond the few electoral successes of the 1860s, which constitute, so to speak, the tip of the iceberg, the liberal, republican or socialist opponents bring to life a civil society whose support then proves crucial in the proclamation and rooting of the Republic.

It was then, above all, that secularism became the watchword of the League, at a time when the establishment of the Republic aroused resistance from the Catholic world. In reaction, in one of those pendulum movements that are customary in French political history, the Republicans hardened their positions. The League of Education was not spared: the relative religious and political pluralism of its circles disappeared in favor of a secular struggle that was increasingly marked on the left.

She thus adopts a position in which Jean-Paul Martin sees the foundation of the “secular associative model”. The latter values ​​the public commitment of private structures on condition that they adhere to a civic project whose definition is as narrow as it is implicit: republican and rationalist, which implies both cooperation of secular works with the State and exclusion of religious works from the public sphere.

French civic culture

The Sacred Union, sparked by the war and extended in the National Bloc until 1924, only temporarily called into question the militancy of the League. In a second part, Jean-Paul Martin describes its rise to power, from the 1920s to the 1960s. Reorganized at the end of the 1920s into the General Confederation of Secular Works, it became the bridgehead of a tight network of associations, themselves structured both locally by the Departmental Federations of Secular Works, and vertically by the thematic French Unions of Secular Works. Teachers were now massively involved in it, contributing to the living outside and beyond school of a republican citizenship that combined enlightened leisure and secular commitment.

With the exception of the Vichy period, which attempted to replace it with a corporatist organization, the movement was largely supported by the teaching state, which provided it with subsidies and personnel, delegated public service missions to its works, and involved its leaders in the commissions and councils where school and extracurricular policy was decided. This was the height of the secular associative model, which saw the League contribute to the definition and realization of the general interest alongside the State, which it wanted to support but also influence, in the manner of a pressure group.

In his eyes, the Republic is indeed much more than a type of political regime, much more than a mode of government: it is an entire society mobilized to defend its emancipatory values, at the forefront of which is secularism, then inseparable from rationalism and anticlericalism.

From reconquest to refoundation

The third and final part reports on the efforts of the Ligue de l’enseignement to adapt to the new political, social and cultural situation that began in the 1960s. The Debré law on relations between the State and private education, which it vigorously opposed, weakened the privileged links it had maintained until then with the Ministry of National Education. In this area, the challenges it had to face had actually been in embryo since the Liberation. The establishment of the welfare state was accompanied by a segmentation of public policies relating to education. The Ministry of National Education and the Ligue thus saw a certain number of sectors slip away from them, youth, sport, culture, tourism, etc., which were now taken care of by departments that did not hesitate to call on representatives of religious associations.

But the League is also faced with developments affecting the very conditions of its success. Urbanization tends to profoundly modify the often rural sociability in which the associations of the movement were inserted. The proliferation of associations of the moment, which comes to compete with them, goes hand in hand with a change in civic engagement, of which Jacques Ion (1997) has shown how it gradually became more restricted in its causes and in its involvement, more resistant also to organizational hierarchies. Leisure activities are also experiencing a movement of professionalization, which contradicts the militant logic of the League.

Jean-Paul Martin explains how, little by little, not without difficulty, the League is led toupdate. Restructured in 1967, when it changed its name again, the French League for Teaching and Continuing Education believed for a time in the secular reconquest, which the common program of the left and then the victory of François Mitterrand as President of the Republic seemed to make possible. But the withdrawal of the Savary project, which would have led to the integration of private education within a large public education service, imposed on the movement a work of refoundation, the scale of which was surprising. Converted to pluralism, including when it implied that it renounced its privileged relationship with the State in favor of other associations, it now defended a humanist secularism, which valued the vitality of civil society while being part of a renewed republicanism, more critical of neo-liberalism than of religion. It thus asserts itself as a space for debate and reflection, gradually refocusing on the school which it wishes to see more attentive to the development of the child and more open to cultural diversity.

A model for the Republic?

As Jean-Paul Martin points out in his introduction, the history of the League ‒ summarized too quickly here ‒ is also a stimulating entry point for grasping a certain French political culture, the one it seeks to forge among its members (up to 47,000 associations and 3.5 million members in 1982, at the height of the movement), the one it imposes to a certain extent on the teaching State, at least under the Third Republic where collaboration with the administration is often very close. But does not adopting the League’s point of view lead to overestimating the power of this secular associative model? Vigorously supported by the League, does the latter nevertheless allow us to describe the relations that the State actually maintains with the associations?

The works devoted to the reformist nebula of the early days of the Third Republic (Topalov ed., 1999) suggest a nuanced response. At the most anticlerical times of the regime, punctuated by the 1901 law or the implementation of the 1905 law, the State did not close the door to private initiatives, whether secular or religious. In matters of penal policy, assistance to the poor, sick or elderly, child protection, etc., we see on the contrary it relying on a multifaceted associative network, which gives pride of place to those who, among yesterday’s vanquished, have renounced political commitment in favor of philanthropy. Present in the councils and commissions where laws are made, assiduous in the national and international congresses which define their issues, they largely contradict the idea of ​​a co-construction of the general interest reserved for secular associations.

Even after the establishment of the 1901 law, which the League helped to make an instrument of secular combat, the Council of State also showed a certain reluctance towards overly militant rationalist associations, which rarely obtained recognition of public utility. The League of Education itself had to wait until 1930 to obtain the precious sesame! The quasi-co-management set up with the Ministry of Public Instruction, which then took the name of the Ministry of National Education, was therefore not generalizable to all State services and tells us more about the relations of the Republic to education rather than to civil society as a whole.

The end of the secular associative model therefore probably refers less to a change in the relationship between the State and religious associations, which have always known how to draw resources from them and influence their progress, than to a profound transformation of secular culture, of which Jean-Paul Martin shows with finesse how much it has weighed and still weighs on the recompositions of secularism in the public debate.