PARIS — Bikini — and burkini — season is over here, but with the new school year, France’s battle over national identity has erupted on a new front: its history curriculum.
School curriculums have long been a part of culture wars, including in the United States, where there have been tussles over slavery and evolution. But in France, where the state sets school programs nationwide, the country’s understanding of its past — and how it uses education to shape young citizens — has become a hot-button issue in a fraught election season.
Changes to how Joan of Arc and other touchstone historical figures are taught in elementary school, as well as changes to how French, Latin and Greek are introduced, have sparked fierce arguments between right-leaning politicians and intellectuals, who believe schools should foster national pride, and the Socialist education minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem and her defenders, who argue that the curriculum should reflect changes in society.
In a recent campaign speech and newspaper column, a former prime minister running in primaries for the right-wing Republican party, François Fillon, said France “shouldn’t have to apologize” for its history. And last week, former president Nicolas Sarkozy, also a candidate in the right-wing party primaries, upped the ante. “Once you become French, your ancestors are the Gauls,” he said, adding that students should be taught, “‘I love France, I learned the history of France, I see myself as French.’”
This increasing politicization of education is happening at a time of intense debate over immigration, multiculturalism and national identity, said Rachel D. Hutchins, a professor at the University of Lorraine in France and the author of “Nationalism and History Education: Curricula and Textbooks in the United States and France.”
“For politicians, targeting history education provides a simple, rhetorically powerful response to public fears over immigration,” she said.
Mr. Fillon, who was prime minister from 2007 until 2012 under Mr. Sarkozy, said that if elected, he would insist the Education Ministry mandate a “national narrative.” His remarks were seen as a rebuke to decades of changes to textbooks that have come to cast France’s colonial exploits, particularly in North Africa, in a negative light.
“Our history has glorious moments and tragic moments, but it’s an entirety,” he said. “We should embrace it and we do not have to apologize for it.” He also lamented the removal this fall from the elementary school curriculum of Julius Caesar, Cardinal Richelieu and Voltaire.
This year’s elementary school curriculum was changed significantly — to focus more on French history and less on world history — after “a very intense debate,” said Michel Lussault, president of the Superior Council for Programs, the state-appointed independent committee of 18 experts that sets curriculums.
The debate centered on how best to teach history and the French language, and how to divide the elementary school curriculum into three-year cycles. But at a time when terrorist attacks have pushed questions of national identity and civic education to the fore, it quickly became politically charged. In the end, the committee’s decision to focus on French history was a compromise between traditionalists who wanted more of a “national narrative” and progressives who believed the curriculum should resonate more with today’s students and make them more active participants in the classroom.
Mr. Lussault, a geography professor at the University of Lyon, said that Mr. Fillon was playing politics. “This is a kind of political rhetoric that doesn’t have much to do with the reality of the curriculum,” he said.
Even if the new curriculum eliminated detailed lists of historical figures, including Joan of Arc and Caesar, teachers are still required to cover their epochs. “I imagine if you’re teaching the Roman conquest of Gaul, you would talk about Julius Caesar,” Mr. Lussault said.
After last year’s terrorist attacks in Paris, the Education Ministry added more hours dedicated to teaching about secularism and the republican values of liberty, equality and fraternity.
Those changes came amid a debate over what it means to be French. “So many people have a French identity card, but the question of what is France and how to transmit the knowledge or the love of France, that’s what the attacks introduced into the debate,” said Alain Finkielkraut, a public intellectual whose 2013 book, “The Unhappy Identity,” about the strains of a multicultural society, lamented what he sees as a decline in school standards.
Ever since the French Revolution — and certainly since the French state wrested control of schools from the Roman Catholic Church in the early 20th century — education has been the government’s main method of instilling certain values of citizenship. But what kind of citizens?
“Should history be civic history? Or a way of teaching curiosity and otherness? That’s a big issue,” said Patricia Legris, a professor of contemporary history at the University of Rennes. As for the kind of citizen: “Should it be a national citizen? Or a European citizen? A world citizen?”
In “The Phantom School,” published this month, the right-wing intellectual Robert Redeker argues that French youth are out of sync with French values because schools have gone downhill. “Many are of North African origin and they are in dissonance, they are like a separate people,” said Mr. Redeker, who has lived under police protection since 2006, when he wrote an opinion piece in Le Figaro calling Islam a violent religion.
“They have a hatred of the country into which they were born,” Mr. Redeker continued. “But rather than teaching love and respect for this country and its language and its history, the school since the start of the ’90s has taught them that ultimately we are mean, slave owners, colonialists, almost murderers.”
Mr. Redeker and others who emphasize Europe’s Greco-Roman past are upset that this year Latin and Greek, which are electives, were changed to focus more on ancient civilizations and less on grammar. “It’s pedagogical tourism,” he said. “Latin and Greek, like mathematics, are a school of logic, one that teaches rigor in thinking.”
Whether curriculums can help solve France’s woes is another question. “A kind of magical thinking goes on around them,” said Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia who has written extensively on contemporary French politics. “The presumption is that if we add 15 more minutes of this or that, we’ve done something to fight the man or to fight the barbarians that are at the gate.”
“In a sense it’s testimony to their faith in the life of the mind,” Professor Lilla added, “but it’s also a way of avoiding hard political choices.”