Les Frères des Écoles chrétiennes à l’époque de Jules Ferry

Résumé 0

The Brothers of the Christian Schools, founded by St. John Baptist De La Salle in the XVIIth century, see it as their mission to instruct children in the « art of living » and, sensitive to the needs of the poor, maintain free schools – an idea adopted by Jules Ferry in the XIXth century. In 1874 two thousand members of the order were responsible for the education of 130,000 students outside France and the paper reviews the situation in various countries as a result of new legislation – in Austria, Prussia, Switzerland, Italy, England, in the U.S.A. and Ecuador, and in A sia where the Brothers’ schools were characterised by the peaceful co-existence of Protestants, Moslems, Buddhists and, in lesser numbers, Catholics, and, thanks to free education, were a melting-pot of social classes. As for the situation in France, it was a question of patience, forbearance, submission to the law, even if this seemed anticlerical so long as it did not impose acts considered evil in themselves. The Brothers refrained from association with clerical movements which expounded arguments in the press. While Jules Ferry sought a neutral ideology, to render education pohtically laïque (secular) and « Republican » and to foster a collective French conscience by abolishing religions activity, the Lasallians refused to exile God, creator of all, from the daily curriculum. In the Brothers’ schools in non-Catholic countries there was openness to all forms of religious expression, allowing for the right to abstain from adherence to a faith and the right to express convictions and translate them into action. This is precisely the idea which led Jules Ferry, as Minister for Foreign Affairs and promoter of French colonisation, to subsidise several Lasallian schools beyond the frontiers of France. Yet, paradoxically, similar assistance was denied to schools within the country.