Recent studies show that the academic level of young French people has collapsed, particularly in the French language and mathematics. A survey of 16-24 year-olds has added to the toll, this time looking at history: almost half of them are unable to place the start of the French Revolution in time.
French history is often invoked in speeches by French politicians, who like to summon the spirits of their predecessors and follow in the footsteps of great men—with varying degrees of success. And what can we say about the famous ‘spirit of Enlightenment’ or the so-called ‘Republican values’, which have become the yardstick for all political action, on the Right as well as the Left? To summon them up, we need to know where they come from. This is likely to prove an increasingly complicated task in the future, since by dint of having reduced the teaching of history to a kind of unstructured mush, the history of France speaks less and less to the younger generations, including on events as ideologically symbolic as the French Revolution, considered to be the matrix of contemporary France.
A survey carried out for the newspaper La Tribune Dimanche in early 2024 revealed that 46% of 16-24 year-olds are unable to place the start of the French Revolution in 1789. Another subject with strong symbolic power is the abolition of the death penalty, often used in France in public debate as a marker of political respectability—the camp of the good defining itself as abolitionist. 77% of these same young French people do not know the date of its abolition, in this case 1981, under the socialist presidency of François Mitterrand.
In terms of universal history, despite the media’s obsession with the Second World War and the Vichy regime, often summed up in the phrase “the darkest hours of our history,” which serves as a common reference for evil, 37% of those polled do not know when Hitler came to power, do not know what the Rafle du Vel d’Hiv (Vel d’Hiv Roundup) was, and do not know the meaning of the expression ‘Final Solution.’
Finally, when it comes to civic education, 41% of those polled believe that secularism exists primarily to discriminate against Muslims. Proof, if proof were needed, that the victim mentality conveyed by the French education system, about the French Republic oppressing minorities, has borne dangerous fruit.
In-depth history teaching, like the teaching of grammar and spelling, has long been sacrificed in the course of curriculum reforms, so the result of this survey comes as no great surprise. But the irony is that the ideological foundation on which progressive republican France has been built is now being eroded. The French Revolution, the founding myth of the origins of modern France, will soon mean no more to the average teenager than the reign of Philip III the Bold.
As for the republican values erected by the radicals as a republican catechism just over a century ago, they have ended up being emptied of their meaning and consigned to oblivion by communitarians of all stripes. Perhaps there is some good news to be gleaned from all this: on this rubble, we may one day be able to hope to put our long-term history back on track.