Controversial stuff

[chani]

I've been watching a tv program for about 2 hours about two very important subjects for us, French people, especially if you are a teacher as I am. It's a debate, something we so love here in France, between personalities, either politicians or historians or intellectuals or religious people. And I've been jumping on my chair for an hour! I wanted to slap the journalist who is leading the debate because he was just stupid sometimes and some of the points made were quite simplistic or mixing up everything.

The first topic was the anniversary of the Law of 1905 separating State and Churches and establishing a model of laicité that is very different from what English or Americans call secularism, that I'm very proud of, and that completely splits religious phenomenons/signs and State places (like schools). I think it's nowadays more important than ever to stick on this model and even to correct the infrigements that have endured until now and that still favour Catholic Church over other religions that are newer (like Islam).

The second topic is about a scandalous and villainous law voted lately by the Parliament and saying that school books, History Books that is, must show the positive role of colonization! Are we regressing damnit?
First off, it's very serious that deputies dare to say they can decide what *we* historians must teach as if we lived in some totalitarian State with an official History! Are we in USSR now?
Secondly, speaking of "positive" sides, or postive role is totally contrary to the work of Historians. We don't do statements of accounts, there's nothing positive or negative, there's no balance to draw. History isn't morality and doesn't separate the wheat from the chaff. This is meaningless for us. We try to understand periods according to facts and to sources, we don't judge, we don't blame and we don't absolve. That is not the goal of History. It isn't meant to be edifying nor judgemental. Thinking in terms of positive and negative stuff is the best way not to understand at all historical periods and to keep making anachronisms. The deputies who voted that law are real morons.

But one of my former Masters (Professor at the Sorbonne) was there, Jacques Marseille, and said what had to be said on the matter at least.

 

Comments

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

I mean the way you phrased your question implies a value judgment which is a thing we don't do in History. We don't discuss decisions. Besides it's too restricted.

Your question sounds like a subject that military students could have in a strategy course using historical examples as references.

A historical problematics would be for instance to "show why the French Campaign was such a quick victory for the Wehrmacht", and the different strategies (the Ligne Maginot and the French defensive strategy, the snare that was The Siegfried Line etc) could be used as points as well as other points.

Or simply, I could ask as a question exam "The Phoney War" and hope that they would find themselves the problematics and phrase it(something they are supposed to do with an essay question): how the Phoney War served the German expansionism in Europe?

[candlelightfrot.livejournal.com]

You mean that a student shouldn't understand that the Maginot Line was a waste of francs and that the French military thinking was in the middle ages as compared to the Germans?

Ok.... I bow to your superior intellectual acuity... what do you want me to kiss, ma maîtresse?

;~P