COVID-19 obliges, and given the online cinema offer, it had been a long time since I had set foot in a cinema. But I couldn’t resist the urge to go see The time of secretsthe most recent adaptation of Marcel Pagnol’s childhood memories — after My mother’s castle and The glory of my father. I liked the film a lot, as did the general public and more than the critics, it seems. I have to admit that I really like Pagnol.
We don’t get over it: the film made me think a lot about education and school. It’s not surprising: they occupy a large place. This is the school of yesterday in France, of course. But, in certain aspects, it is also still somewhat ours, or at the very least it makes one think of it. You will see: the news was even invited into my viewing of the film.
Let’s go to Provence. We are in the summer of 1905. The summer vacation begins.
The Republic Hussars
Marcel Pagnol’s father, Joseph, is a teacher and the young Marcel, a scholarship holder of the Republic, is about to enter high school, that is to say secondary school.
The family feels a sense of gratitude to the Republic. Being able to attend school appears for what it is: an immense opportunity. I found myself, once again, thinking with gratitude of the work done so recently in our country by the Parent Commission and of all that we owe it.
We cannot imagine these young high school students described in the film demolishing one of the rooms of the school by smashing typewriters… and even less the entire community, starting with the school management, not offended by such behavior.
The classroom is austere, with lined desks and a blackboard. She is from another era, no doubt, as are the teacher and the type of authority he exercises, he who goes so far as to insult recalcitrants with mediocre results. Nevertheless: he is respected because he embodies, because he establishes, hence his name, something that goes beyond all the actors in this play in which they are playing. This is called knowledge, possible emancipation, belonging to a society.
The figure of the teacher, this hussar of the Republic, and the respect due to him are therefore omnipresent. Little Marcel, involved in a fight with another student, will be saved by what a supervisor will report – and will not report. This one will say to have been deeply marked by his teacher, a certain Joseph Pagnol.
Each of us, or almost, could testify to the importance, sometimes decisive, of such and such a teacher in his or her life story. I’ll spare you mine, which takes me back to Africa and to one of those hussars who are preparing us for our sixth form entrance exam…
And I began to dream of such recognition of the work of teachers in our country.
Women and a certain law
The question of the place, of the status of women, in that world in general and in that of school and education in particular, is tackled in the film, and the description that is made of it makes it possible to measure the immensity of the path travelled.
It was women’s activism that made it possible (among other things with their publication called The sling), and education, which they value, has a lot to do with it. Impossible not to feel a great emotion in front of all this.
The action takes place in 1905, and this year resonates strongly with people interested in education.
It was the year when, surrounded by a team of people from the left, and even from the extreme left, Ferdinand Buisson (1841-1932), an immense educator of the time, author of the essential and very striking Dictionary of pedagogy and primary instruction and future Nobel Peace Prize (1927), finally passed the ambitious law of separation of Church and State. A new word then entered the collective vocabulary: secularism. And it is at school, at school first and foremost, that it must apply. We of course refer to it in the film, where we also see, through jokes and ironies, these disagreements between the believing uncle and the hussar Joseph.
But the law will apply, and through it France brings something new in the organization of life in the city and what follows for the school. I had a thought for us, for the fact that, despite our very modest Bill 21, we continue “to subsidize about fifty schools that maintain explicit religious practices”.
The curriculum
I imagine that, in France at least, Pagnol is still studied at school. Through its theater and its cinema, it has never ceased to be loved by the public, and this also applies to us – the room that day was full.
But I confess to being surprised that it is not yet in La Pléiade. Should we see in this, as some say, an effect of a certain political correctness condemning a work from which minorities are absent and where yesterday’s stereotypes abound? The prelude to its concealment in the school curriculum? I refuse to think so.
I leave you with one of those beautiful words of which Pagnol had the secret.
In October 1962, when he was 67, the Republic gave him a great gift: a high school in Saint-Loup, in the suburbs of Marseille, would bear his name. The Marcel Pagnol high school! Very moved during the inauguration, he will say: “I thank you, with deep and great emotion, for having inscribed on the face of the most beautiful high school in France my first name, followed by the name of my father, the teacher of Saint Loup. »