Department of History
University of Alaska Anchorage
3211 Providence Drive
Administration Bldg. 147B
Anchorage, AK 99508

Phone: (907) 786-1690
Fax: (907) 786-1778

scott.gavorsky@uaa.alaska.edu

"Ceding to the Circumstances":
State Institutions, Civil Society, and Running the Schools
in Maine-et-Loire, 1815-1875
(Dissertation Abstract)

In the nineteenth century, public schools transformed how French citizens understood the relationship between the individual, local authorities, and the nation-state—but not just through classroom lessons. Through an analysis of primary education development in the western department of Maine-et-Loire between the Bourbon Restoration (1815) and the solidification of the Third Republic (1875), my dissertation argues that debates over funding, operating and monitoring primary schools became a field to negotiate and delineate local and national values and responsibilities, ultimately structuring French attitudes and policies towards public institutions and collective ideals of citizenship. Rather than the still-influential state-centric model of development in the 1870s exemplified by Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen, functional systems of schools were developed locally by municipal authorities and an active education-oriented civil society starting in 1816. This education civil society comprised a range of non-state actors, from individuals leaving endowments for schools to subscription-based organizations promoting specific pedagogies to parish councils (fabriques) who owned local school buildings. Although state interest increased following the Guizot Law of 1833, this education civil society continued to work closely with communes to expand primary education. By the 1850s, however, the relationship between the communes, education civil society (especially Catholic organizations), and an increasingly powerful state education bureaucracy had resulted in open competition between the providers of French primary education. This competition forced new debates on the roles and responsibilities of communes, local civil society, and the state in the provision of primary education. The culmination of these debates was a political culture that privileged a direct relationship between the local community and a national body—either the state or the Catholic Church—that provided vital resources and direction; the institutional result was the emergence of a preference for centralized national systems by the mid-1870s. The trade-off was that local civil society, the providers of primary education earlier in the century, became merely pressure groups to support education policy determined elsewhere—a retreat of civil society from local praxis in favor of national politics.

Civil Society and French Law
"L' État comme propriétaire? Schools as Property in Nineteenth-Century France," in Institutions and Power in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Culture, eds. Kate Griffiths and David Evans [accepted for publication by Rodopi Press]

Education and Nationalism
"'Born in France, Naturalized in England': Pedagogy and Nationalism during the Bourbon Restoration," Society for French Historical Studies 56th Annual Meeting, Tempe, AZ, 10 April 2010.

"L'École au Village: The Local in the French Education Pamphlet War, 1817-1824," University of North Carolina-Charlotte Graduate Forum, Charlotte, NC, 28 March 2007.

Professionalization and Exclusion
"To Know and To Be Known: Education Professionals at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia," Sixth Annual New Frontiers in Graduate History Conference, York University, Toronto, ON, 15 March 2002.