Charles Nodier et la question éducative

Abstract

The oldest evidences of a theoretical reflection by Nodier on educational questions appears only in 1815, after Waterloo. Nodier actually analyses the Cent-Jours (the hundred days during which Napoleon was...) as a repetition in miniature of the revolutionary crisis which makes him aware of the precarious and illusory character of the Restauration: the Revolution Age and its imperial appendix have not been a parenthesis, but the end of an era. It is therefore an absolute necessity to create new intellectual instruments, and to protect the new generations against the Revolutionary chimeras. As a consequence, Nodier’s educational reflection takes two forms. The first one is a virulent criticism of the education innovations, and especially the mutual teaching. This fight against the new teaching methods, strongly symbolical, aims to preserve the new generations from the past errors. This is nonetheless only the negative facet of his thinking. The second form taken by his reflection deliberately lapses into utopia: Nodier, convinced that the world is going to end, considers that it is his duty as a scholar to write for after, for this world which may arise from the ruins of ours. His positive educational work consequently dedicates itself to two human categories in which he foresees the seeds of this new world: the people, and the women. If only the society collapses in the foretold cataclysm, it will arise anew from the people. It is therefore very important to create a new education system which will preverse it from dangerous erring ways and prepare it to accept its mission. The education of women is Nodier’s second preoccupation in the 1830s. Women, by their deeper nature, differ from men to such a point that Nodier makes them the members of another species, more advanced on the path leading to the comprehensive being. Their function, a true vocation, is therefore to precede men and to drag them along behind themselves towards the heights where the destiny of mankind will carry on, when our species would have disappeared from the face of the earth.