Outre les qualités intellectuelles qu’elle amène à développer, l’université, par la diversité de ses étudiants et de son corps enseignant apporte des qualités humaines à celui qui y étudie. L’université est le lieu transitoire entre la vie d’un adolescent et la vie d’un homme, qui devient autonome, assume ses choix, ses études et par là même, ses résultats.

Cette formation est un des piliers qui permet à chacun de se construire.

Un deuxième pilier est cependant indispensable pour aborder efficacement le monde du travail, je veux parler de la formation professionnelle.

Beyond the intellectual qualities that it helps to develop, the university, by the diversity of its students and its teaching staff, brings human qualities to those who study there. The university is a transitory place between the life of an adolescent and the life of a man, who is becoming autonomous, accepting responsibility for his choices, his studies, and thus also for his results.

This education is one of the foundations that allow each of us to construct ourselves.

A second pillar is nevertheless indispensable for efficiently entering the work world, I mean professional training…

The proposed law would thus require that university students spend five hours weekly on getting a BEP or CAP, which are both secondary-level education certificates, on the level of American vocational-technical diplomas. Typical specializations for the BEP or CAP are things like carpentry, retail sales, automobile maintenance, graphic design, secretarial work, and restaurant work: they are degrees that, in essence, aim to produce the specialized “technicians” who make up the French working classes in an increasingly post-industrial era. Given widespread complaints about out-of-work university graduates, it isn’t surprising that this proposed law hopes to enhance job placement prospects, while also (in a charming moment of humanist pragmatism) allowing students to “balance their knowledge” between pure theory and pure technique.

Let’s be clear: this is a proposition that comes from a specific political position, that of the French center-right. Five of the six senators who propose it are from UMP, the party of Sarkozy; one additional senator (Marcel Deneux) is from the centrist MoDems. Given the UMP’s well-known affinity for the business sector, it isn’t very surprising to see this proposal to shift higher education in a vocational direction; there have been plenty of more subtle versions of the same proposal over the years. To be sure, given the current left majority in the French Senate, it isn’t remotely likely to become law, and no doubt there are some internal French politics here that I don’t follow. Sauvons L’Université describes it sarcastically as “the UMP’s generous contribution to the debate,” which suggests that it’s a purely symbolic proposition.

There is, however, an interesting expression in the proposed law that merits commentary: la vie active. It translates simply as “active life,” which probably will strike an Anglophone reader as pretty vague. In French this is a conventional expression that denotes what in English would be called “working life.” It’s used in expressions like this one (in the proposed law):

Le baccalauréat professionnel permet l’insertion dans la vie active…
The vocational diploma allows entrance into active life…

It’s one of those expressions that always puzzled me in French: why should “work” be glossed so poorly as “activity” in general? Surely, I always thought to myself, “activity” encompasses a much broader range of things than just paid labor? Finally I thought to look it up in a French scholarly dictionary:

14. RELIG.  Vie active. Mode de vie des personnes vivant dans le monde, par opposition à la vie contemplative des religieux ou religieuses cloîtrés.

Étymol. ET HIST.
I. Adj. 1. 1160 « (en parlant d’une pers.) qui est dans la vie active, laïc, par oppos. à contemplatif »; vie active « vie séculière, p. oppos. à vie contemplative » (BENOIT DE STE MAURE, Chron. ducs de Norm., éd. Fahlin, 13 355 : Soz icez [chanoine e clerc] vit li ordres lais, E cist en sostiennent le fais. Actif sunt qui si faitement Vivvent au siècle activement, E vie active est apelee); 2. 1360 « qui déploie de l’énergie, travailleur » (ORESME, Éthique, Table ds GDF. Compl. : Actif est de action, et selon ce l’en dit que ung homme est actif, qui est praticien et bien besognant);

In short, this tells us that in the medieval period (or at least around 1160 A.D.), the phrase “active life” was used to distinguish those who were living secularly from those who were in the “contemplative life” of the religious orders. By 1360 the expression was also used to describe a person who “deploys energy, a worker.” Curiously, then, when we read about current French debates over job placement, we find ourselves in the presence of distinctions between action and contemplation that derive rather directly from the culture of medieval Christianity. One might even go so far as to say that this very distinction between “action” and “contemplation” is something that encourages today’s right-wing senators to view a university education as entirely theoretical, the utter opposite of a practical education.

It’s a bit curious, because French university curricula have increasingly shifted towards professional topics like business and economics over the past forty years. But no anthropologist should be surprised to find that symbolic systems of classification work to conceal as well as to reveal.

“It takes a strong stomach to oppose the strikers”

Aristote Toussaint, 21 years old, master’s degree in business law at Bordeaux IV.

In student movements, when like me you’re in the opposition, you have an interest in keeping your mouth shut. Or you need to have a strong stomach! At the Nantes fac, where I was last year, I was threatened for my comments in the General Assembly [AG]. I couldn’t go to class by myself. I didn’t hide that I was a member of the UMP [Sarkozy’s center-right party], and then? I’m proud of my convictions. The strikers [bloqueurs] are disrespectful people, they call themselves defenders of democracy but they’re anything but democrats. They’re utopians, allergic to work. I’d like to think that the leaders act in the name of some real ideology, but most people are just following the movement. The ones who criticize the autonomy of universities [recently imposed by the Education Ministry] are the same ones who complain about not getting jobs when they graduate… In the end their action accomplished nothing, aside from a few weeks of vacation. For the time being, it’s rather calm in Bordeaux, and I sincerely hope that there won’t be any strikes this year. We have to be optimistic and continue to reform [the universities], whatever it costs.

A few thoughts on this: Toussaint’s sense of disgust and contempt for the protesters is fairly palpable. Interestingly, it’s hard to sort out the political disagreement here from what we could call his defense of the individual and his dislike of what he views as an irrational, slavish political crowd. In other words,  Toussaint seems above all to dislike the sense that his political opponents (a) are intolerant of his dissent (to the point of personal threats, he says); (b) are therefore betraying the ideals they claim to stand for; (c) and worse yet, don’t appear to truly hold any ideals, but mostly just “follow” what the rest of the movement is doing. Shades of Gustave Le Bon! Usually viewed as the central figure in the late-19th-century French right-wing critique of the masses, Le Bon wrote that “crowds are not to be influenced by reasoning, and can only comprehend rough-and-ready associations of ideas.”

Curiously enough, though, Toussaint seems to complain not only that strikers are irrational but also that they have, in a sense, too many ideas. Calling them “utopians” (utopistes), he says they dislike work even as they complain of not getting jobs. (Though this seems like a contradiction to Toussaint, I think this is quite a common attitude among working people. “I need my job to live, but I don’t have to like it.” Et cetera.) Anyway, a utopian, surely, is nothing if not in the grip of a strong idea, is nothing if not known for an uncompromising refusal of the established pragmatic protocols of daily life. Toussaint’s critique thus appears not only to valorize the dissenting individual over the mindless collective herd, but also to critique the useless utopianism of work-refusal in the name of something like a procedural democracy where dissenters would have fair rights to their opinions. (But would still accept the basic outlines of the status quo.) Although Toussaint doesn’t put it this way, I see him making a critique of political utopianism in the name of something like democratic liberalism.

It strikes me as unsurprising that this critique would come from a law student. Law students seem to be known for debating, and are socialized to respect the established rules of procedure and grievance. Not to mention that law students, according to one of the other interviews here, currently have good job placement in France and therefore are probably more likely to be contemptuous of those who fail to get jobs. (A job after all can be a major status symbol for those who have them.) It’s worth noting that some of the protest against the university reform law in question did come from conservative law professors; but still, this resistance from a law student is sociologically unsurprising.

What to me is more interesting is the phenomenology of protest from the point of view of the minority opposition. It sounds like this guy was upset. Maybe frightened. Proud of his opposition. Viscerally opposed to his opponents. I don’t know if this is a common reaction, but it would be interesting to find out. And his complaint that ostensibly pro-democracy movements are actually undemocratic in their internal workings seems like something worth knowing much more about. It wouldn’t be the first time.