1Ferdinand Buisson has earned a place in the history of the Third Republic by virtue of his seventeen years as Director of Primary Education after 1879, and his important role as a Radical Socialist deputy in the Bloc des Gauches after 1900. His career brought him in touch with most of the public life of the Third Republic, significantly at several points. From his first intervention in public controversy in 1864 to his death in 1932 he was involved in a series of overlapping debates about theological, historical, educational, philosophical and political issues ; he was by turns Protestant heretic, free-thinker, anticlerical, Dreyfusard, Left-moving Radical Socialist and pacifist. The case of Ferdinand Buisson affords a rare opportunity to map the consciousness of a republican educator in whom major, and even contradictory, strands of republican thought find expression through more than sixty years.

2The notion of laïcité best sums up Buisson’s lifelong preoccupation, a notion admirably described by René Rémond1. At one time or another, Buisson spoke to all the questions identified by Rémond as tributary to laïcité: he elaborated philosophies of knowledge and history, and pedagogical, theological and moral Systems. For Buisson, as for the nineteenth century in general, to talk about education was to talk about these other questions as well. The republican habit of assuming the Virtual synonymity of laïcité and problème scolaire was the collective habit of an age that perceived public education as the means by which a society could preserve, renew or redirect itself by generalising, reforrning or altering existing school arrangements.

3Buisson’s apostolate of laïcité was a conscious attempt to bring about in the late nineteenth century a Reformation France had rejected in the sixteenth century. Indeed, his version of laïcité drew heavily from his Personal experience of French Protestantism as both a living faith and an ecclesiastical institution2. The Protestant temperament Buisson shared with his co-religionists meant a consciousness of being somehow apart from the main stream of French national life, of being in the nation yet not fully of it. To become accessible to all Frenchmen as a collective ideal, Protestantism, as laïcité, had to shed its exclusiveness, both doctrinal and institutional ; it had to be opened up, secularised. Buisson appealed to history to establish the content of the true Reformation, and found in it a prefiguration of the moral and social program of the French Revolution3. He believed the school of the Third Republic would become the temple of this new faith, a purified Protestantism. The republican State would thus exercise through its school the magistrature morale that had passed to it from a Church no longer competent to exercise it. In laïcité Buisson defined a collective ideal that offered moral and spiritual unity for France, and a secular, social salvation for its people.

4Buisson’s reformulation of Protestant thought was achieved in the 1860’s in the course of his participation in the lively debates between « orthodox » and « liberal » groups in the French Protestant community. His monumental study of the sixteenth-century French reformer, Sebastian Castellio, which was a by-product of that debate, provided the historical schema within which he believed its modem mission had its roots. He had selected Castellio as the subject of his doctoral thesis for the Faculté des Lettres in 1865 ; he did most of his research in Switzerland while he was teaching at the Académie de Neuchâtel between 1866 and 1870. The thesis was finally presented in 1891. When it was published the following year, Sébastien Castellion : sa vie et son œuvre, 1515- 1563 was more than a contribution to the Protestant debate that had inspired it: it had become the history of the notion of laïcité as Buisson had come to understand it by that date4.

5Buisson acknowledged his debt to the ideas of Edgar Quinet and Jules Michelet in his interpretation of the notion of progress in human history. Quinet’s synthesis of Herder and Vico combined the German metaphysical view of history, in which religion and the development of mind are central, with the notion that human free will underlies man’s spiritual advance through the ages5. Quinet’s definition of history as the story of freedom cast in spiritual terms, the « mirror of the universal soul in time and deed (...) the eternal gospel of the Dieu intérieur », affirmed man’s capacity to learn from history6. In an 1896 lecture, Buisson explained that progress, the « law of civilisation », is conditional on man’s ability to build on truths that have come from the past7. And history, « the account of man’s unending quest for perfection, the tale of man’s perpetual becoming », he compared figuratively to un livre d’or of humanity, on whose pages truths yet unknown will come to be written. The truths inscribed in the early pages of the book, however incompletely, nevertheless provide the key without which the whole is incomprehensible. The condition of being civilised, by Buisson’s reading, consists in recognising the interdependence of moral and material advance, and in discerning their trajectories into the future by understanding their paths to the present.

6The sixteenth century occupies a position of central importance in Buisson’s account of man’s quest for perfection. His interpretation of it brings together Quinet’s view of the Reformation as a transition in the history of the spirit between the dogmatic and authoritarian Catholicism of the medieval age and the gospel of freedom proclaimed by the French Revolution, with Michelet’s conception of the Reformation as part of the broader Renaissance, embracing both soul and intellect, faith and reason8. Buisson explained the common urge behind the rebirth of letters, the return to the classics, and the renewal of reflection and imagination :

With the same spirit and joy with which he looks again to classical antiquity, man turns again to early Christianity. The Church returns to Christ as the school returns to the revered masters of antiquity (...) and humanity will rediscover the Scriptures as it has rediscovered the Iliad 9.

7Like Quinet and Michelet, Buisson saw in the sixteenth-century renewal the promise of important progress toward a new spiritual unity for the French people. However, that promise was not fulfilled because those who ought to have defended the French Reformation movement from its enemies deserted it10. The Revolutionaries of 1789 and 1848 renewed the promise. Buisson believed passionately that the Third Republic would succeed in realising it where these other heroic attempts had failed. But he confessed that the sixteenth century had for him a charm impossible in these later periods, for it had manifested « the first intoxication of adolescence (...) a blooming, a bursting forth, a springtime of the spirit ».

8In his historical studies, Buisson proposed a « nationalist » interpretation of the Renaissance-Reformation movement which gave its French manifestations particular significance in the nation’s spiritual history. He maintained that the simultaneous revival of science and piety had generated a broadly-based movement for renewal in the French Church several years before Luther. He insisted that as well as being earlier in time, this movement had had its own distinctive content and character because of its French context. The « backdrop of eternity » provided by the Middle Ages, against which early French humanist activity was set, contrasted sharply with the insouciant, incroyant setting of the Renaissance in Italy11. French humanists could not escape this heritage of centuries of Church-controlled education, with the result that the substitution of the humanist spirit of free inquiry for the traditional appeal to authority produced religious reformers ; the power of religious imagery remained whether or not this substitution occurred. In the account of Castellio’s conversion from Catholicism to the Christianity of the Reformation, Buisson discerned a major theme both for his biography of the reformer and for his own public career : the best humanist education a society can provide is the surest means of promoting its spiritual liberation12. By this reading, education provides the dynamic of history, and free inquiry is its necessary condition if progress toward this objective is to occur.

9Castellio’s doctrine of religious liberty had first attracted Buisson in the course of his participation in the Protestant debates in Paris in the 1860’s13. The young Sorbonnier clearly saw a parallel between his own defence of the liberal pastor, Athanase Coquerel fils, against the condemnation of the Paris Presbyterial Council, and Castellio’s defence of Michael Servetus in the face of Calvin’s condemnation and execution of the Spanish heretic14. When he withdrew from the Protestant debate on his return to besieged Paris from Neuchâtel in September, 1870, he was the acknowledged spokesman for a liberal movement that had sent waves throughout European Reformed Christianity.

10The Reformation Buisson proposed had as its central principle what he believed to be the Protestant principle par excellence, freedom of conscience, as it had been expounded by Castellio and his continuators15. In Paris in 1864-1865, the immediate objective of this Reformation was to neutralise theology as a disruptive force in the French Protestant Church by challenging the principle of authority by which the governing councils of the Church presumed to exercise a spiritual governance over members of the Paris Church. In Neuchâtel, this objective grew in his mind to become the neutralisation of organised religion as a disruptive force in the State by challenging the principle of authority on which orthodoxies of all kinds based their claim to exercise a spiritual governance over whole peoples16. By 1870, Buisson was confident that he had set out the terms for the transformation of the authoritarian, dogmatic and exclusive French Protestant Church into a true Église de multitude, proclaiming faith in the primacy of reason and conscience, and offering to all, regardless of theological persuasion, a form of secular salvation.

11The main line of Buisson’s assault on the principle of authority in the orthodox Church was his rejection of the supernatural bases on which that principle was compelled to rest. At first timidly, then with growing conviction, he suggested that belief in the divinity of Christ, in the inspiration plénière of the Scriptures, in the doctrine of predestination, in the special historical destiny of the Jewish people, and in miracles, could not be required as a condition of membership in the Church since all required the setting aside of reason or conscience or both17. He saw the process by which the Church had come into possession of its power as the result of a two-fold perversion of the early Church. The first was the development of the pseudo-science of theology. Buisson considered theology to be an entirely human structure, contrived by the application of rationalist methods to inessential materials, such as the marginal comment, the narrative detail or the Personal prescription offered by the Apostles18. The second perversion, the elaboration of dogma, liturgy and priesthood, organised the power that the control over the content of the faith had created. Once the supernatural foundations upon which this power is built are destroyed, Buisson insisted, the entire theological-ecclesiastical structure collapses.

12The Église de multitude that Buisson offered as an alternative to traditional orthodox institutions underwent a similar process of evolution in his mind during the debates of the 1860’s. In 1864, he defined the Church as « an association of men pursuing a common objective : to live according to the commandments of Jésus Christ, and following his example to accept the love he personified as the rule of their lives ». By 1869, Buisson was defining his Union du christianisme libéral as « a voluntary association of all individuals who are prepared to commit themselves to the practice of virtue and to the cultivation of all [their] intellectual, moral and esthetic faculties »19. To achieve the « reign of fraternity and human solidarity » the Church will admit all who are prepared to make this commitment, whether they are « theists, pantheists, supernaturalists, positivists, materialists or even atheists » ; only the intolerant will be excluded by reason of their own intolerance.

13In the Protestant debate of the 1860’s, Buisson proposed a religious ideal rooted in his understanding of man as a rational being in the process of becoming, and of the Church as an unstructured association of those committed to striving together for le vrai, le beau et le bien. At the centre of this ideal was his interpretation of the relationship between morality and religion20. While morality defines the relationships among the members of a particular society, religion – for Buisson the extension ad infinitum of morality – is concerned with the relations in une société universelle des êtres. His assertion of the priority of morality contradicted in no way his assertion of the primacy of the religious fact ; rather, it expressed his conviction that the commitment to morality was necessarily the first religious act. For while religion was pre-eminently a private, interior matter, its expression in outward and visible acts as morality was necessarily a social, and ultimately a political matter.

14In his reformulation of Protestantism, Buisson stripped it of both theological and institutional exclusiveness. By making religion as theology a matter of individual spiritual decision, he denied the possibility that any single theological System could claim precedence in the State without violating the principle of freedom of conscience. By making religion as morality the expression in social acts of the fonds commun of moral truth in which all share by virtue of their common humanity, he translated it into the matter of ultimate social, and therefore educational and political concern. The State, in a word, must become the Church. While religious sects would be left free to deal with eternity by whatever theological formulas they might choose, the State was obliged to take up its magistrature morale to regulate relations among its citizens21.

15Neuchâtel provided an important experience for Buisson in the élaboration of his understanding of laïcité by bringing about the convergence of religious, political and educational ideas that circumstances had kept separate to that time. He had initiated the 1868-1870 campaign with an attack on the use of the Old Testament as a source of materials for the moral and religious education programme in the primary schools of the canton22. The ensuing debate quickly developed two strands : a liberal Protestant assault on the dogmatic authoritarianism of the established Protestant Church, and a Radical-Party demand for the separation of Church and State. For Buisson – French, Protestant, republican – the issues were inseparable ; for Neuchâtel, with long traditions of democracy and religious consensus, they were unmanageable because incompatible23. The enthusiastic support of Buisson’s endeavour by a procession of visiting French liberal Protestants and by exiles of ’48, most notably Edgar Quinet and his wife, made clear what more than one Swiss observer suspected : Neuchâtel was sheltering a French debate that could not take place in France of the Second Empire24.

16The argument Buisson developed in his opening salvo in the Neuchâtel campaign – « une réforme urgente dans l’instruction primaire » –, concerned the need to end the « official » spiritual monopoly of the orthodox national Church « over the education of young people, and over the general moral direction of families and the population as a whole »25. Just as the modem Protestant Church, true to the principles of the sixteenth-century Reformation, must be latitudinaire, so the modem democratic State, true to the principles of the Revolution, must make certain that its future citizens « speak early and late of right and duty, of patrie and humanity, of freedom, of work, of equality and of human solidarity ». And just as liberal Christianity had affirmations with which to replace « the legends, miracles and theological chimaeras » of the « official » Church, so the Republic had its own truths to offer to replace the lapsed verities of an outdated past. The separation of Church and State implied the substitution of one set of beliefs for another. For Buisson, liberty of conscience in the modem State sprang from liberal Christianity and the Revolutionary ideal that he considered its lineal descendant26.

17Under the combined influence of Protestant controversy, Edgar Quinet’s romantic republicanism, and the dramatic unfolding of French history in 1870, Buisson’s belief in the social-historical mission of Protestantism as laïcité was confirmed and provided with a basis in theory and an intransigence of spirit that helped to ensure its survival in the Third Republic. The proclamation of the Republic on September 4 brought Buisson home to Paris within hours. In a letter to his Neuchâtel colleague, Désor, written shortly after his arrival, he explained the urgency of saving the frail « République de paille » and then of transforming it into « la bonne République »27. This transformation would require « great struggles, new and terrible ordeals », for it called for nothing less than the spiritual and moral regeneration of the French people through education.

18The record of Buisson’s mission laïque describes the life cycle of his republican interpretation of an appropriate national education for France. The evolution encompassed in this cycle can be summarised by comparing the definitions of « education » in the 1878 and the 1911 editions of his Dictionnaire de pédagogie. In 1878, he explained that while there was general agreement about the primary purpose of education, former l’homme, detailed definitions varied as widely as the Systems of thought concerning man’s nature and destiny28. From among these, he selected Kant’s : « to develop each individual to the highest level of perfection of which he is susceptible » ; and Henri Joly’s : « to give to the individual the complete possession and virtuous use of his various faculties ». There is in each case a clear sense both of the nature of man and of his destiny ; each definition assumes an ideal society based on the generalisation of the « ideal man » whom it is considered to be within the power of education to form. Buisson invited Emile Durkheim to provide the statement concerning educational purpose for the 1911 edition of the Dictionnaire. For Durkheim, the purpose of education is « to bring about in each child a certain number of physical, moral and intellectual characteristics required of him by the larger political society as well as by the particular social milieu for which he is destined »29. The relevant data in this 1911 definition are the data that describe society as it is, not as some System of thought holds that it ought to be.

19The realism of Durkheim’s 1911 statement documents the passing of a style of educational optimism that Buisson admirably exemplifies. He had declared in 1883 after the first reform measures had been approved that « the Republic has made the school, now the school must make the Republic »30. He accepted at the outset that the Opportunist école primaire was the possible institution, given the state of social and political consciousness of the 1880’s. But he believed it could be the agent of its own perfection : by providing access to enlightenment for the masses, it would generate new and higher levels of intellectual and moral awareness, whence institutional reform and general social progress. His patience with the evolutionary process fluctuated with its pace at particular moments. The optimism of the heroic age of the 1880’s was gradually displaced by mounting alarm in the following decade. Buisson communicated the mood early in the decade in his preface to Sebastien Castellion, where he suggested that the institutional forms of republican life had outstripped the moral awareness of those who functioned with them31. « We no longer burn anyone », he declared ; « but we still hate almost instinctively any opinion that does not happen to agree with our own ». The problem as he construed it stemmed from an abuse of history by which one segment of the population remained enslaved to an outdated past, while another preached the need to erase the past completely and start afresh32.

20Buisson’s analysis of this moral crisis in his opening lecture as Henri Marion’s successor to the chair of pedagogical science at the Sorbonne in 1896 built upon this earlier statement. He joined Brunetière in suggesting that the infatuation with science characteristic of the period raised new and serious threats to the republican ideal33. To the old dogmatic authoritarianism of the Church had been added a new dogmatic belief that science alone could provide the foundations necessary for the spiritual unity of the nation. In his 1900 lecture series, La Religion, la morale et la science, he acknowledged that we have no other method than the scientific for mastering the universe by discovering its laws34. He claimed as well that this mastery promoted our moral independance by emancipating us from immoral beliefs. But he insisted, as positivists did not, that there were limits to science :

A window opened on infinity does not give us possession of it, but it does make it possible for us to escape the finite. The scientific method, which is the method of the finite, is not the whole of intelligence any more than intelligence is the whole of man or man the whole of reality35.

21The « atheistic dogmatism » of science was as abhorrent to Buisson as the theological dogmatism of churchmen.

22The relaxation of Church-State tensions associated with the Ralliement and esprit nouveau before 1900 owed something to the serious and generally moderate discussion of the social question and its implications for moral éducation by spiritualist republicans like Buisson, Pécaut, and their younger contemporaries, Gabriel Séailles and Célestin Bouglé. Their public statements awakened a new and promising moderation in the Catholic milieux of Sertillanges, Laberthonnière and Sangnier, of the Annales de la philosophie chrétienne and L’Ami du clergé 36. However tentative, this effort to listen and to understand held more hope of true rapprochement between Church and Republic than the shaky politics of the Ralliement which created the illusion of progress by ignoring questions rather than by facing them. The Dreyfus Affair destroyed both the hope and the illusion.

23The Dreyfus Affair was Buisson’s Servetus Affair37. He characterised it as « a moral drama with a political sub-plot »38. The moral drama concerned the defence of the republican ideal from the attacks of its « eternal enemy », l’esprit romain. The quintessence of the republican ideal, l’esprit laïque, found itself blocked by this enemy. Abandoning his chair at the Sorbonne in favor of Radical politics, Buisson preached the gospel of anticlericalism which he described as « the Protestantism of France, the classic form of the revenge of reason against faith, of freedom against authority »39. He played an important role as chairman of the legislative committee in shepherding the Separation legislation through the Chamber of Deputies. The political goals of Buisson and Clemenceau coincided in the 1902-1905 period and they cooperated enthusiastically in the cause of victory over the hereditary enemy of the different republican traditions to which each was connected. But when the time came after 1905 for constructive social reform, Clemenceau, Voltairean-positivist, gave in to dark despair about the human species, persuaded that it did not deserve to be free, whereas Buisson as a rationalist spiritualist could conceive and support policies to deal with accumulating social problems40. Though Buisson shared the rhetoric of the Revolutionary tradition with other Radicals, his understanding of the republican ideal informed his political activities with a vitality rare among Radicals. For him the Republic was an ideal to be realised, whereas for positivists it was little more than a sociological experiment, and for Marxists, merely a stage in the working out of the dialectic. His were conceptions of the State and of man that had had their time when the Radicals dropped him in 1924.

24Near the end of his career Buisson observed that « Dieu s’est fait homme, et du ciel les problèmes sont descendus sur la terre. Ils sont sociaux et non plus théologiques »41. The evolution of his understanding of the notion of laïcité reflects the dominant modes of discourse concerning social questions through the period. At the outset he believed education could make new men able to respond in new ways to social problems ; their newness would consist in a heightened moral, and therefore social awareness. In mid-career he accepted the necessity of awakening men’s consciences to the clear moral imperatives of particular situations : the Dreyfus Affair was one such compelling instance of the need to carry the educational enterprise beyond the limits of school rooms. As a Radical deputy he undertook to influence directly the shaping of public social policy. Finally he came to believe that educational reform alone would not bring about social reconstruction ; there would have to be a parallel progress along the road to a redistribution of goods.

25If this was opportunism, it can be seen as Buisson’s recognition of the interim, proximate nature of all human acts with reference to the ultimate ideal towards which they tend. Means were controlled by circumstances as ends could not be. The constancy of his vision of the social ideal of laïcité and his flexibility in acting for it are évident in the record. The historical events on which he chose to reflect – the sixteenth-century Renaissance-Reformation, the Revolution of 1789, the thinkers with whose ideas he felt most comfortable : Castellio, Kant, Condorcet, Quinet, Renouvier – did not provide him with a closed, completed system, whether religious, historical, educational or political.

26Buisson and the spiritualist republicans failed to bring about in the Third Republic the Reformation France had rejected in the sixteenth century. They have found their ways into historical narratives more often as extravagant apostles of anticlericalism than as the educational and social reformers they aspired to be. However, the spiritualist outlook that moved them to oppose the perversion of power represented for them by the Concordatory Church also prompted them to speak and act with humanity and compassion for all victims of the abuse of power of whatever sort. Buisson’s record as Director of Primary Education before the turn of the century, and as reforming Radical Socialist after, provides the evidence that his republicanism was inspired by a commitment to liberté, égalité and fraternité that was both authentic and generous. His conviction that laïcité is entirely compatible with the principle of liberté de conscience is now shared by Catholics42. Ferdinand Buisson would have seen the commitment to dialogue implicit in this evolution as a sane alternative to the violent confrontations of the past and a significant progress toward la bonne République 43.