Catholics and schools in Vichy France, 1940-44

Abstract

In 1940 the French Catholic Church was quick to blame military defeat on the laicism of the Third Republic. However, the Church was confident that it could rectify the errors of the past. The new authoritarian regime at Vichy offered the possibility of overturning the past sixty years of secularism and of rebuilding France along Christian lines.This thesis examines how the Church attempted to win France back to the faith through the vehicle of education. It shows how it hoped to strengthen the position of its own educational system and how it tried to re-assert its influence over children in the State school. The study is divided into four parts. The first looks at the role education played in Church/State relations and puts into context events treated in more detail later. The second part examines the curriculum of confessional schools and the ways by which the Church attempted to influence the lessons of the State school. Part three looks at teachers and pays particular attention to the teaching orders. Although they recovered much of their former legal status under Vichy, they never became fully-fledged supporters of the regime. In addition, the thesis looks at how the Church tried to break the traditional secularism of the State 'instituteurs'. Part four investigates the funding of Catholic education. It examines the measures that Vichy took to alleviate the material plight of Catholic schools and illustrates how State subsidies contributed to the growth of Catholic education. Analysis of Vichy's educational policy reveals that the regime was less clerical than has previously been recognised. This study alsoconcludes that the Church was not an unqualified supporter of the regime and that Catholics began to have their doubts about Vichy far earlier than has sometimes been suggested.