Physical education in French schools: a Foucauldian account of changes to the general education curriculum from 1815 to 1944

Abstract

Following France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, French physical educationalists developed gymnastics programmes, promoted their services through the press, and lobbied the central and local governments' educationalists. The efforts of these physical cultural reformers brought about a transformation in athletic practices in France, especially in French schools, that has a continued relevance. The historiographic debate on sport in French education environments emphasises the ‘republican’ nature of school physical education and sport. Politicians, reformers and teachers considered the production of a physically capable student to be part of the larger curricular goal of creating French citizens. Through a close reading of government documents, popular press articles and specialist journals, my work will interrogate the limits of the state's approach to integrating physical cultures into schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What I will show is how successive French governments intensified the essentially Foucauldian systems of control inside of physical cultural programmes in schools in order to more efficiently produce what they understood to be better citizens. Their efforts faced challenges from many young athletes, parents, and sometimes renegade teachers who found spaces of agency and freedom where they could rewrite the state's lesson plans to suit their own purposes.