{"id":74804,"date":"2024-11-10T23:26:34","date_gmt":"2024-11-11T04:26:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world.edu\/?p=74804"},"modified":"2024-11-10T23:26:34","modified_gmt":"2024-11-11T04:26:34","slug":"teaching-enlightenment-today-how-history-enlightens-young-citizens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/teaching-enlightenment-today-how-history-enlightens-young-citizens\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching Enlightenment Today: How History Enlightens Young Citizens"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The Age of Enlightenment is today an essential reference in public discourse when it comes to discussing living together and the values \u200b\u200bof the Republic. This makes its teaching an exercise that is both difficult and necessary. Because to understand the spirit of Voltaire and Rousseau, it is important to place it in the complexity of its time, and historical research can provide support for finding the right distance.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

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“We will love science and its controversies. Like you, we will cultivate tolerance […] We will continue, yes, this fight for freedom and for reason […] because in France, professor, the Enlightenment never goes out.” Thus ends on October 21, 2020, the speech given by the\u00a0<\/span>President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron<\/span><\/a>\u00a0, on the occasion of the national tribute paid at the Sorbonne to Samuel Paty, professor of history and geography assassinated on October 16, 2020.<\/span><\/p>\n

Two decades earlier, in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, the Enlightenment was also invoked both as an antidote to terror and as a rallying cry for all defenders of freedom.<\/span><\/p>\n

The National Library of France decided to entrust the essayist and historian of ideas Tzvetan Todorov with the curation of an exhibition entitled\u00a0<\/span>Lumi\u00e8res! A Legacy for Tomorrow<\/span><\/em><\/a>\u00a0. In an\u00a0<\/span>interview published in <\/span>Le Monde<\/span><\/em> on March 4, 2006<\/span><\/a>\u00a0, Todorov stated:<\/span><\/p>\n

“There was, at the beginning, a militant intention: recalling the great principles of the Enlightenment seemed essential to us in a historical moment marked by September 11, by the attacks of a certain religious fanaticism against secularism, against the equality of men and women. But we could not limit ourselves to this simple opposition: the Enlightenment is sometimes betrayed by those who claim to be part of it.”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Between these two events, the attack on the satirical magazine\u00a0<\/span>Charlie Hebdo<\/span><\/em>\u00a0, which occurred in Paris on January 7, 2015, resulted in the return to the forefront of the media scene and to the center of public debate of Voltaire’s\u00a0<\/span>Treatise on Tolerance<\/span><\/em><\/a>\u00a0, an emblematic figure of the Enlightenment (1763),\u00a0<\/span>of which more than five thousand copies were sold in a few days<\/span><\/a>\u00a0.<\/span><\/p>\n

Three events and, in response, three ways of summoning the spirit of the Enlightenment and embodying it in struggles for freedom, reason and tolerance. However, this systematic reference to the Enlightenment is not an invention of the 21st\u00a0<\/span>century<\/span><\/sup>\u00a0\u00a0.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Enlightenment is the Republic, the Republic is France<\/strong><\/h4>\n

On the occasion of the centenary of the French Revolution (1889), the Third\u00a0<\/span>Republic<\/span><\/sup>\u00a0\u00a0already summoned the Enlightenment to pose as its heir. Conversely, the Vichy regime (1940-1944) did not simply put the French Revolution on trial through the\u00a0<\/span>National Revolution<\/span><\/a>\u00a0; it expressly went back to the origins of the “French decline”, which it identified with the Enlightenment and its contestation of authority – political or religious – in favor of the spirit of individualism.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Enlightenment is not neutral and the discourse on it is most often polarized, whether it is praising it or denouncing it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Teaching them is therefore both an educational and an eminently political issue. It significantly extends beyond the strictly historical field, and also concerns\u00a0<\/span>moral and civic education<\/span><\/a>\u00a0\u2013 most often provided by history and geography teachers \u2013 but also French and philosophy.<\/span><\/p>\n