The Nation According to Lavisse: Teaching Masculinity and Male Citizenship in Third-Republic France

Ernest Lavisse's Histoire de France: Cours élémentaire (1884) was one of the most widely used history textbooks among French school children during the Third Republic. Le Petit Lavisse is replete with gender lessons that encourage French schoolboys to reflect on their identity and invigorate them with national pride following defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. In this essay, we examine representations of masculinityand male citizenship in Lavisse's manual to illustrate how male ‘codes of honor’ (Nye, 1993) and a male ‘sex in mourning’ (Corbin, 1992) function in this republican project of nation rebuilding. In contrast to previous scholarship, we illustrate how Lavisse situates both his male and female heroes in these nineteenth-century discourses on honour, masculinity and citizenship. In sum, we expose the inherently male-centred nature of the pedagogy of the Third Republic prescribed by Lavisse and others.