Made in France

Societal structures and political work

Andy Smith, Paul Tobin

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526154224
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

How has French society been made, by whom and why? And how in turn has it influenced the French? This book sets out the institutionalized rules and norms that continue to structure France, together with the 'political work' that has recently changed or reproduced these power relations. Exploring a range of age groups and types of social activity, including work, business, entertainment, political mobilizations and retirement, Made in France examines where significant change has occurred over the last four decades. Smith argues that while transformation has occurred in France's financial and education sectors, only relatively marginal shifts have occurred elsewhere in French society. To explain this pattern of continuity and isolated change, the book strongly nuances claims that neo-liberalism, globalization or a rise in populism have been its causes. References to these trends have impacted upon French politics to varying extents, Smith argues; however, France continues to be dominated by issues which are specific to the country and linked to its deep societal structures and history. Smith provides a comprehensive account of French society and politics and in doing so proposes an insightful analytical framework applicable to the comparative analysis of other nations.

1

Childhood, families and initial schooling: Conservative primary socialization

Introduction

If nearly 12% of France’s residents were born elsewhere, the vast majority came into this world in a French hospital or home. Their first months and years would have been spent in a family situation of varying types involving different modes of childcare before, at the age of 3, or even as early as 2 years 6 months, beginning their respective school lives. Put bluntly, the question to be answered here is not so much what is it like being a child in France? but why is it so?

Of course, on one level everyone’s childhood is different. Parents and families are diverse, as are parenting styles, locations and individual schools (Lahire, 2019). However, recurrent patterns of thought, norms and behaviour can nevertheless be discerned. Indeed, in keeping with the thesis of this book as a whole, this chapter shows that societal structures – i.e. institutions and power relations – together with the political work that changes or reproduces them, are key. As sets of stabilized rules, norms and conventions, institutions set parameters upon the lives of French children by strongly guiding parenting and schooling practices. Moreover, they also shape the very fields of family support and education within which these practices take place, and therefore affect asymmetries of power between pupils, parents, teachers and administrators in particular. More fundamentally still, these institutions and power relations only came into being, and have since been reproduced or changed over time, as a function of how political work has been undertaken to structure social and public action around children and childhood.

Put differently, the subject matter of this chapter is both how initial socialization takes place in France and how this very process is structured by institutions, power relations and work that is political. Socialization is, of course, a fundamental concept of the social sciences which, over the last 150 years, has given rise to a plethora of studies and intense theoretical debate (Dubar, 2010). If virtually all the specialists of socialization concur that parenting and schooling are crucial processes during which children inculcate societal dispositions and ‘rules of the game’, explanation of how and why this takes place has generated three distinct approaches, each inspired by major social theorists. At the risk of caricaturing each of them, the first emphasizes the top-down imposition of societal institutions upon relatively passive children (e.g. Durkheim, Parsons), whilst the second highlights the reproduction of societal norms via social classes and the ‘symbolic violence’ they generate (Marx, Bourdieu). Meanwhile, a third approach envisages socialization instead as an interactive process during which each child recreates for themselves what they learn from their family members, peers and teachers. In short, it is envisaged as a more creative process, constantly generating compromises between the taught and the learnt (Weber, Mead). Given that the subject matter of this chapter is less the description of socialization as a process and more what steers it societally, structuralist elements from institutionalist and field theories will play an important role in the interpretation of research results that follow. Nevertheless, because of the importance I give to political work, together with the distinctly plural character of contemporary French society (Beaud, 2018), room will be also left for analysing the scope for contingency that has nevertheless remained around French family and schooling institutions.

Indeed, as will be shown throughout, in France these institutions and fields have been the object of numerous attempts by collective or public actors to train children, parents, childminders and teachers to act in certain ways and not others. As the specialist literature has documented in detail, contemporary French life has been particularly marked by a succession of state-led attempts to influence the thinking and behaviour of the nation’s children, as well as by the resistance this has repeatedly inspired. Indeed, precisely because the introduction of compulsory, non-clerical schooling in the period 1890–1905 was crucial to the development of the primary school as a major vehicle for realizing the republican ideal, it has been ‘sacralized’ ever since (Déloye, 1994). Just as importantly, the Vichy governments of 1940–44 both enabled supporters of private Catholic schools to gain back some of the ground lost to anti-clericalism and also paved the way for extending public education to children beyond the age of 14 (Paxton, 2001). More recently, since 1989 a controversy over the right of Muslim children to wear veils at school has durably reinserted the issue of religion within education back upon the French political agenda (see chapter 2). Indeed, governmental responses to this and other issues related to the diversification of ethnic groups, and thus the values of parents, feature highly upon what today is often presented as a deep challenge to the institutions of French family life and schooling. At the same time, however, other challenges have also been defined and brought to the fore, notably by holders of the belief that France’s economy is insufficiently ‘competitive’ – a trait they blame in part upon the schooling of its pupils. In this way, for example, powerful economic and political actors have used neo-liberal recipes and the mantra of globalization to construct France as being ‘behind’. From this definition of ‘the public problem’, they have then called for deep change in how the nation trains its young to think and behave. Meanwhile, certain trends in social mobility, notably increased individualization and materialism, have fuelled and mediated all these examples of political work.

Against this backdrop, and by focusing upon the period since 1985 in particular, the central argument developed in this chapter is that although some institutional change has undoubtedly occurred in response to the tensions outlined above, for the most part the rules, norms and conventions which structure French family life and primary schooling, together with the fields in which they are set and reset, have remained very much intact. As will be shown, whereas in the 1970s many French commentators predicted ‘the end of the family’, and some change in patterns of living has actually occurred, its institutions remain largely in place (Segalen, 2005: 5). More profoundly still, the values which generated these institutions in the first place continue to heavily influence their reproduction by being defined and hierarchized in remarkably similar ways. Indeed, in most instances, reproduction, and indeed ‘social conservatism’ (Norris and Inglehart, 2019), has largely prevailed over calls for change. Specifically, the positioning of the adult rather than the child at the centre of the family and educational institutions has been preserved. Indeed, in many instances, this trait has even been enhanced.

To outside observers in particular, this claim may seem strange. Foreign tourists frequently remark that France is both ‘children friendly’ in terms of their acceptance in restaurants and other public places, as well as being a country where children are relatively ‘well-behaved’. However, as the first part of what follows will explain, the apparent gap between these anecdotal but recurrent observations and my central claim of adult-centred conservatism can be explained as follows: from life at home to playing in a crèche, French infants are expected to not only respect formal rules, but to conform to a relatively rigid set of norms and conventions. Moreover, and not surprisingly, this approach is codified and intensified once they go to school. As the second part of this chapter will highlight, schooling from the age of 3 is highly advantageous to parents, providing them as it does with free day care. However, this institution not only gives great power to the state, but also to teachers as a corporation that dominates the educational field, to determine schooling policies and, in so doing, to keep parents, as well as research-informed specialists of education, firmly at a distance.

Getting born,1 being an infant and fitting in with adults

Conformity begins at home, but it also takes place within the hospitals and other forms of medical and child care which heavily structure the first three years of the life of any child living in France. By progressively examining the diversity of what now constitutes a home and a family in this country, it will quickly become evident that this entity is by no means purely a ‘private’ matter. Quite the contrary: virtually from the moment a pregnancy is detected, a set of adult-centred institutions, power relations and value hierarchies begin to impinge upon and orientate the way a child will come into the world, then be brought up in the home and beyond. Resistance to these vectors of socialization, of course, remains possible and often takes place. However, the social forces they unleash generally prove too strong and, consequently, largely shape how most children in France are brought up, think, feel and act.

The cradle months

In the French case, ‘the cradle’ very much begins during pregnancy due to the combined effects of social norms and public policies which largely support the having of children. Specifically, although the figures since 2015 are down on preceding years, Tables 1.1 and 1.2 show that France has a higher birth rate than many other developed countries. This rate is lower than that of Ireland, roughly the same as in the UK and significantly higher than that of other large European countries such as Germany, Italy, Spain and Poland.

Table 1.1 French births and birth rates (per 1,000 inhabitants)

	Number of births	Birth rates
2018	758 000	11.3
2017	767 000	11.4
2016	783 640	11.7
2015	798 948	12.0
2014	818 565	12.4
2013	811 510	12.3
2012	821 047	12.6
2011	823 394	12.7
2010	832 799	12.9
2009	824 641	12.8

Source: INSEE, www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/3676604?sommaire=3696937, consulted 10th May 2020.

Table 1.2 Birth rates in Europe compared, 2017

Country	Birth rate (births/1,000 population)
Ireland	14
UK	12
France	11.4
Poland	10
Germany	9
Spain	9
Italy	9

Source: Eurostat, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Fertility_statistics, consulted 10th May 2020.

France’s relatively high birth rate, together with the ‘natalist’ public policies that support it, have deep historical roots which go back to an initial definition of this nation possessing a demographic ‘problem’. This social construct emerged in the late nineteenth century, then took on significantly higher social meaning following the decimation of its male population during the First World War. As Claude Martin in particular has underlined (2017: 33), since laws in 1938–39, then the creation in 1946 of a family branch within the new national social security system, ‘family’ sectorial policies have directly encouraged the having of children. Policy instruments have included tax credits, family benefits, their reinforcement as of the third child and subsidized price reductions for familles nombreuses (ones with three or more children). Indeed, at its high point in the mid-1950s, family policy accounted for no less than half of the nation’s social security budget! Moreover, a high birth rate has also been encouraged indirectly by support for organizations and companies willing to offer part-time employment, in particular by giving employees Wednesdays off (the day of the week when maternelle and primary schools have been shut since the early 1970s). The ambitions of family policy have certainly been curtailed since then, as unemployment began to preoccupy much of the social security system. Moreover, this trend has deepened since 1997 when family benefits became linked to income levels – particularly for familles nombreuses. More generally, the trend over time has been towards a more ‘selective’ family policy (Martin, 2017: 38–39), together with a certain ‘dualization’ as regards support for child-minding which distinguishes between those in and out of work. Nevertheless, when compared to many other countries, policies in favour of raising children remain relatively strong in today’s France.

Moreover, in order to fully understand French approaches to the having of children, one next needs to grasp the linkages between the fields of family support and health which overlap strongly in this country. Although patients today increasingly have to contribute more to the costs of their healthcare than they did in the late twentieth century, the vast majority of an individual’s health expenditure in France is covered by the social security system (funded through employment-linked national insurance contributions or the state), topped up by forms of relatively inexpensive mutualist2 or private insurance schemes. Moreover, beyond providing further encouragement for mothers to have babies, the relative generosity and high reputation of the French health system also goes some way to explaining the considerable medicalization not only of birthing in France, but of the way the health of infants is tracked. Indeed, this in turn dovetails with the importance of doctors not only within French healthcare and science, but also French society as a whole.

This high level of medicalization can first be appreciated when one realizes that today only 0.5% of mothers in France give birth at home, compared to 2.3% in the UK and nearly a third in the Netherlands. This represents a sharp change since 1950, when 45% of births in France still occurred at home. In the Fr...