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IN 1910 the president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, and the rector of the University of Paris, a M. Liard, agreed to inaugurate a chair for a visiting French professor. Gustave Lanson, who came in the fall semester of 1911 and taught with the official title of doctor honoris causa, was in fact the first important professor of French to teach—rather than simply lecture—in the United States. 1 An element of competition was involved in the arrangement: Harvard had begun an actual exchange of professors with the Sorbonne, and, perhaps more important, the Germans had already for some years been sending “Kaiser Wilhelm professors” to teach at Columbia; they were paid directly by the emperor and were housed at the Deutsches Haus. Not coincidentally, around the same time the Maison Française was inaugurated at Columbia and situated next door to the German establishment.
Lanson, after returning to Paris, wrote and published a fascinating little book entitled Trois mois d'enseignement aux Etats-Unis. In it he informs us that, in addition to this duties at Columbia, he traveled to a number of other eastern and midwestern schools and universities, in order to meet students and get an idea of the goals, methods, and quality of French language and literature teaching on the secondary and university levels. He visited well-known French departments, including those at Harvard, New York University, City College of the City of New York, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Michigan, Yale, and, of course, Columbia. He went to football games, observed the beauty of the campuses, witnessed the frenzied activity of university expansion (Johns Hopkins was moving to its new campus on the outskirts of town), and remarked on the energy and devotion of both professors and students.
He was struck in particular by the conjunction of religion and education in the American university: “At Yale, every morning, and obligatory undenominational [ sic , in English] service brings together all the students; a few prayers and psalms, a short moral speech; it's a question of ten or fifteen minutes. From there each student goes off to class” (130). 2 Lanson notes, however, that because of a decline of religious commitment on the part of students, required attendance at this type of service has been dropped at numerous institutions. Nondenominational religion, a device whose imposition was intended to unify the student body and forge an academic community, was thus being supplemented or supplanted by team sports: football, baseball, and track (131).
Lanson was pleased to observe that virtually all the faculty members he met at these schools were qualified; they had the licence at least, and many had higher degrees and had passed the agrégation. Lanson found such credentials significant, pointing out that, only a few years before, the teaching of the French language had become discredited because it had not yet been professionalized: French hairdressers, cooks, and housekeepers often advertised themselves as French language teachers when they fell on hard times. Lanson even cites an ad a friend found in a Boston newspaper: “Young Frenchman seeks position as maître d' or valet for a private family. Will give lessons” (205). Clearly the situation had got out of hand, especially when one considers the qualifications of many of the German teachers arriving in America. By 1911, happily, the French were catching up; the quality of the teachers arriving matched, and was no doubt the direct result of, the rebirth of the French universities, which Lanson alludes to a number of times.
But a problem remained. One could teach the language, to be sure, but what of French culture and civilization? Students learned vocabulary and grammar, and literature was used almost exclusively as an aid to vocabulary development. Despite the quality and dedication of the teachers at the university level, the students, precisely because they were reading literature only on the most superficial level, were not being exposed to, or initiated into, French culture—which Lanson saw as necessarily the highest goal of any French teacher. 3 Visiting a class at City College, Lanson was happy to see that the students could summarize the plot of Pierre Corneille's tragedy Horace and could name the main characters. But he was somewhat surprised when he engaged in some basic Lansonian pedagogy: when he asked a student, described by the teacher as the best in the class, about the difference between the patriotism of Horace and Curiace, the student answered, “But monsieur, we're never asked questions like this”—a remark confirmed by the teacher (108). When pressed, the student gave a perfectly creditable answer. Asked a second question of the same type, the student, a “Cuban with an intelligent physiognomy and lively eyes,” made the same remark and, when pressed, again gave a good answer. This exchange went on for fifteen minutes and, by the time it was over, Lanson tells us, the student “had found all the ideas for a little moral and psychological commentary, and he had found the French form for these ideas” (108–09). Lanson singlehandedly was showing America, as represented by the perhaps resentful City College teacher, how the job had to be done.
Clearly two things were lacking in the way French was taught in America: first, the explication de texte, which could give the student the means and the form by which certain questions could be posed and answers produced; second, and a consequence of the first, an insight into the meaning of French literature and thus an understanding of the true meaning and significance of French civilization—for French literature, as Lanson sees it, is a privileged means of access to all of French culture.
Despite progress, then, there was a definite crisis in French literature and language teaching in America. French pedagogy in the United States was a purely mechanical exercise, perhaps of some value to those about to travel or live in France—a tiny minority—but, Lanson implies but does not state, a waste of time for all the others. Students, he argues, not only must be initiated into the mysteries of the plus-que-parfait and the subjunctive but must also possess a real understanding, and love, of French culture. The great texts of the literary canon are the vehicles of that culture. But why should Americans be put in contact with French civilization? What's in it for them, and for the French?
Perhaps taking a cue from the Harvard experiment, Lanson envisages an exchange—but one involving much more than a mere handful of professors. The French have something to offer Americans: not so much practical or technical advances as concepts representing the very spirit of their nation.
We are an idealist nation: we have a tradition of rationalism, of liberalism, of generous concerns and disinterested enthusiasms, which recommend us to all peoples, whatever the weaknesses of our conduct and our stubbornness in denigrating ourselves. Our literature, since the Renaissance, has lived through the expression of the highest ideas of progress, of justice, and humanity. We speak a language of clear and universal ideas. Everything, in every corner of the world, that is true, useful, and great thought acquires, filtered through our thought and our language, a superior intelligibility that heightens its force of attraction and expansion. (201)
It would be a mistake, I think, to dismiss these remarks as a mere collection of clichés. They are instead the prototypical justification for French studies worldwide. Other languages, at the time Lanson was writing, obviously had greater practical value: at the end of Trois mois d'enseignement he reproduces tables that indicate the overwhelming popularity of German over French in American secondary schools. He well knew that the principal reason for the disparity was that more young people came from German-speaking than from French-speaking backgrounds. In fact, the only areas of significant French teaching in American high schools at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century were New England and Louisiana, areas with indigenous French-speaking populations. 4 Lanson's argument depends on the belief that French alone can offer more than mere utility. It entails, in its literature above all, the dissemination of a “general culture,” an idealist one, that would “enlarge the horizon of common morality” (199) and therefore contribute something notably lacking in American society: the formation of the “homme du monde” (197). Only a recognition of this strength could ensure the widespread teaching of French, the contends: eventually Americans would understand that Germany, despite its social, scientific, and economic clout, “was not everything, could not do everything” (192).
Lanson, then, suggests that French culture, conveyed through language and literature classes, could enable the university to serve American civilization as a vehicle of social unification, just as nondenominational religion and team sports did on a much smaller scale within the American university itself. For, Lanson writes, Americans counted on the university “to unify the American soul, to forge [or manufacture— fabriquer ] a collective consciousness [ une conscience collective ] for this disparate crowd of immigrants of every race and every mentality” (199).
Lanson does not imply, of course, that the French could enlighten the Americans while remaining aloof from innovations taking place on this side of the Atlantic. No, the Americans had something to offer the French as well, albeit something a good bit less exalted. American professors and planners could offer ideas and counsel for “the organization and equipping of teaching, for the bold renewal of materials and methods, for the art of spending usefully, without meanness and without waste, for the art of getting the maximum returns from men and things, for the proper measuring and distribution of authority and liberty” (210). Clearly the Americans' offering would be more humble than that of the French: it would consist of a very modest dose of educational and intellectual Taylorism (efficiency engineering), just enough to reinvigorate the new French universities—and certainly not enough to challenge anything in them. The French were the bringers of enlightenment; the Americans brought a few good methods, “good books to read, good courses to take” (210).
Lanson's view of the French critic and literary scholar—going off into the world, armed with the agrégation and the doctorat d'état —is really somewhat ambivalent. This professor is, on the one hand, quite powerful; he or she brings to the world not only French civilization but also civilization in the more general sense, with a capital C: the ability to think and write clearly and elegantly but, beyond that, the capacity to be more than just a German or an American, a technician or an efficiency expert. With civilization comes a higher goal or meaning, a secular deliverance. On the other hand, the literary critic and scholar for Lanson is self-effacing and subordinate; he or she is not the kind of author whose works may live forever. In an essay entitled “L'immortalité littéraire,” published in 1895, Lanson states:
Already Saint-Marc Girardin and Paul de Saint-Victor are no longer read; in thirty years their names will be barely known. A vague memory, a twilight of immortality, that's really all an excellent critic can hope for: a sentence in a preface, a citation in a footnote, that's his lot—and that's at the very most…. The critic sacrifices himself to make known the talents of others: his function is to aid the birth of the immortals, not to make himself immortal. Our job [ notre métier ] is only valuable when we practice self-effacement. (310)
What's said here of critics also applies to professors; note that Lanson as a professor writes in the first-person plural when he writes of critics. The teacher-critic, in propagating civilization, is therefore double: both a powerful disseminator of republican enlightenment, a savior of the world, really, and at the same time a servant who fully recognizes the “twilight of immortality” that will come in a few years. After all, if one wants literary immortality one can always write fiction or poetry and take one's chances. The literary and critical discourses are radically different, incommensurate, and so are the social functions connected with them.
I would now like to fast-forward to America in 1994. It has been eighty-three years since Lanson's visit. Like most critics, he has had his twilight of immortality. What then of the role of the French professor—American or French—in the United States today? It's interesting to note that nowhere in Trois mois d'enseignement does Lanson speculate on what the graduate students he meets might do. Although he visited dissertation defenses and graduate seminars and was impressed with the American graduate students, at no point does he consider the idea that these people might teach French. Could Americans, with American academic qualifications, also be the bearers of French civilization? The question of the identity and the role of the French professor goes hand in hand with that of the role of the French canon, the vehicle for the civilizing mission of the professor. The interesting thing here is that in the last twenty years or more, Americans—students and professors alike—have come to look to French literature and thought in general for virtually the opposite of what Lanson claimed it could provide. In reading authors such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida (they can serve here as metonyms) and using them to return to and read the traditional canon—both the French, as established by Lanson and his successors, and the American, established by like-minded individuals here—against itself, Americans have consciously followed the French lead in dismantling the humanist traditions of spirit, cultural consensus, the authority of the “homme du monde,” and the legitimacy of high culture. We have a strange and almost humorous situation: French literature and culture, as represented by figures like Foucault, retains its prestige, perhaps as a remainder from the days of Lanson, but that prestige is now directed against the very elements that originally guaranteed it and that it guaranteed. This phenomenon implies, I think, not the elimination of the canon but its opening out in ways that work against Lanson's notion of culture. Lanson himself implicitly recognizes the problem in Trois mois d'enseignement when he notes that much of the most important recent French literature (he cites Anatole France, Henri Bergson, and Maurice Barrès) goes against the very idéologèmes that he claims are central to the tradition (227–78). Today we might think of much francophone literature as work that specifically challenges the logic of a higher civilization that is inseparable, finally, from colonialism and racism. Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal is a founding document of this (anti)tradition.
The inevitable result of reading Foucault, for example, against or instead of Lanson will therefore be the fragmenting and demystification of the canon: the canon is no longer a seamless whole, representing and transmitting not only French culture but high culture in its essence. Once this idea takes hold, literature no longer represents or is representative: the canon tends to become a pragmatic device (we read certain works so that we can talk to one another) rather than a transcendent category (certain works epitomize and transmit progress, justice, and humanity). But a larger problem remains: with this demystification of high culture and thus the dismantling of Lanson's canon at least in part, how can one continue to privilege French literature as a whole (and not just a few disruptive philosophers and writers one happens to like)? And how can one argue (as Lanson does) that native French speakers, properly trained and bearing the agrégation , are uniquely equipped to teach their literature in America? As soon as the canon becomes something other than an ideal and idealized means of transmitting culture in general, French becomes a polyglot affair open to the study of writers and filmmakers from various francophone nations and cultures, working in any number of idioms and dialects. French culture as cultural disruption and transformation necessarily turns against itself, then, as a coherent field of study. But, at the same time, as a single definition of French—or any other—literature fades away, entering the twilight of immortality, the work if this literature's redefinition still continues—indeed, it becomes even more imperative, if endless. If not the theory, then at least the practice of the canon or a canon—what works and what doesn't, for various purposes and according to various criteria—will always continue, at least as long as people are interested in the study of languages and literatures. Of course this kind of pragmatism loses the concept of high culture, the chief weapon that Lanson could provide to enable French, in principle at least, to hold its own against more “practical” languages, such as German at the turn of the century and Spanish today. As French teachers and students we have to face the same problem that Lanson confronted at the turn of the century: how to promote French when other languages seem to offer more immediate rewards. Lanson's solution is no longer available to us—we're on our own, now, to find another. Perhaps the French government, through its recent effort to foster research and study centers in the United States, will help things, along, but the ultimate responsibility rests with those—teachers, critics, writers—who serve as mediators between French and American culture.
No doubt French studies will find strength in this challenge; like the status of the canon, the current position of the scholar-critic is much the opposite of the one described by Lanson. No one worries too much anymore about the immortality of a given or author, but as the autonomy of the work of art declines—as it loses its privileged beauty and its cultural mission—the critic comes to appear as a rival to the author. We are swimming in texts, none of which can be privileged, the author's or our own. But just as we are no longer the author's poor cousin, happy to scrounge for crumbs of immortality—we are now free to rewrite the literary text, to question it, to ignore its higher vocation—so too have we lost much of the vicarious power of Lanson's professor-critic. We can no longer arrogate to ourselves the authority of those who travel to another country to initiate the inhabitants into the delights of higher civilization. Indeed, many French professors are now those very inhabitants.
The author is Associate Professor of French in the Department of French at Penn State University, University Park.
1 The importance of Lanson as academic literary critic and pioneer of literary pedagogy is fully examined in Compagnon; see, above all, Compagnon's discussion of the reception of Trois mois d'enseignement (123–25). A pioneer of the explication de texte and of historical literary studies as an academic discipline, Lanson was the author of the universally relied-on Histoire de la littérature française , originally published in 1893, which by 1912 had sold 150,000 copies, according to the title page of the 1912 edition.
2 All translations from Lanson are my own.
3 When Lanson visited in 1911, and for many years thereafter, foreign language teaching in the United States concentrated on grammatic drill, composition as an aid to the mastery of grammar, and reading as a device for building vocabulary. See the criticism of American foreign language teaching in Coleman 168–69. But note also that Coleman, in his suggestion for reform of language teaching (16), puts “ability to read the foreign language with care and enjoyment” at the top of his list. By 1929, them, enjoyment had replaced rote memorization as the goal of teaching—but there was still no talk of any higher moral function of language study.
4 One table Lanson reproduces (234–35) gives some idea of the disparity between French and German enrollments in American secondary schools, presumably not long before 1912, when Trois mois d'enseignement was published. A few states had strong French enrollments: Massachusetts (25,253 in French, 10,936 in German), Maine (4,324 French, 867 German), New Hampshire (2,917 French, 572 German), and Louisiana (912 French, 31 German). Predictably, the midwestern states had strong German enrollments—for example, Ohio (1,870 French 13,093 German), South Dakota (66 French, 1,161 German), and Wisconsin (410 French, 8,289 German)—but so did Texas (368 French, 2,085 German). Nationwide, 95,671 students were studying French, 192,933 German.
It wasn't the cultural mission of Lanson's pedagogues, of course, that tipped the scales in favor of French after World War I. What did that trick was the systematic and often violent extirpation of German language and culture from American society during the war. Statistics in Coleman (20–21) tell the story: the total French enrollment in all public American secondary schools in 1925 was 359,219; the total German enrollment was 32,870 (What happened to all the German teachers who lost their jobs?); Spanish, 253,397; Latin, 611,680 (!; Lanson does not indicate Latin enrollments in his book, but what could be less “practical,” or more associated with high culture, than Latin?).
Césaire, Aimé. Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1983.
Coleman, Algernon. The Teaching of Modern Foreign Languages in the United States. New York: Macmillan, 1929.
Compagnon, Antoine. La troisième république des lettres: De Flaubert à Proust. Paris: Seuil, 1983.
Lanson, Gustave. Histoire de la littérature française. 1893. Paris: Hachette, 1912.
———. “L'immortalité Littéraire.” Hommes et livres, études morales et littéraires. Paris: Lacène, 1895. 308–20.
———. Trois mois d'enseignement aux Etats-Unis: Notes et impressions d'un professeur français. Paris: Hachette, 1912.
© 1995 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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