Pedagogies of the Fin de Siècle: Ideas and Institutions in Modern European Intellectual History

During the late nineteenth century, education reformers in France mobilized the lycée philosophy course as a vehicle to promulgate brain science and steer its cultural resonance. Philosophy had been required for all students during the final year of secondary education since 1809. Beginning with the education reforms of 1874, however, the course integrated physiological and neurological methods. This pedagogical campaign throws into stark relief the institutional contexts in which psychology shaped the intellectual history of modern France.

As brain research opened a new scientific horizon in Europe, the French Third Republic set about enforcing a lycée philosophy curriculum designed to capture public reception of the emergent neurosciences. Philosophy’s contested campaign, fraught with competing ambitions of national regeneration, technological advancement, and cultural integrity, developed in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Following France’s humiliating defeat, politicians and intellectuals placed blame on the nation’s retrograde scientific institutions. In the face of the technologically advanced Prussian Empire, the Third Republic looked to education as the key to surpassing the perpetual foe across the Rhine.

It was in this institutional context that lycée philosophy instructors, including Henri Bergson, Émile Durkheim, and Pierre Janet, became the public stewards of nascent psychological research. Numerous historical studies have examined these titanic intellectuals of the fin de siècle. Yet their institutional role as educators teaching a standardized curriculum has yet to be sufficiently appreciated. I argue that these and other thinkers of modern France rallied around experimental psychology and neurology thanks to their positions as civil servants charged with inculcating secular and scientific values in the classroom.

By examining modernist thinkers within the educational system of the Third Republic, my presentation casts new light on the intersection between ideas and institutions across intellectual history, philosophy, and the history of science.