An Old School Primer

Abstract

This article looks at the echoes of a greatly loved primary schoolbook that may be found in selected texts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Le Tour de la France par deux enfants, written by a woman under an ungendered pseudonym, was first published in 1877, the same year as that high-water mark of French literary Naturalism, Zola's L'Assommoir. Although their didactic aims are broadly similar, the ways in which the two authors deliver their message could not be more different. Significant excisions of even the most anodyne of references to religious ritual and architecture are deemed necessary in the light of growing secularisation in French state schools, and practised in a later reprint.