Towards a new humanity

Preface

Vers le style was a text produced at the end of World War II by a team of thinkers who had worked and lived together during the war in a ‘leadership school’ (l’école des cadres à Uriage). The école was established at the end of July, 1940, as part of a programme initiated by the Vichy regime to develop the kinds of leaders that it thought would be needed to implement the ‘Révolution nationale’ which it sought to introduce in ‘Unoccupied France’ in order to revive the country after its ignominious surrender to German forces. The prime movers of the école were demobilized soldiers and radical Catholic priests. The founder and ‘chief ’ was Pierre Dunoyer de Segonzac. The institution ran short courses of varying lengths and large numbers of young men followed these ‘stages’ and were influenced by them. It attracted young ‘intellectuals’ as tutors and its ethos was that it generated a communal context within which diverse attitudes and opinions could be represented and discussed. Although the école was at first sponsored by the Vichy government, it quickly found government oversight too intrusive. At the end of October, 1940, the école moved from a château in Gannat, near to Vichy, to a château in Uriage, near to Grenoble. At the end of 1942, the école was formally abolished by the Vichy government. Preparations had been made in advance of this expected abolition. The école became clandestine and, in the Spring of 1943, a proportion of the members moved to ‘la Thébaïde’ at Murinais, near to Saint-Marcellin on the edge of the Vercors, from where they ran courses for the Resistance. On 13 December 1943, la Thébaïde was invaded and destroyed by the German army, the Gestapo, and the French milice. From the beginning of 1944, dispersed members met occasionally to salvage the text which had emerged from their discussions in the previous years. This ‘summa’, edited by Gilbert Gadoffre who was the leader of the école at Murinais, was published in 1945 by Éditions du Seuil as Vers le style.

I first became interested in the école des cadres à Uriage in the early 1970s. My PhD, received in 1972, had been supervised within the Cambridge English School by Raymond Williams.1 His influence led me towards the ‘sociology of literature’ which was emerging at that time and towards the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham under the direction of Richard Hoggart.² I read Jacques Charpentreau and René Kaës, 1962, La culture populaire en France, Paris, Les éditions ouvrières, which drew my attention to the work of Joffre Dumazedier and caused me to embark on a cross-cultural comparison between the work of Hoggart and Dumazedier. I had become involved from 1973 in a pedagogical innovation³ at my place of work – the University of East London (then North-East London Polytechnic) [NELP/UEL] – and it became clear to me that I needed to explore the institutional conditions of possibility for the introduction of radical educational change. This realization caused me to want to analyse the context within which Dumazedier developed the orientation which was pursued in Peuple et Culture, which he co-founded in 1945. That context was the école des cadres à Uriage.

In 1977, I received a West European Research Grant, jointly sponsored by the British Academy and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, to work in the Bureau des Archives Départementales de l’Isère at Grenoble which held documentation about Uriage. I received funding from the same sources for a follow-up research visit in 1982. Between these two visits, I had one year of secondment from NELP as Morris Ginsberg Fellow in Sociology at the London School of Economics in which I explored theoretically the character of higher education institutions, considering the relationship between the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of organizations as conceptual instruments for understanding variations in curriculum content. The outcome of the two research visits was, firstly, an article on the école in Higher Education Review in the Autumn of 1982,4 and, secondly, a paper on ‘French Sociology, 1940-1944’ given at a conference on ‘Vichy France and the Resistance: Ideology and Culture’ held at the University of Sussex in 1984. When the proceedings were published, this became: ‘Uriage: the influence of Context on Content’.⁵

My early interest in Uriage, therefore, arose from the extent to which the work of the école, and the thought of authors within the école, supplied an objective correlative for my reflections on my involvement in the introduction of an educational innovation within an institution which was relatively marginalized within the UK higher education system. In the mid-1980s, I discovered the work of Pierre Bourdieu. I found that the educational research which he undertook with Jean-Claude Passeron in the 1960s (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1964, 1979; 1970, 1977) provided me with a conceptual framework to analyse ‘independent study’ and then that Bourdieu’s La Noblesse d’État (Bourdieu, 1989, 1996) also gave me a way into thinking about the nature of educational institutions. I was able to draw on the sociological analyses of Bourdieu and Passeron to understand my own experiences with the result that this usurped my interest in elements of precedent in the circumstances of the Uriage team.

For over thirty years I have concentrated on attempting to understand and adequately communicate the full range of Bourdieu’s work, in its sociological, anthropological, and philosophical dimensions. The emphasis of my most recent book on Bourdieu⁶ was that the balance which he achieved between intellectual endeavour and socio-political activism is paradigmatic. The essence of his conviction was that we need to encourage in everybody a reflexive analysis of the conditions affecting the development of beliefs, values, and actions in such a way that our responses to others are not distorted by a mistaken belief in the autonomous validity of intellectual discourse about them.

During this period, I had always regarded my research on Uriage as unfinished business. In the past, my research had been shaped by an interest in the similarities and differences between the educational innovations of the Uriage team in 1940–1945 and those of the staff involved in developing and implementing procedures for ‘independent study’ at NELP/UEL from 1973 until 1990. Originally, I had investigated the regime of the école and had focussed on some of the ‘cahiers’ produced by members of the Uriage team.7 After completing The Bourdieu paradigm, I decided that I would like to revisit my work on Uriage by focussing on the text produced by the Uriage team in the closing months of the war. I was driven by a sense that the thinking of the Uriage team before the establishment of de Gaulle and the construction of a new constitution has relevance in relation to our current anxieties about the capacity of political systems in nation states to respond adequately to the challenges confronting the whole world. I secured a contract and started work towards the end of 2019.

Then the Covid-19 pandemic struck. I have completed the translation and the commentary during lockdown. Suddenly, the relevance of Vers le style becomes pronounced as people everywhere consider whether the crisis is an opportunity to set humanity on a new course or whether the ‘new normal’ will just be a restored ‘old normal’.

This book does not seek simply to re-present in translation the text published in 1945 as if in the belief that its arguments have intrinsic value which make it transhistorically pertinent after a period of seventy five years. Instead, the book offers an abridged text which is enclosed within contextual information. The intention is that the text should be understood ‘socio-genetically’, following Pierre Bourdieu’s injunction as expressed in his ‘Concluding Remarks: For a Sociogenetic Understanding of Intellectual Works’ in Calhoun, Lipuma, and Postone, eds, 1993, Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives. Generalizing from his perception of the ways in which his own works were being received, Bourdieu argued that adequate responses to all intellectual works depend on making the effort to understand the social and epistemological conditions of their production or, as he puts it, ‘the epistemological and social conditions under which (that is, at the same time, with which and against which) the intellectual project whose product is the work in question was elaborated’ (Calhoun et al., 1993, 264). For Bourdieu, social and intellectual trajectories are inextricably linked and they have to be seen to be mutually reinforcing. To borrow words from the title of an article by Laurent Thévénot and Luc Boltanski, both of whom had been influenced by Bourdieu, we are all involved in finding our ways in social space (Thévénot and Boltanski, 1983). We are all born into situations which give us unique dispositions to act and think, and these immediately inter-act with the objective conditions in which we develop and the discourses of explanation of them which are at our disposal.

The purpose of this edition of Vers le style, therefore, is to situate it in its socio-historical context and in the trajectory of its authors, and, in doing so, to raise questions about the relevance today of the thinking which it contains by encouraging readers to reflect both on the objective conditions of their societies and on their individual trajectories within those societies. It is important that this book is not read simply as a ‘re-presentation’ of an old text but as a package in which the context of the text and its authorial intentions are integrally related so as to generate, by reference to one historical case-study, socio-analytical thinking about the process leading to the production of a ‘summa’ or ‘manifesto’ for our consumption, and reflection on its content.

This socio-historical orientation has two practical consequences. It dictates the form of the presentation, and it also demands some familiarity with the thought and politics of mid-twentieth-century France.

1 Raymond Williams (1921–1988), author of Culture and Society, 1958, and The Long Revolution, 1961.

2 Richard Hoggart (1918–2014), author of The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life, 1957.

3 See Robbins, 1988, and my contribution to Poynter and Rustin, eds, 2020.

4 Robbins, 1982.