ABSTRACT

The Belle Époque quest for a modern beauty (an ‘art nouveau’) extended into France’s system of free primary schooling, established in the 1880s by the Third Republic to educate the popular masses. Design reformers’ belief in the underlying unity of the fine and applied arts, and their growing emphasis on the importance of individual initiative and creativity to the latter, suggested that integrating the right form of artistic education into public education, especially primary schools, would serve both economic and democratic ends. The quasi-official Société Nationale de l’Art à l’École (National Society for Art in School) was founded in 1907 to support this goal. An examination of its efforts nevertheless reveals that its distinction of didactic and aesthetic aims, as well as the parameters it imposed upon content and style, blunted their democratic, emancipatory potential in ways that echoed the broader limitations of the French expansion of education.

摘要

美好年代对现代美（一种“新艺术运动”）的追求延伸到法国的免费小学教育体系中，该体系由第三共和国于 1880 年代建立，旨在教育大众。设计改革者对美术和应用艺术的基本统一的信念，以及他们越来越强调个人主动性和创造力对后者的重要性，表明将正确的艺术教育形式融入公共教育，特别是小学，将有助于经济和民主的目的。准官方的Société Nationale de l'Art à l'École（全国学校艺术协会）成立于 1907 年，以支持这一目标。然而，对其努力的审查表明，它对教学和审美目标的区分，以及它强加给内容和风格的参数，削弱了它们的民主、解放潜力，其方式与法国教育扩张的更广泛限制相呼应。