LA RÉPUBLIQUE EST LAÏQUE

This poster appeared on the public noticeboard of our village school a few days before the rentrée.

In fifteen points it details how the school and school employees must comport to maintain the strict separation of Church and State.  It is part of a wider effort to make visible in all schools the fact that a primary mission of school is to teach and share the values of the République.  Those moral and civic values are embodied in the Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen.

It seems a little strange that people have to be reminded that the revolutionary changes begun in 1789 created an egalitarian society that benefitted the vast majority of the population.  Shouldn't those benefits, and the responsibilities of citizens to maintain them, shouldn't they be manifestly visible to all in their daily lives? ("We hold these truths to be self-evident").  What are the fundemental changes happening in France such that a substantial part of the population must be explicitly taught that liberal democracy, while constraining the revolutionary impulses of the most exploited in society, also confers certain benefits and protections that were hard won by the Révolution?

In some ways, it makes me think of the run up to the centenary celebrations of Ireland's great revolution of 1916.  Do Irish people see the benefits of no longer being under the imperial thumb or have they forgotten already that the struggles of the 1913-1923 period, while consigning the people of the Six Counties to the apartheid of the Orange State, also allowed the rest of Ireland to imagine what a society without colonial masters could be like.  Do people see that benefit in their daily lives in 2015, or will they have to be explicitly taught it like the way the French are now teaching the precepts of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen?

Playlist:

Come Out Ye Black and Tans
The Wolfe Tones



COME OUT YE BLACK AND TANS
Dominic Behan (1928-1989)

I was born on a Dublin street where the loyal drums did beat,
And those loving English feet they tramped all over us,
And each and every night when me father came home tight
He'd invite the neighbors out with this chorus:

Come out ye Black and Tans, come out and fight me like a man,
Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders,
Tell her how the IRA made you run like hell away
From the green and lovely lanes of Killashandra.

Come tell us how you slew them aul' Arabs two by two,
Like the Zulus they had spears and bows and arrows,
How you bravely faced each one with your 16-pounder gun,
And you frightened them poor natives to their marrow.

Come out ye Black and Tans, come out and fight me like a man,
Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders,
Tell her how the IRA made you run like hell away
From the green and lovely lanes of Killashandra.

Come let us hear you tell how you slandered great Parnell,
When you thought him well and truly persecuted,
Where are the sneers and jeers that you loudly let us hear
When our heroes of '16 were executed?

Come out ye Black and Tans, come out and fight me like a man,
Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders,
Tell her how the IRA made you run like hell away
From the green and lovely lanes of Killashandra.

Come out ye Black and Tans, come out and fight me like a man,
Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders,
Tell her how the IRA made you run like hell away
From the green and lovely lanes of Killashandra.