Chapter 4
Birth of a formula: prevent system, repressive system
The terms 'repress', 'prevent', 'prevention' and the like, were certainly not new to the 18th century. Until we have better research results we will continue to say that the terms, 'preventive system', 'repressive system', 'preventive education' and 'repressive education' came into existence in the 18th century. They seem to have been first used in France in various debates in two contexts and with radically different meanings: school policy on the one hand and family education-boarding school (schools and boarding schools directed by the State, by lay people and by Catholics) on the other.194
1. Prevention and repression in school policy
In French school policy in the first part of the century the two terms, 'preventive system' and 'repressive system' surfaced in connection with a very keen debate on the freedom of the school.195 Article 17 of the Belgian Constitution of 1831 had accepted the principle of freedom and thus given rise to a consistently liberal school system. "Teaching is free. Any kind of preventive measure is prohibited. Only the law regulates the repression of crimes”.
In France, the 'preventive system' was supported by people, most of them secularists, who promoted state monopoly over schooling, as sanctioned by the Napoleonic university system. This prevented any chance of a liberal school, namely a school not controlled by the State, or in other words it made any preventive authorisation impossible. In reality it was a preventive-oppressive system. The repressive system was championed by those who opted for freedom of teaching with different claims sanctioned in principle by the Constitutional ‘Charta’ promulgated by Louis Philip I of Orleans on August 14, 1830. The system was called 'repressive' because the Guizot Law of June 28, 1833, applying the constitutional decree, foresaw various ways of controlling private institutions, to the point of eventually suppressing them in cases where there was serious non-compliance of a legal, moral or didactic nature. The conditions, however, were such that they appeared to be doubly repressive. The first of these conditions was their dependence on the university. This was a more telling reason why they should have given a better solution to the problem by issuing a new law which might have also included the secondary schools in its liberalisation.
The one who would insist on this issue in the debates reopened in l844 was Alexis Charles de Tocqueville (1805-1859), a great moderate liberal, in his intervention on January 17,1844, and in various articles which appeared in the newspaper Le Commerce.196 The Report made on July 13, 1844 by Adolphe Thiers, president of the parliamentary commission, would have a decisive importance in the debate. The report definitely disposed of any attempt to modify the current Law of 1833. In his report on the work of the Commission, Thiers introduced the terms systeme preventive and systeme repressive which were neither mentioned nor found in any previous intervention. They refer directly or indirectly to the solutions proposed for the first two problems: the conditions for opening an institution of public instruction, with the exclusion of the 'preventive system', and the supervision, as demanded by the 'repressive system', to which they ought be subjected197
194 Trans note: wherever the term collegio is used, this will normally be translated as boarding school, unless already made
clear in a sentence, where it will be referred to simply as school
195 For a concise presentation of the problem and some of the main people involved, cf. B. Ferrari,“La politica scolastica
del Cavour”, (Milan: Vita e Pensiero 1982), 52-63.
196 These can be found in the interesting study by A.M. Battista,Lo spirito liberale e lo spirito religioso. Tocqueville nel
dibattito sulla scuola, (Milano: Jaca Book 1975), 129-201.
197 Cf. Rapport de M. Thiers sur la loi d’instruction secondaire fait au nom de la Commission de la Chambre de Députés