FRANCE HAS had voucherized education going back to the immediate aftermath of the Revolution of 1789. At various points, the system was questioned, but never overturned other than by war or a brief revolutionary episode.

In 1844, for instance, the Republicans (in French terms, the center-left and far left) attempted to bring all schools under the direct regulation of the federal government ("the University") and cut off funds to schools that did not meet its regulations. Since one of the regulations was to be no state support for religion, this would have had the effect of terminating the support for private schools that had been in place since it was grudgingly conceded by Napoleon in order to win the support of the Catholic Church forhis rule. The Villemain bill, containing these provisions, came before the Assembly in January, 1844.

It was then that a young (but already famous) French parliamentarian went to the center of the oval-shaped chamber to question what contribution, if any, would be made to religious harmony, or for that matter education itself, if religious schools were either regulated into atheism or, just as bad, financially strangled into bankruptcy. Having heard the zero-sum arguments about different groups, experts, and side-effects, he took up what seemed to be the deeper issues of social harmony, morality, and freedom.

"If we are not careful, gentlemen," Alexis de Tocqueville began, "we will soon arrive at a point at which we will represent here, neither ideas nor men, but interests, canals, railroads. You say that a peace" that is, a social peace "exists, and I will tell you again that the war has only changed the theater of politics, it has become philosophical and religious...."

"To be sure, I do not share the views of many prejudiced people against the University" the French government's Department of Education over the grammar schools. "I myself was part of these schools.  Its existence, even its purpose, is among the highest interest of the country.

"But I will still notice what needs to be corrected. Yes, instruction has indeed progressed, but education" interruption from the left "did education, which is the training of the heart and the morals, reach the same level?"

"I hear some 'no's, and these 'no's do not come from critics interested in its ruin, they come from faithful friends of the institution" of public education.... The University" the federal regulation arm for grade schools "left many things to be changed, and therefore gave much pretext for war.... War is here, it is started, it is already active...."

Thus, members of the French clergy issued attacks "some of them unfair" upon the secretary of education. Levellier, and other public officials, responded by trying to push the clergy out of its legitimate interests in education altogether. "What does the secretary of education do?" He, "and other men of some importance.... retaliate against not only a part of the clergy which threatens secular education, and not only the whole clergy, but all of Catholicism and of Christianity."

Given this state of war, what was the solution? The exclusion of religion from schooling was a non-solution. "

The fear of a too-powerful church, meanwhile, of a state-backed religion, was obsolete, Tocqueville thought, especially in an increasingly Democratic age. "Some people think the clergy will take a predominant place in society and the government. But do not take seriously the assumption that a society like ours, proud and impregnated of civil and religious freedom, would subdue to an Orthodoxy. Gentlemen, this is pure imagination."

"I have never seen a free people whose liberty is not enrolled in beliefs. To me, the reason for this is that liberty is more the daughter of morals than the daughter of institutions, and morals are daughters of beliefs."

The effort to lift persons materially, through public education and other means, was important indeed "the essence of democracy as I understand it." But even this, and this purpose, was not the highest purpose not even the highest purpose of education, as implied above.

"Don't you think we need these religious beliefs," while debating a bill "threatening their ruin? Do you truly believe that we can help these problems through cold and vain philanthropy? Don't you think we need to appeal to religious men, to all religions, to alleviate all these miseries.... to teach all this ignorance and enlighten all this darkness?"

For the religious war in France, Tocqueville argued, there needed to be an active, dynamic solution not simply a "separation" of church and state or a smoldering silence of contempt, but a system that allowed belief to flourish. "I myself am convinced that the greatest danger in these fights, sooner or later, is that they come to indifference." The violent rhetoric of the clergy which Tocqueville did not hesitate to criticize would in turn facilitate the removal of religious and moral content from the schools in a real but deadly peace. "The peace you are talking about is a fruitless one," a repressed "war of interests instead of a healthy war of political opinion.... In short, gentlemen, I will not vote for the paragraph..." (Alexis de
Tocqueville, speech to the Chamber of Deputies, Le Moniteur Universel, January 17, 1844, pages 92-93.)

Thus in Tocqueville's terms, France's de facto voucher system was not likely to be a cause of religious strife, of which he agreed France has had much. Rather, it is a potential solution to religious division, a way of defusing the tension and disarming the time bomb.

This dynamic was perhaps best expressed powerfully 150 years later by French Socialist Louis Legrand, whose 1981 book catalyzed a great education debate in France and whose ideas were taken up as a rallying torch by Francois Mitterand in his election as president.

"The body of society," wrote Legrand, "already is divided." To say this is not to cause division, but merely to acknowledge that one exists. "The official solution to this dilemma has been sough, as we have seen, in an aseptic concept of secularity. This is the worst and most hypocritical situation... emptying public education having become more and more intellectual and arid of values and thus of explicit ideology, while allowing the development of a 'free' educational system marked by an ideological ethic and context.... The common school cannot be the present public school with its ethical and ideological emptiness." (L'école unique: à quelles conditiones?, Paris, Scarabèe 1981, pages 203-204.)

Thus, one of the most lucid exponents of the école unique, or common school which to Legrand means one, truly, common school representing a solid, tangible, national ethos, as distinct from the "vapid" schools created by public education required, at least for its evolution, and perhaps indefinitely to sustain it, the presence of an other system with a spirit of its own. This independent sector would offer definition to the common school, and act as a spur to its evolution. This is neatly consistent with the classic liberalism of French education reformers from Thiers to Maupas to de Tocqueville. As Legrand continued:

"It is contradictory and inadmissable that a democracy that considers itself liberal should refuse to citizens who desire it the exercise of the fundamental right to decide on the nature of the education that their children will benefit from." (p. 205.)