When Symbolic Violence Changes: The Example of the Educational Reform of Vichy

This paper aims to understand the mechanisms of symbolic violence through the capacity of the State to impose a specific social order by means of public policies. Public policies are, according to Pierre Bourdieu, one of practical modes for the exercise of symbolic violence: as much as the government justifies and legitimizes its intervention, it legitimizes the dominant representations of the social world. From the example of the educational reform of the Vichy regime – on which focus our thesis – we will concretely evaluate what resources the new government has to impose a new vision of the educational institution and the limits to which it is confronted.

In 1940, the establishment of the Vichy regime allows activists of a conservative school, marginalized under the Third Republic, to occupy key positions in the Ministry of National Education. Against the republican school (free, secular, positivist) established in the late nineteenth century, it is an elitist, religious and nationalist school that is proposed as necessary to recover France (I). Beyond the speeches, some tools are actually implemented by the new government to produce this new vision of educational institution: change the structure of the Ministry, transform the organization of teaching, change teachers’ formation, impose new men at all levels of the hierarchy, etc. (II). This symbolic violence, which really translates into some institutional structures of the society - very quickly because of the authoritarian nature of the regime - is however limited by some actors. Teachers, street level bureaucrats who are responsible for implementing the reform, will resist at this violence (III).