INTERVIEW - To discuss school uniforms throughout history, Virginie Girod receives the historian, Laurence de Cock, doctor of education sciences and author "D'une jour fascist. Elise and Célestin Freinet, pedagogues and activists" (Editions Agone). This specialist clarifies it immediately: the school uniform is a tradition born in England up to the images conveyed by the universe of Harry Potter for example, but the questions around the school are for their part "linked to the specifically French history of education and in particular the stranglehold of religion for a very long time on this education".

2023-01-06T04:08:06.115Z

If we go back in history, the uniform "does not have a vocation to standardize. It has a vocation to distinguish, in this case to distinguish the mass of the uneducated, from a form of elite", specifies again Laurence de Cock who first cites the importance of high schools under Napoleon, then the rupture created by May 68 and the abandonment of the "blouse". "May 68, it is a liberation of the bodies and the uniform and the blouse could be considered as a form of discipline of the bodies, of submission to an order", analyzes this historian again.