France is easier to study than most of its neighbours because it is of one piece: everything happens in Paris. The political upheavals of the 19th century affected it directly and totally, while there were (not always quiet) corners in the scattered "Germanies" where people like Pestalozzi (Burgdorf, Switzerland), Fröbel (Keilhau, Thuringia), Herbart (Göttingen, Lower Saxony), and others could reflect on pedagogy and experiment with it.
When Jules Ferry launched the public school system of the Third Republic, he could do so with fresh ideas anchored in well-founded knowledge. The partial text on the left of the following JPEG is by Edgar Quinet, one of the early French thinkers on this subject (and, by the way, translator of Herder).
The penultimate paragraph on page 19 should be learnt by heart. But we can erase "primary" and replace "child" by "graduate". This is Ferry the instructor, on page 20 (second half) we meet the pedagogue.
The book by Buisson and Farrington from which these pages are copied did, alas, not contain much by the first author himself. The following excerpt just shows that "citizenship" was already part of school.
