My entire high school education was in the French system—the first three years in France itself, and the next four in the French school (“Lycée Français”) in London.
What Americans call “grades” and the English “years” are counted backwards in the French system, starting (of course!) at 6, and ending with an additional year after 1. The last two years of French high school are thus known as “première” (“first”) and “terminale” (“final”). The high school diploma is the famous “baccalauréat”, always known in ordinary conversation as the “bac”.
When I was a pupil—this has since been somewhat rejigged—students in general, rather than vocational, high schools had a choice between three types of bac: “literary”, “economic” and “scientific”. Students made this choice in “première”, which was also the year when they sat the French exam for the bac.
My studies were heavily weighted towards French, particularly in “première”, when we were being prepared for that great initiation rite, the “bac de français”.
I chose the literary bac, since I was a reader, with very mediocre mathematical gifts, and no interest in economics and very little in the sciences. This mean that my studies were heavily weighted towards French, particularly in “première”, when we were being prepared for that great initiation rite, the “bac de français”. All students had to sit that bac, but for the ones in the literary section, it would determine a higher proportion of their final mark on the whole bac, and was consequently meant to be approached with much solemnity and trepidation.
Various sorts of work were required for the “bac de français”, not all of which I can recall. But the most valued, most sanctified sort of assignment which we were to be set was the “commentaire composé”. One could in fact eschew producing a full “commentaire” in the exam, as there were other options. but it was understood that the most gifted and committed students would choose the “commentaire”.
It is not easy to explain quite what a “commentaire composé” is; nor was it easy to grasp this at the time. It was certainly not anything as banal as explaining the difficulties in a text. Behind it lay the discipline of “explication de texte”. To “explicate”, is, etymologically, to “unfold”, and this image gives some idea of the vision of the nature of literary study that lay behind the “explication” and “commentaire”. The author was imagined as having created something with the multiple, precise folds of origami, and the student was to identify these folds, and set out how they served to form the final object.
The rules of structured writing which had been drilled into us were supposed to kick in.
Metaphors all are very well, but what does this mean in practice? In general, we were confronted with a few paragraphs from some classic text of French literature, which we had studied for few months, and were invited to write a “commentaire composé” for those paragraphs. At this point, the rules of structured writing which had been drilled into us were supposed to kick in. Proper writing meant constructing an argument in three parts, each with three sub-parts (three was not an officially obligatory number, but was always preferable). At every stage, one’s claims were to be illustrated by examples—direct quotes from the text—and one would then explain how each quote justified the claim.
So to write a “commentaire composé” on a text meant to make three broad claims about what the author was doing—his stylistic means and his ends—and then to sub-divide these claims into sections, and illustrate each section. One was, in short, to write a sort of demonstration of what the author had accomplished and how.
I loathed the “commentaire composé”, with all the hatred and disgust a trapped adolescent can muster. The entire exercise seemed to me a horrifically tasteless attempt to reduce the literary art to a machine one could somehow take apart without wrecking it. Above all, the “commentaire composé” was boring: I had (and have) no interest in reading others’ meticulous restructurings of the pieces they have obtained from smashing a text to bits, still less in writing anything of the sort. I can digest a few acute observations about an author’s artistry, but lengthy write-ups repel me. The essence of an art can never be captured by such analysis.
The “commentaire composé” hovered like a poisoned cloud over every text we studied. Whatever beauty, pathos or humour it contained came with a blaring warning: YOU WILL HAVE TO EXPLAIN HOW THIS WORKS. None of the pleasures of literature could be enjoyed for free: all had to be paid for in the coin of commentary. One might seek deeper understanding of a text by learning about its historical background or reading authors that had influenced it. But this too was of no use, unless it could be shoved into relevant sections of the “commentaire composé”, recycled as parts of one’s great demonstration of how the text-machine worked.
There have presumably been French high school students who enjoyed writing “commentaires composés”. These, one fears, are the ones who grow up to be high school teachers. They thus carry on what might as well be the true purpose of this part of the French secondary curriculum: convincing the great majority of students that literature is a form of horrible punishment to be fled as soon as possible.
The “commentaire composé” was by no means an outlier within the French syllabus, but rather one of many instances of its apparent mission to crush the adolescent spirit through ugly formal exercises. I see no reason to believe this has changed substantially for the better in the last thirty years.
Nor, of course, is the French high school system as a whole an outlier among nations. Everywhere centralized, mandatory educational systems show a grim tendency to break the minds and hearts of adolescents. Far too much of secondary education involves picking apart those minds and hearts, and re-ordering them into some structure deemed fit for the adult world: students are to be broken and reorganized for some greater good, much as we were once taught to do to texts.
