Le Petit Matin
- The Prince of Wales Visits the Saint-Cyr School
- A Long Letter from M. Bérard to M. Herriot on the Reform of Public Education
- Note of the Day
This 30 October 1926 front page reported that the Prince of Wales, on a visit to Saint-Cyr, was made a private first class of the “First Battalion of France” in a small ceremony on the Grand Carré, and received white gloves and a casoar cap from the class’s lowest-ranked cadet, which made him an honorary Saint-Cyrien of the “promotion du Maroc.” The paper printed the opening of a letter in which former minister Léon Bérard told Education Minister Édouard Herriot that two years of major school reforms had gone ahead without any debate in parliament. A signed Note du Jour predicted that Dr. Robinson would fail to reach Mars this time, but saluted such attempts as steps toward contact in a later generation.
Translation
The Prince of Wales Visits the Saint-Cyr School
Then, in a quite private ceremony held on the Grand Carré, the rank of private first class of the First Battalion of France was conferred on the Prince of Wales. The “Père Système,” the lowest-ranked member of the class, expressed his pleasure at being able to count the Prince of Wales among the cadets of the School, and handed him the insignia of the rank: white gloves and a casoar cap, thus conferring on the British heir to the throne the title of honorary Saint-Cyrien of the Morocco class (promotion du Maroc).
A Long Letter from M. Bérard to M. Herriot on the Reform of Public Education
PARIS, October 29. — M. Léon Bérard, deputy and former Minister, has just sent M. Herriot, Minister of Public Instruction, the following letter: “My dear Minister, “Reforms or changes of great consequence have been carried out in public education over the past two years without the Chambers ever having deliberated on them; it would be only too easy to explain by the preeminence of financial difficulties why Parliament’s oversight has not shown itself more active and more exact in matters of education.
Note of the Day
And if you want to know what I really think, I believe that Dr. Manfield Robinson will not yet succeed this time in communicating with the planet Mars, but I hold it for certain that our grandsons, if not our sons, will do so routinely, and that the failed attempts of today’s researchers will have helped to bring forward the hour when the solution to the problem is found. That is why I salute them.
Context
Léon Bérard, the former minister who wrote to Herriot
Léon Bérard, described in the dispatch as deputy and former minister, had himself run the ministry he was now addressing. The Senate’s biography records that he was Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts from November 1919 to January 1920 and again from January 1921 to March 1924. As minister he set out in 1923 to make the study of Latin compulsory for all secondary pupils, and his successor rescinded the decree of 3 May 1923. After leaving office, Bérard asked to interpellate the government on the opening of modern-track secondary classes. So when he complains that changes “of great consequence” had been made in public education “over the past two years” without any vote by the Chambers, the period he means runs roughly from his own departure from the ministry in 1924, and would likely include the reversal of his own classical reform.
Herriot’s 1926 “amalgame” experiment
In 1926 Édouard Herriot, a Radical serving as Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts, introduced an experiment called the amalgame. It brought together, in certain classes, pupils from the classical and modern sections of secondary schools and pupils from the upper primary schools. The historian Jean-Yves Seguy links the experiment to economic justifications and to the broader project of the école unique, which aimed to merge the primary and secondary systems; his study also examines the resistance the measure met. For Bérard, who had tried to impose Latin on every secondary pupil, a ministerial decision to teach classical and modern pupils side by side touched the very questions he had fought over in 1923. The excerpt ends before Bérard names particular measures, so the link to the amalgame is a matter of context, not a statement in the letter.
The casoar and the battalion: Saint-Cyr emblems given to the prince
The casoar the paper says was handed to the prince was an emblem the cadets regarded as their own. Saint-Cyr’s shako plumes are nicknamed casoars, after the cassowary, and were first adopted in 1855; the cadets did not welcome them at first, but the plumes became a symbol of the school. Today each Saint-Cyr class is organised as a battalion and the cadet corps as a regiment, and the 1926 report’s phrase “First Battalion of France” shows that this battalion vocabulary was already in use. At the time of the visit the school still stood at Saint-Cyr-l’École, where it remained until 1940. The paper’s detail that the class’s lowest-ranked cadet, the “Père Système,” presented the insignia places the honour within the cadets’ own customs.
Class names, colonial Morocco and Franco-British friendship
Since 1829 every Saint-Cyr class has chosen a name for itself. From the mid-nineteenth century many classes took names inspired by the French colonies, and half of all class names between the 1870s and the start of the First World War had colonial roots. A “promotion du Maroc,” as the paper calls the class to which the prince was attached, fits this pattern, and Morocco remained present in the school’s naming: in the 1930s a class took the name of Henri de Bournazel, a cavalry officer killed in 1933 during the final stages of the French conquest of Morocco. Franco-British ties themselves later gave a class its name, when a wartime class was named for Franco-British friendship as embodied by the Entente cordiale and was put through an accelerated six-month programme because of the Second World War.
Dr. Mansfield Robinson’s message to Mars in October 1926
The columnist’s “docteur Manfield Robinson” was Dr. Hugh Mansfield Robinson, a London lawyer and former town clerk of Shoreditch, who claimed to have been in telepathic contact with a Martian woman named Oomaruru since the early 1920s. In October 1926 he took his project to the Post Office, which had recently opened Rugby Radio Station as a global radio-telegraph hub. The transmission was scheduled for 11:55 p.m. on 27 October, on the wavelength of 18,240 metres that Robinson requested, and consisted of three words: “Opesti, Nipitia, Secomba.” Postal clerks listened on 30,000 metres, the wavelength Robinson said the Martian preferred, and received no response. The Note du Jour, printed three days after the scheduled transmission, expected exactly this result “this time” while honouring the attempt.
Why the columnist expected later generations to talk to Mars
At the start of the twentieth century many scientists believed in the possibility of life on Mars, and the columnist P.L. wrote within that climate when he declared it certain that “our grandsons, if not our sons” would communicate with the planet routinely. Robinson himself did not give up after 1926: he waited two years for Mars to come close to Earth again and made another attempt in October 1928. He died in 1940, aged 75, without ever having made radio contact with Mars. The column’s confident forecast was therefore the writer’s own conviction, and the experiments of the period produced nothing to bear it out.
Original
Le prince de Galles visite l'Ecole de Saint-Cyr
Puis, au cours d'une cérémonie tout intime, qui se déroula sur le grand carré, le grade de soldat de 1e classe du premier bataillon de France, fut décerné au prince de Galles. Le Père Système, dernier sorti de la promotion, se félicita de pouvoir compter le prince de Galles parmi les élèves de l'Ecole, et lui remit les insignes du grade: gants blancs, calot de casoar, conférant ainsi au prince héritier britannique le titre de SaintCyrien honoraire de la promotion du Maroc.
Une longue lettre de M. Bérard à M. Herriot au sujet de la réforme de l'enseignement public
PARIS, 29 octobre. - M. Léon Bérard, député, ancien Ministre, vient d'adresser à M. Herriot, ministre de l'Instruction Publique, une lettre suivante: «Mon cher Ministre, «Des réformes ou des changements de grande conséquence furent accomplis depuis deux ans dans l'enseignement public, sans que les Chambres en aient jamais délibéré; il ne serait que trop facile d'expliquer par la prééminence des difficultés financières que le contrôle du Parlement ne se soit pas montré plus actif et plus exact aux choses d'éducation.
Note du Jour
Et si vous voulez le fond de ma pensée, je crois que le docteur Manfield Robinson n'arrivera pas encore cette fois à communiquer avec la planète Mars, mais je tiens pour certain que nos petits-fils sinon nos fils le feront couramment, et que les tentatives avortées des chercheurs d'aujourd'hui auront contribué à avancer l'heure où la solution du problème sera trouvée. C'est pourquoi je les salue.