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Inclusive citizenship in practice? Solidarity, civic education, and democracy at the fin-de-siècle
| Focusing mainly on France, this paper examines the connection between social interaction in civil society and the interpretation and practice of democratic citizenship in the early twentieth century. Political ideologies of solidarity and national unity both shaped and reflected the democratic values and practices that had begun to develop in schooling, politics, and civil society more generally by the end of the nineteenth century. Enlightened men and women founded educational enterprises such as people’s universities and social education societies to foster civic awareness, enterprises which became models of inclusive civic participation. Because these initiatives also built on older, exclusive habits of sociability, values, and representations, and on organicist understandings of social interaction, their role in the democratization of public life was complex, if not ambiguous. However, analysis and comparison of the ideas and activities of those behind such projects demonstrates that, like their European counterparts, French civic educators like Anna Lampérière clearly imagined and operated within an inclusive, if not egalitarian, public space before World War I. Although decades would pass before efforts to expand the formal citizenship rights of women, colonial subjects, and other groups finally met with success, it is significant that intellectuals with divergent views on political representation, national sovereignty, and colonialism already accpted the civic participation and/or “co-presence” in civil society of men, women, foreigners, and members of various social groups as a necessary feature of democratic political culture and a condition for social progress.
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