France’s cultural heritage is in peril because students are shunning literature in favour of more practical courses that they believe will help them to secure well-paid jobs, the Education Minister said.

Xavier Darcos said that France was in danger of becoming a nation of unemployed sociologists unable to master speech or thought. Latest figures show that fewer than 20 per cent of students chose literature, compared with 50 per cent a generation ago.

Amid this evidence of a long-term decline in the number of pupils specialising in literary subjects for the end-of-school baccalauréat examination, Mr Darcos has ordered Education Ministry officials to draw up plans to revive interest in the French classics.

“We need literary people, pupils who can master speech and reason,” he said. “They are always in demand.” As for the aspiring economists and sociologists, they often ended up on overcrowded university courses with few openings in the employment market, he added.

However, traditionalists believe that the initiative is already doomed because of the widely held view among the brightest students that literary studies are a soft option for no-hopers. This trend is an affront to the rich literary heritage that has produced writers such as Molière, Voltaire and Victor Hugo, they say. There is also resentment that intellectual literati are losing their privileged status in a Gallic society that they say is being corrupted by television, the internet and globalisation.

Amid sweeping cultural changes, the term “literary” has taken on a pejorative meaning for young French people, according to a report by the Education Ministry inspectorate.

Under the French system, lycée (sixth-form) pupils sit a dozen or so examinations for le baccalauréat général, with the contents and marks weighted according to three main options available. Le bac L gives preeminence to literature, le bac S to science and le bac ES to economics and social sciences.

The Education Ministry Inspectorate report said le bac Lwas threatened with extinction after the proportion of pupils taking it fell from 50 per cent in 1968 to 18.6 per cent in 2007. This year 49.6 per cent of pupils took le bac S and 31.8 per cent le bac ES, which has been growing over the past 15 years.

But le bac L “too often looks like a refuge for pupils who have difficulty with scientific subjects and who have been brought there by default rather than by their taste for literary teaching,” the report said.

The inspectors said that literature appeared increasing irrelevant to schoolchildren in a society “founded on technology”. They feared that globalisation would fuel the phenomenon with scientists using an international language while “the characteristics of literature appear very French”.

“Behind the decline of these studies lies another menace . . . the disappearance of an essential swath of our tradition and culture.”

University teachers complain that many school-leavers are incapable of writing correct French. “The average is 10 to 12 mistakes but I’ve counted up to 50 in a degree paper,” said Jean-François Guennoc, a lecturer at Paris University.

The pen is mightier . . .

“Grammar, which knows how to control even kings” Jean Molière, 1622-73

“I quote others only in order the better to express myself” Michel de Montaigne, 1533-92

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live” Gustave Flaubert 1821-80

“Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself” Marcel Proust 1871-1922

Source: Times database

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