Black Hussard

See also: Hussard

black Hussard is the nickname given to the Instituteur S under the IIIe République. It is Charles Péguy which popularizes the term in the Money in 1913:

Our young Masters were beautiful like black hussards. Slender; severe; strapped. Serious, and a little trembling of their early, their sudden omnipotence.

This nickname comes, initially, of the black and austere color of clothing of the teachers resulting from the Teacher training schools created according to the law Paul Bert of 1879 in each department. The institution banishes, indeed, any ornamentation and any superfluity. But in addition, and it is perhaps most important there, these Teacher training schools left the teachers who, if they all were equipped in the same ones tons, had especially received true a Mission (the term is not too strong): to inform the French Population.

From this mission as much as by the statute of Civil servant of State, the black hussards, small middle-class men, represented some Autorité moral and intellectual (it is the case in the Glory of my father and the Girl of the shaft sinker of Marcel Pagnol). Charles Péguy continuous to describe them with an amazement which testifies to this privileged reputation:

this Teacher training school seemed an inexhaustible regiment. It was like an immense deposit, governmental, of youth and good citizenship. The government of the Republic was charged to provide us such an amount of serious.

It is the méliorative resemblance teachers to a regiment which pushed Charles Péguy to call them hussards , in reference to terrible the hussard S Hungarian, and to the effectiveness and the devotion of the latter.

The Surnom was thereafter taken again in various ways, and one could say the hussards severity or the hussards of the Republic .

Random links:

Black Hussard

Related articles