Who was Paul Robin?
Born on April 3, 1837, in Toulon, Paul Robin came from a modest Catholic petty-bourgeois family. A brilliant student at the Lycée de Brest, he went on to study science at the École Normale Supérieure on Rue d'Ulm in Paris. He became a high school teacher — already an unconventional one — who went beyond the imposed curriculum. He taught astronomy and music, and organized botanical field trips.
Unable to tolerate the authoritarianism of the educational system any longer, he took leave and moved to Brussels in 1865. He lived there for four years, associating with freethinkers and the local section of the International. Expelled from Belgium in 1869, he went into exile in Switzerland, where he met Mikhail Bakunin. Upon returning to France, he was imprisoned in 1870, released after the fall of the Empire, and then emigrated to London. As a militant in the International Workingmen's Association (A.I.T.), he sided with Bakunin and broke with Karl Marx.
In 1878, Ferdinand Buisson — who had been his companion in exile in Switzerland and had become one of Jules Ferry's main collaborators — asked him to contribute to his Dictionnaire de pédagogie et d'instruction publique. He then had him appointed inspector of primary education in Blois in 1879. Teachers were surprised by his recommendations: placing importance on drawing, music, walks, and scientific research (botany, geology, archaeology…), organizing outings and visits… He initiated a school festival that, for the first time in Blois, brought together hundreds of students and several thousand spectators.
However, the role he was supposed to fulfill — ensuring the application of official instructions — did not suit him, and the hierarchy began to grow concerned. In reality, he wanted to find an experimental setting where he could put his educational ideas into practice. Once again, Ferdinand Buisson helped him by securing his appointment as director of the Prévost Orphanage in Cempuis (Oise) in 1880. J.-B. Prévost, a Fourierist industrialist, had bequeathed his property to the Department of the Seine to create a mixed orphanage run by secular teachers and a secular director. Since the establishment depended on the Prefecture of the Seine, Robin escaped direct control by the Ministry of Public Instruction.
For fourteen years, he devoted himself entirely to the orphanage. He oversaw the fitting out of the premises and furniture, created workshops, introduced "co-education of the sexes," and applied his new method of Integral Education (Éducation intégrale). This was an education that was simultaneously physical, intellectual, and moral, and entirely free from religious influence.
Robin's pedagogical orientations were defined by essential priorities and clear rejections. In Chapter VII of Combats pour l'enfant, in the section "Anarchism and Pedagogy," Pierre Michel provides an exhaustive inventory of the principles and practices that Robin rejected and those he promoted: "Refusal of religious and patriotic indoctrination; respect for the child's personality; priority given to the spirit of observation, initiative, and experience; rejection of dogmatism and the principle of authority; concern for developing the students' critical intelligence so they could manage their own lives; desire to foster mutual aid and solidarity; great importance given to hygiene and health; versatile vocational training that would give them the greatest possible opportunities in society; rejection of rankings, punishments, and rewards (...)." (1)
Robin based his pedagogy on a major principle: it is the spontaneity of the child that determines the first acquisitions. In this way, he put Fourier's ideas into practice. The children were encouraged to freely choose manual activities from a wide variety of workshops.
"The student will have to devote a certain number of hours to the in-depth knowledge of a small number of professions*, and adopt the type of work by which he will earn his living. This will be the rational conclusion of the apprenticeship." (2)
All students learned printing. The teaching of the arts held an important place. In this countryside school, with its small farm and cultivated fields, emphasis was also placed on natural outdoor activities : walking, swimming, cycling, and gardening. Physical education was highly varied and excluded competitive sports. (3) Every summer, the children went on holiday camps by the sea.
Freedom and the individuality of the child were respected. The educational atmosphere was fundamentally anti-authoritarian.
The establishment had a rich library. School textbooks were used very little ; teaching was based instead on life, observation, and reflection. Mutual teaching was strongly encouraged. Fraternity was no longer an empty word but a lived reality. The students sat for the Certificat d'Études (primary school certificate) and achieved excellent results.
Robin also published a bulletin in which he set out his pedagogical principles, as well as the events and achievements of the Prévost Orphanage. From 1895 onward, this small journal was titled L'Éducation intégrale, and Robin used it to develop his positions in favor of neo-Malthusianism.
The revolutionary "co-education of the sexes" provided a pretext for reactionaries, who were disturbed by Cempuis, to put an end to this educational experiment. Clericals organized a smear campaign against the "scandalous school," a campaign relayed by the press of the time. An investigative commission was appointed: "It could find nothing to reproach Paul Robin for on the pedagogical level, but considered it dangerous to allow him to spread ideas that were subversive from a social point of view and harmful from the point of view of the defense of the country." It is true that the children were accustomed to cheerfully singing a "Marseillaise of Peace." (4)
An inspection took place, the report of which confirmed the slanders and gossip. On 30 August 1894, on the proposal of Georges Leygues, Minister of Public Instruction, Robin was dismissed from his functions by the Council of Ministers. Édouard Drumont, antisemitic journalist and writer, author of La France juive, wrote in his newspaper La Libre Parole on 1 September 1894: "Mr. Robin, director of the municipal pigsty of Cempuis, was executed yesterday in full Council of Ministers. This is the collapse of the pornographic system of co-education of the sexes." (5)
Robin then tried to continue his educational work, notably collaborating with Francisco Ferrer's journal L'École rénovée and with the "International League for the Rational Education of Children," while also devoting himself to the dissemination of neo-Malthusianism through pamphlets, articles, and lectures. In line with his conceptions — "good birth, good education, good social organization" — he advocated for an improvement in women's condition and campaigned for chosen motherhood: "One should only give birth to children who have the greatest possible chances of being happy and useful." Should this be pointed out? This has nothing to do with the genocidal eugenics of the promoters of the "New World Order" of this deranged 21st century, who propose to eliminate the useless, to enslave the useful, and for whom the very notion of happiness means self-dispossession and transhumanist dehumanization.
In his lectures, he began popularizing contraceptive methods, defended the right to abortion, and can thus be considered one of the pioneers of family planning — an institution that still exists today and has seriously drifted by endorsing contemporary wokism and becoming virtually a propagandist for gender transitions, the devastating effects of which on children and adolescents will be discussed later (cf.No to psychological violations ). In 1896 he founded the "League for Human Regeneration" and in 1900 the "Universal Federation for Human Regeneration," but he often encountered indifference, mockery, and insults. This activity experienced some growth from 1902 onward, when he was assisted by Eugène and Jeanne Humbert and joined by brilliant speakers such as Sébastien Faure. The break with Jeanne Humbert in 1908 would end this fertile period.
He then spent eighteen months in New Zealand, visiting anarchist communities, but did not find the one in which he would have wished to live. Having written a pamphlet on suicide and its technique, Robin, who had become almost blind, poisoned himself on 31 August 1912. (6)
"I was the first in France to give, for fourteen years, an education to children that gave them good physical vigour, provided them with an education that, if not extensive and profound, was at least based solely on indisputable objective realities, gave them the spirit of observation and experimentation and, finally, despite their ignorance and disdain for any extra-human conception, made or left them moral and good beings.* At Cempuis, this godless establishment, boys and girls from four to sixteen years old were raised together, as one large family, with the greatest possible freedom, each placed in a position to combine within themselves the qualities of two classes that are today enemies: the tastes of the intellectual and the artisan, the culture of the brain and that of the hand, thus presenting an early example of what every human being should become in the near future.
I did not subject young minds, still incapable of philosophizing, to a critique of our decrepit institutions, but nor did I praise them. It is quite certain that, without having to preach this critique to them, the soundness of sense and judgment that the education they received will have given them will inspire in them a hatred of the powerlessness and atrocities of current institutions — lamentable vestiges of past centuries that, in our own, hinder the development of human progress and happiness. That is my real crime, of which I remain proud…"*
Cited by Gabriel Giroud in "Paul Robin, sa vie, ses idées, son action", Paris, Éditions G. Mignolet et Storz, 1937, p. 105,
and by Roland Lewin in "Sébastien Faure et 'La Ruche' ou l'Éducation libertaire", Vauchrétien, Ivan Davy Éditeur, 1989, p. 43.
* Emphasised by us.
1. Pierre Michel, in Octave Mirbeau, Combats pour l'enfant (Octave Mirbeau: Struggles for the Child), Vauchrétien, Ivan Davy Éditeur, 1990, p. 132.
2. Paul Robin, On Integral Education.
3. "It is with great regret that I see the ideas of excessive sport and championship competition occupying everyone's minds in an unhealthy way. Everyone dreams of being first in something, if not the only one. Vanity, jealousy, resentment, discouragement—these are the results. To be an ordinary person among equally capable athletes : such is the nobler and more humane ideal that we seek to inspire in our pupils."
Paul Robin, Educational Festivals, bulletin of the Prévost Orphanage, 1890.
At a time when hyper-competition, doping, and corruption are infiltrating the world of media-driven sport, these words are well worth reflecting upon.
4. R. Lewin, Sébastien Faure and "La Ruche", Ivan Davy, 1989, p. 42, quoted by P. Michel in Octave Mirbeau: Struggles for the Child, Ivan Davy, 1990, p. 139.
5. Quoted by M. Dommanget in The Great Socialists and Education, Paris, Armand Colin, 1970, p. 350, and by Bertrand Lechevalier in Fifteen Educators (edited by Jean Houssaye), Paris, Armand Colin, 1994, p. 74.
6. Gabriel Giroud, who had been a pupil at the Cempuis Orphanage, recounts in the book he published on Paul Robin how Robin methodically prepared for his own suicide :
"He therefore took every precaution, as far as he was concerned, to ensure that even his death might have some chance of being useful. He distributed his books, equipment, and projects among organizations which, he believed, would be capable of using, implementing, and carrying them forward. A fine edition of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie went to the General Confederation of Labour (CGT). His small printing press was given to 'La Ruche' (The Beehive), founded by Sébastien Faure. Various organizations devoted to educational advocacy shared his laboratory instruments, collections, most of his tools, and the scientific educational games he was then developing. He then looked into the formalities required to ensure that no obstacle would stand in the way of a prompt autopsy and the use of his body. He had made his wishes on this matter known to a few friends through a Testament and a short text entitled Post Mortem, which he revised several times."
G. Giroud, Paul Robin: His Life, His Ideas, His Work, Paris, Éditions G. Mignolet et Storz, 1937, pp. 292–293, quoted by R. Lewin in Sébastien Faure and "La Ruche", Ivan Davy, 1989, p. 120, note 170, p. 154.
Paul Robin, Educator (ICEM – Freinet Pedagogy website).
