Resumen de L'invention de la dissertation littéraire dans l'enseignement secondaire français
The dissertation was originally a literary genre practised in France since the middle of the seventeenth century (Saint-Evremond, Boileau). The genre was created in imitation of the Latin dissertatio that itself goes back to the sixteenth century, several thousand of which having been received by the Bibliothèque nationale de France before the nineteenth century. Little by little, the number of French dissertations caught up with the number of Latin dissertationes in the catalogue of the library, with equality being reached by 1800. In the second phase, in the eighteenth century, the exercise of the dissertation passed from literary or erudite circles to the academic and university world. But it was only during the nineteenth century that it spread in the French university, first to the licence and the agrégation in the humanities, in its double Latin and French form, then in philosophy classes, where it was practised in the two languages. During the first half of the century, the distribution of the French composition exercises followed a simple principle: up to the rhetoric class (the first), the students wrote narratives and discourses (French, but also Latin) that applied the principles of traditional rhetoric (imitation of the great writers, amplification, figures, pompous style); in philosophy, one moved on to the dissertation, which was based on contrasting principles (rigorous treatment of the subject, self-determination of the plan and the general organization, adoption of a precise style devoid of useless decorations). In the second half of the nineteenth century, the dissertation gradually won ground over the discourse, which, in this period of rapid evolution, remained too much bound to the most traditional classic humanities. It began to be practised in the rhetoric class, and preference was given to French literature (but also Latin and Greek). In 1836, for the first time, a literary dissertation was given on a classical author in a public examination (it was a competition for the agrégation in humanities). After 1870, the taste for French literature, which till then was the poor relative of classical studies, invaded secondary-school education, as a reaction to the defeat and the loss of national territory. In ten years, a decisive evolution occurred, first in minds and then in the regulations. The Latin discourse, which was the major examination for the baccalaureate, was done away with by Jules Ferry in 1880 and was replaced by a �French composition on a literary or historical subject�. The literary dissertation was henceforth on track. It remained only to find ways of teaching it to students, which would still take several decades.
