This paper aims to clarify the way in which the centralist and assimilationist educational policies during the French Third Republic, strongly inspired by a ‘jus soli’ conception’ of citizenship, in fact largely approached children of immigrants by way of educational neglect. Obviously, this did not imply that the presence of immigrants and their children was not being noticed. On the contrary, the distinctively state-centered and assimilationist understanding of nationhood, deeply rooted in political and cultural geography and powerfully reinforced in the 1880s by the Republican programme of universal education, was strongly strengthened by the politicized resentment in frontier departments. This resentment was invigorated by the exemption of long-settled foreigners from military service – not in the least concerning Belgian migrants in 'le département du Nord' –, and intensified in the 1870s, as the military induction rate increased among French males, and especially in the 1880s, as Republican doctrines of universal and equal military service gained ground. The particular sequence of institutional reform that accompanied these developments involved the establishment of free, compulsory and secular primary education, in line with the traditional idiom of nationhood. With regard to the extent of interculturality of the underlying educational conceptions, it might be emphasized that in the absence of a strong ethnonational self-understanding, French assimilationism and its expansive definition of citizenship, were much more determined by political, institutional and territorial motifs than by ethnocultural motifs. Most of the foreign families that established themselves definitely in the frontier region of 'le Nord' just mentioned, were of Belgian origin. Apparently no educational measures at all were taken to provide for an adapted intercultural embedding of their children. In this regard, the ‘hegemonic’ educational laws of Jules Ferry played a crucial role as far as the manner in which these children gradually shaped their (intercultural) identity is concerned, with language being of vital importance. This specific historical configuration of ‘intercultural education by default’, of which the situation of the children of Belgian immigrants serves as a prime example, throws some interesting theoretical light on the way in which particular intercultural identity and acculturation effects may be generated in the absence of any purposive intercultural educational policy as such. As a consequence, we also aim to develop some deeper general insights in the relation between certain acculturation or educational policies and modalities on the one hand, and intercultural identity formation of immigrants and their children on the other.

Our research takes places in an interdisciplinary research context, in which collaboration with two other researchers, working on a PhD within the Faculty of Arts, plays an important role. This interdisciplinary embeddedness implies a broad heuristic and historical focus, in which archival sources of a diverse kind (e.g. songs of immigrants, information about immigrant associations, school inspection reports and other educational sources) are combined with a broad range of secondary and theoretical literature. On the basis of this variety of sources, with different layers of empirical exemplariness or theoretical scope, the specific case of the Belgian immigrants and their children is put in the context of the then French politico-cultural environment. The heuristic emphasis is strongly historical, allowing for a detailed educational and cultural analysis of the implicit and explicit acculturation strategies of (and outcomes for) both Belgian immigrants and the receiving French society.

Thus far, there has been scant historical interest in the way recent constructions of cultural identity relate to educational policy. This neglect of the significance of cultural identity is surprising, seen the fact that historians of education have often focused on school systems as instruments of national formation. At the same time, the ‘creation of the nation’ through education has often left unresolved the question of ethnic minorities, as is the case for the Belgian immigrants. Therefore, our research, positioned in this as yet unexplored territory, opens up a multitude of new research questions, both case-specific and of a more theoretical nature. This corresponds to the increasing contemporary and historical relevance of analyses of the more hybrid forms of cultural identities, as (partly) constituted by particular educational and school settings, and opens up many opportunities for publications in international journals and the setting up of an international symposium (May 2010).