“Humanities”, by Caroline Fourgeaud-Laville

Caroline Fourgeaud-Laville intends to show, through this luminous and very lively work, how the humanities (Greek, Latin, philosophy, philology, ancient history) are essential to us and why it is urgent to rehabilitate them by giving them a greater place.

Far from the prejudices that one may have, the study of their topicality and their modernity allows, according to her, to demonstrate that they constitute a true source of emancipation and development of critical thinking in the service of democracy and the fight against prejudice.

The author of this work is a specialist in ancient Greece, but also the founder of an association, Eureka, which promotes the transmission of ancient languages, and Greek in particular, to a young audience, from primary school onwards. She sees it, in fact, as an excellent tool for emancipation and citizenship.

Rehabilitate the humanities

It is true that the study of Greek and Latin has tended to disappear in recent years. She also asks:

“Why have the humanities suddenly become so cumbersome that we want to remove them from education programs? Perhaps we need to see them attacked to feel all their values ​​and qualities? Thus, periodically, the duel resurfaces pitting a grieving elite against politicians convinced of the ineffectiveness of ancient languages, allegedly incapable of confronting the modern world. Moral works, memories of war, philosophy put to the test of politics, history of peoples, war treaties, funeral orations or pleadings, these texts are eminently critical and rich in teaching, it is therefore not surprising that our ministers, presidents of the Council or other elected officials could consider them as formidable competitors. The humanities sharpen minds which they make less manipulable. HAS”

Retracing recent history, in order to explain what may have led to this decline in humanities, she notes the opposition between the classics and the moderns, as in the time of Boileau and Perrault, the latter seeking to promote living languages ​​to the detriment of ancient languages.

“The contestation of the humanities appeared as soon as the world imagined itself modern, as if Greek, the language of Archimedes, Hippocrates or Ptolemy, was incapable of dialoguing with the future! HAS”

However, we would be wrong, she brilliantly demonstrates through this stimulating and convincing work, to renounce the manifest interest and the essential contributions of these humanities. It is therefore time to rehabilitate them by promoting their essential contributions and demonstrating their founding character.

“Greek like Latin are mother languages, they are the progenitors of a civilization. They are not a curiosity of linguists, but project meaning well beyond the men who once spoke them. They carry a world and sow in each of those who practice them the ferment of humanism. HAS”

Teaching ancient Greek from a young age

It thus shows the beneficial effects of learning ancient Greek on attention disorders. They have been proven, she asserts, by all the tests and research that have been carried out.

Hence the establishment of a project to teach ancient Greek to children in primary schools in different countries. In France, Caroline Fourgeaud-Laville contributes to this through the Eurêka association.

It is in fact calling for new forms of pedagogy, inspired by methods of teaching modern languages. And this, from primary school, because this is where the brain is best suited to learning and the assimilation of knowledge, among other things by heart.

But above all, these methods consist of reconciling language and culture, by training while informing. “Because mastery of the language conditions our understanding of culture”, and relying in particular on digital resources makes it possible to adopt a lively approach both to writing, but also to speaking, familiarizing students more easily with Latin or Greek. Like what certain schools or universities are actively developing in Spain and the United Kingdom.

It also recalls and underlines the improvement experienced by the studies of Latin-Greek in the 1980s. A period which brought the remarkable Hellenist Jacqueline de Romilly to the French Academy, herself a defender at the time of the maintenance of Greek and Latin at school.

Because, as Caroline Fourgeaud-Laville writes:

“Reconciling language and culture is a challenge, and it is the only worthwhile one, if we want to continue to train while informing. However, current educators now manage to combine culture and intuitive learning of the language, because mastery of the language conditions our understanding of culture. HAS”

An element consubstantial with democracy

Recalling the extent to which democracy is fragile and continues to seek itself, she establishes the link with the humanities, recalling the different contributions, imprints and common uses in our language, demonstrating in what way “the humanities awaken consciousness and critical thinking. They ensure the capacity for judgment which is a condition for the political exercise of a citizen.”

It thus shows that it is a language of freedoms, which is full of nuances, transgressions, subtleties, poetry, variety, so that it is particularly capable of expressing with agility the complexity of reality and of promoting the creation, the emergence of concepts and new words, as well as developing what makes humanist culture and democracy cement, their “critical capacity, autonomy of judgment, respect for the person, awareness of the fallibility of human knowledge, sensitivity to the fundamental pluralism of the social world, preference given to dialogue and the confrontation of ideas. HAS”

This is also why the awakening of consciences, the importance given to language, until the return of eloquence competitions, contribute to solidifying its essence and making it last.

“If Greek and Latin were not essential, they would have disappeared a long time ago, since humanity is economical and does not burden itself with unnecessary baggage. Mother languages ​​are not fads or curiosities for nostalgic people, they are ammunition for pioneers. What differentiates them from our contemporary languages? They speak in the language of the first thought builders. HAS”

The fundamental contributions of culture

She also insists on the fact that, in the age of the Internet and the rising power of Artificial Intelligence, like the message delivered by Olivier Babeau and Laurent Alexandre in their work Stop studying – learn differently in the age of AIit is essential to be aware that personal culture is irreplaceable. Certainly, it is demanding and takes time, but new technologies and immediate access to knowledge cannot replace it. In other words, culture cannot be assimilated to “a simple infusion”. New technologies must be considered as simple aids, in no way replacing our creativity and our freedom.

Because, to quote Jacqueline de Romilly again, this is what she wrote in The Treasure of forgotten knowledge :

“Culture, apparently, is useless. But it is made precisely from the mass of forgotten memories: when they have been accumulated for a long time, their presence constitutes a particularly rich and varied treasure and then becomes like second nature; it adds a sort of halo to all the impressions, to all the experiences, to all the knowledge that presents itself. HAS”

Let us never forget, moreover, that all totalitarianisms have in common that they attack not only the foundations of our culture, but also our language. The author thus recalls the analyzes carried out by the German linguist Victor Klemperer through nearly two thousand pages of his The language of the Third Reichin which he studied the way in which “Nazi propaganda sought to transform everyday language to disseminate its ideology”, positively connoting terms such as “fanaticism” and multiplying neologisms, while attempts were made to simplify and lighten the language and of its nuances, a true instrument serving the transformation of reality and the erasure of freedoms.

The risks linked to the loss of knowledge

Furthermore, as Caroline Fourgeaud-Laville hypothesizes, what would happen if today or tomorrow an authoritarian power decided to remove an entire part of the knowledge from data centers?

“The data war is a reality that is often ignored and underestimated, but dangerous and strategic, as Raphaël Chauvency, senior officer of the naval troops and teacher of strategy at the School of Economic Warfare, has perfectly shown in Win without violence (2025). Today, knowledge is the spoils of war liable to be phished, hacked, misappropriated. HAS”

When she talks about the virtues of the heart, it is reminiscent of the famous novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, whom she cites a little later, where a handful of resistance fighters ensure the perpetuation of knowledge, or even to Vaclav Havel and the small group of intellectuals who accompanied him, whose resistance to totalitarian power, through the transmission of culture, was saving, like the action of Milan Kundera and other Eastern European intellectuals whom he describes in A kidnapped West.

Which agrees with the anecdote that the author develops on page 141 about Jean Racine, who learned The Ethiopics of Heliodorus by heart to manage to circumvent, not without difficulty, the censorship of the time of which he was the victim on several occasions and whom he was thus able to taunt with a certain malice.

“The humanities, understood from the first inscription on stone, through papyri and up to books and data (digital archives), are our authentic heritage. The only real danger could come from data censorship. Keeping memory with and not against new techniques is the challenge that the first humanists themselves faced. HAS”

The dialogue with Thucydides

Caroline Fourgeaud-Laville then focuses, in one of her chapters, on the legacy – or rather the dialogue with – Thucydides or Herodotus, who left a lasting mark in history by analyzing in particular the causes of wars, continuing to inspire specialists in geopolitics and military schools. Which shows the importance of studying the Humanities and not leaving room for forgetting.

We return once again to reading and studying the classics. Whose value goes beyond what we can estimate, their influence not only on the knowledge of the past, but above all on the lessons that we can continue to draw from it in the analyzes relating to our current world and our future, well beyond and even against conformism.

To conclude, let us leave the last word to the author of this particularly invigorating book:

“The approaches that researchers have today to the ancient world make it possible to place it in all its complexity and to retain its essential values. The Greek and Latin languages ​​must necessarily remain at the source of classical studies, because the texts which were written in these languages ​​give us something to think about, offering us something to build our thinking and our critical spirit. They are not models of right thinking, but tools for thinking well. We do not emerge more virtuous from reading Thucydides, but more educated, less naive, in the face of current conflicts. HAS”