Education: The Bac & the Trac

In a barren room in Paris’ venerable Sorbonne, a dimpled blonde teen-ager stood quaking before five quizzical professors. With quavering chalk she diagramed on a blackboard the working of a steam engine. Then, taking up other items of her examination, she stumbled through an account of the history of Japan from 1875 to 1905, explained the functioning of an eardrum and expounded her ideas on the philosophical principles of mathematics. When it was over she tremblingly left the room and, whispering “My stomach aches,” took her place with other waiting youngsters.

Eighteen-year-old Denise Chambon was one victim of the annual bac (baccalaureate exam) and trac (student term for butterflies in the stomach) that thousands of French youths (and anxious parents) suffer through each fall. Looming at the end of seven years of intensive secondary schooling, the bac orals are the big hurdle for French schoolgirls and boys. To the 65% who pass, success means a bachot certificate and eligibility for entrance to a university or employment in many civil service and professional jobs effectively closed to non-baccalaureates.

This autumn French newspapers and educators bitterly complained about the bac and the old-fashioned competitive system it stands for. First set up in 1808, the exams have long been attacked by progressives as a “savage rite of French bourgeois snobbism.” Philosopher-Scholar Etienne Gilson coupled the bac with alcoholism as the “twin scourges of the French people.” Novelist René Barjavel complained in the weekly Carrefour, “[the bachot] is just a slip of paper proving that its owner has a minimum of general knowledge . . .”

But for Denise Chambon it was a happy day. When the bac jurymen finished tabulating the results, Denise learned she had passed second on a list of twelve with an assez bien after her name. At her home her mother and bus-conductor father received the news proudly.

Last week when Denise, along with other lucky French youngsters who had passed their bac, went job hunting, they would find the “slip of paper” still rated special consideration.