Two important cultural themes have dominated discourse surrounding the history of French education: issues of secular vs. religious control over schooling, and issues of social and educational stratification. The rural village school plays a role as “key symbol” in thinking about the formation of a unified, secular, French nation. The history of French education is often phrased in terms of the spread of a specifically “French” identity and set of values, radiating out from Paris into the innermost depths of each peasant village. Jacques Ozouf has written that “in every village, there was at least one schoolteacher and one school, a uniform patterning, reassuring or threatening depending upon one's perspective, but never neutral” (1967:7; my translation). It was in such schools that, supposedly, the French language and secular morality of the bourgeoisie was spread to the provincial masses. The history of French education, and in particular, the history of the village schools, has taken on the trappings of an “origin myth” of the nation. The titles of two books capture this – Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen (1976) and Baker and Harrigan's edited volume The Making of Frenchmen (1980). In Lavialle, the school and teachers are still trying to turn peasants into Frenchmen over one hundred years after the institution of mandatory state education. The historical and ongoing struggle between families and the school in Lavialle indicates that local populations must be viewed as taking a very active role in the history of education, but that this role can vary according to regional circumstances.