Father Porée Aporia. A Jesuit Mentor in the Struggle with the Spirit of the Nation

Abstract

Father Charles Porée, Voltaire's teacher and lecturer in rhetoric at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, the most prestigious secondary school in France, tried for many years to put his ethical programme into practice. He could act by personal example, by actual teaching, by directly preaching his ideas in numerous speeches and by plays for the school theatre. Putting love for God above all, love for King and fatherland in second place, and kinship love (paternal, filial, fraternal, conjugal) below, he found no place in his hierarchy for love between a man and a woman, considering it a negative value. He proposed a broad literary programme to support his views and used school theatre for the same purpose.

Keywords

• school speech
• school theatre
• jesuit pedagogy
• love
• charles porée
• françois-arouet voltaire
• lycée louis-le-grand