Paul Robin

Paul Robin (April 3, 1837 in Toulon, France - August 31, 1912 in Paris) was a French anarchist pedagogue, known in particular for having developed integral education at the orphanage in Cempuis. He was the most significant figure of the French Neo-Malthusianism movement. Paul Robin was born in Toulon into a bourgeois, Catholic and patriotic family. A pupil of the École normale supérieure in Paris, he passed his bachelor's degrees in mathematics and physical sciences; he becomes a Darwinist and an atheist. He was briefly a high school teacher (1861 - 1865), but came into conflict with his administration on matters of popular education, for which he had a keen interest. In 1865, he left for Belgium where he established contacts with activists of the International Workers' Association, helped create the Belgian section of the AIT and was expelled for having participated in the movement supporting a strike. He retired to Switzerland, then to France (where he was imprisoned in July 1870), and finally to England. In London, where he frequented the militants of the International; he was a member of the General Council of the International for a time, but quickly broke with the “authoritarian” Marx to take the side of Mikhail Bakunin, whose anarchist ideas he shared. During his voluntary exile, he gave lessons. In 1879, he returned to France as an inspector of primary education appointed by Ferdinand Buisson, director of primary education to Minister Jules Ferry. Robin had previously collaborated on the Ferdinand Buisson Dictionary of Pedagogy. Thanks to Buisson, who gave him constant support, Robin was placed at the head, from 1880 to 1894, of the Prévost Orphanage, in Cempuis (Oise). In this establishment which depends on the general council of the Seine, he put into practice, on a significant number of children, the theories on integral education which he formulated from 1869 to 1870. This education, which is intended to give children from disadvantaged classes the means to access education, is characterized, in addition to its atheism and internationalism, by the concern to harmoniously develop the individual as a whole.