Summary of the Lesson

The story opens on a morning that Franz would rather forget. He is late for school and dreads the day ahead because M. Hamel, his French teacher, is known for his strictness and his terrifying ruler. Worse still, Franz has not prepared the lesson on participles that was assigned. For a moment, he considers skipping school altogether and running off into the bright, warm day where the birds are chirping and the Prussian soldiers are drilling in the open field. But he resists the temptation and hurries to school, his heart heavy with guilt.

As Franz approaches the town hall, he notices a crowd gathered around the bulletin board. This board had been the source of bad news before — announcements of lost battles, conscription orders, and commands from the occupying Prussian authorities. Franz wonders what new trouble it holds, but he does not stop to find out. The blacksmith, Wachter, reading the bulletin with his apprentice, calls after him that he will get to school in plenty of time — words Franz takes as teasing. He rushes on to the school.

What he finds there is deeply unsettling. Normally, the schoolyard is noisy with the opening and closing of desks, the sound of lessons being repeated in unison, and the teacher's ruler rapping against the desks. Today, everything is eerily quiet, “as quiet as Sunday morning.” Franz had counted on that usual commotion to reach his desk unseen. Instead he must enter before everybody, blushing and frightened — yet M. Hamel speaks to him gently, telling him to go to his place quickly.

Then Franz notices the strangest thing of all. M. Hamel is wearing his finest clothes — the beautiful green coat, the frilled shirt, and the little black silk cap that he only wore on inspection days or when prizes were given out. And at the back of the room, on the benches that were usually empty, sit the old villagers — old Hauser, the former mayor, the former postmaster, and several others. They look sad. Old Hauser has brought an old primer, thumbed at the edges, and holds it open on his knees with his great spectacles lying across the pages.

M. Hamel announces, in a quiet and grave voice, that this is the last French lesson they will ever have. An order has come from Berlin that only German is to be taught in the schools of Alsace and Lorraine. The new teacher arrives tomorrow. This is the end of French instruction.

The announcement hits Franz like a thunderclap. In that moment, everything changes. The participles that had seemed so pointless now feel like treasures he is about to lose. He is filled with regret — for wasting time, for skipping school to hunt birds' eggs or slide on the Saar, for never taking his lessons seriously. The books that had seemed such a burden — his grammar, his history of the saints — now feel like old friends he cannot bear to part with. And M. Hamel, whom he had feared and resented, becomes a figure of profound respect and pity. Franz understands, too, why the village elders have come: it is their way of thanking their master for forty years of faithful service and of showing respect for the country that was theirs no more.

When it is Franz's turn to recite the rule for participles, he gets mixed up on the very first words and cannot go on. But M. Hamel does not scold him. Instead he blames everyone — the parents who preferred to send their children to work in the fields or the mills, the children who put off their lessons, and even himself for giving them holidays to water his garden or for letting them off when he wanted to go fishing. He speaks of the French language as the most beautiful, the clearest, the most logical language in the world. He urges them to guard it and never forget it, because when a people are enslaved, as long as they hold fast to their language it is as if they had the key to their prison.

The lesson that follows is unlike any other. M. Hamel teaches with a patience and tenderness Franz has never seen, explaining the grammar so clearly that Franz understands everything. Then comes the writing lesson, where the students are given new copies with the words “France, Alsace, France, Alsace” written in a beautiful round hand — they look “like little flags floating everywhere in the school-room.” The only sound is the scratching of pens over paper. On the roof the pigeons coo low, and Franz wonders whether they, too, will be made to sing in German. …