The article explores a spate of recent publications on the "civilizing mission" that French teaching orders undertook in the 19th and 20th centuries, opening girls' schools in foreign countries. This scholarship addresses the transfer of French educational models to both colonial and non-colonial situations, while highlighting how specific political and national contexts constrained or facilitated the action of French orders. Through an analysis of studies in missionary, colonial and gender history, the article emphasizes how this scholarship in combination with a series of published sources lays the groundwork for a transnational history of teaching nuns operating on foreign soils.
Historiography; teaching orders; nuns; civilizing mission; girls' schools