In this article the author discusses citizenship of both yesterday and today, considering it as a complex theme because it supposes the equality and autonomy of an individual. The French republican school is used as a reference, deliberately thought of as a school of citizenship. Based on an historical retrospective of movements which characterize the construction of the republican school, woven under the influence of the Church, the author unveils the contradictions and paradoxes of this process. His way of thinking shows that the education was taking shape in the form of a private school which he denominates an "institutional program", and that, as a result of recent mutations of the Nation-States, this led to transformations of the work's own nature upon others. Finally, the author develops a post-national and a post-institutional model for citizenship delineating possibilities around which the new figures of a citizenship background are constituted.
citizenship; educational institutions; school education