In pursuit of politics

Education and revolution in eighteenth-century France

Adrian O'Connor

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781526143037
  9781526120564
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526120588
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: History of Education
• Index: History

This study offers a new interpretation of the debates over education and politics in the early years of the French Revolution. Following these debates from the 1760s to the Terror (1793–94) and putting well-known works in dialogue with previously neglected sources, it situates education at the centre of revolutionary contests over citizenship, participatory politics and representative government. The book takes up education's role in a dramatic period of uncertainty and upheaval, anxiety and ambition. It traces the convergence of philosophical, political, ideological and practical concerns in Ancien Régime debates and revolutionary attempts to reform education and remake society. In doing so, it provides new insight into the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and sheds light on how revolutionary legislators and ordinary citizens worked to make a new sort of politics possible in eighteenth-century France.

1

Education and an ambivalent Enlightenment

As Peter Gay noted almost half a century ago, ideas about education were central to the theory, ambitions, and experience of the Enlightenment.¹ Philosophes and fellow travelers concerned themselves to an extraordinary degree with education and its power to shape people’s character, capacities, and lives, to influence who they were individually and altogether. What people could and should learn, by whom they should be taught and how much instruction they should receive, where and to what end they should be educated: these were questions that cut across the national, intellectual, scientific, and denominational fault lines of Enlightenment exchange. They were questions that forced Enlightenment thinkers to consider the underlying principles and human implications of their ideas and, insofar as debates over education became debates over the schools, they forced eighteenth-century authorities and institutions to engage with new ways of thinking about what they did and why.

These debates were shaped in critically important ways by sensationist philosophies of epistemology and psychology, especially those inspired by the late-seventeenth-century work of John Locke (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) and Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)) and spread through France in the works of Voltaire, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, and others.² Sensationism denied the existence of innate principles or ideas, holding instead that the mind at birth is a tabula rasa – or blank slate – and that all cognition derives ultimately from sensory experience of the external world. More broadly, this meant that a person’s character, habits, intellect and, in the philosophy’s more radical forms, capacities were the result of experience and education (broadly conceived). It seemed to follow from this view that familial, pedagogical, and social environments could be designed to influence people’s character – both individual and collective – and to promote particular social, political, or cultural norms.³ Drawing on the works of Fénelon, Locke, Charles Rollin, and others, theorists and reformers came to emphasize the entangled nature of pedagogical and political regimes and worked to design an order in which each would complement and complete the other.⁴ These writers aimed to “link education to political and social transformation,” sought to establish pedagogical practices that would nurture desirable social or political habits, and argued about which social and political habits were, in fact, desirable.⁵

These ideas were reinforced by changes in the practical organization of the schools. During the eighteenth century, the ages at which students entered and the rate at which they progressed through the collèges became more uniform, helping to normalize a specific trajectory of studies and student life. The change was, in some cases, striking. During the seventeenth century at the Jesuit collège in Châlons-sur-Marne, five or six years could separate the youngest from the oldest members of a class: students in the V^e ranged from age 10 to 15, and from 13 to 18 in the III^e. According to Chartier and Julia, however, “this heterogeneity was progressively reduced during the eighteenth century ... [as] the ‘pyramid of ages’ within each class showed a tendency to stabilize around a ‘normal’ age: 10 or 11 for the VI^e, 11 or 12 for the V^e, etc.” They note that this “eliminated the most visible – if not necessarily the most important – difference between the students ... [and] was an essential condition for the collège to be considered a moral sphere in which success indicates merit and where, with discipline and hard work, one can achieve excellence.”⁶ The movement towards uniformity within a class and within a school was an essential condition not only for a meritocratic conception of the collège, but also for an understanding of education as formative for students’ characters during their maturation from child to adult and, consequently, for the idea that one might use education to define, reform, or solidify social mores and practices.

This interpenetration of political and pedagogical concerns is most famously evident in the mid-century works of Montesquieu and Charles Duclos, though it had taken shape during the second quarter of the eighteenth century. That quarter-century saw the convergence of educational thinking around a number of points and priorities, among them a desire to reconcile models of individual morality and the pursuit of the collective good and a related sense that the benefits of education were to be both nurtured and realized in society (rather than exclusively in private or in the soul).⁷ Unlike the Scholastic model of education, which sought to help students “achieve detachment from the sinful world by immersion in a formal and not commonly used language and … gain humility through constant, difficult study,” eighteenth-century thinkers increasingly argued that “children should be educated in the world rather than cloistered from it and taught about society rather than tossed into it unprepared.”⁸ This transition reached a logical climax of sorts in Duclos’s 1751 Considérations sur les moeurs de ce siècle, in which Duclos claimed that eighteenth-century France was well equipped with institutions offering the sort of “instruction” that could train “savants and artists of every sort,” but was woefully lacking the sort of “education” needed to “form men,” to “raise them to live one for another,” and to establish among them a collective “morale de l’utilité.”⁹

Mid-century calls for an educational system that would be useful to both the students and society focused on several points. The most frequent were proposals that the collèges’ curriculum and administrative structure be made uniform, that they be amended to include a greater emphasis on mathematics and the sciences, and that instruction be in French rather than Latin. These proposals reflected a growing sense that the schools and the public ought to inform and influence one another, a point that was reflected in the emergence and popularity of non-scholarly and “public” courses in specialized and useful subjects, including but not limited to architecture, chemistry, modern languages, and mathematics. The success of the “cours public” and “cours spectacle” (for which participants generally had to pay), indicated the popular embrace of new ideas and expectations regarding education, as well as a growing sense that education could benefit a non-academic public; they indicated, in short, a new “market” for education, one that pushed against the historical, institutional, and pedagogical logic underlying the collèges and universities.¹⁰

This relocation of education and its ambitions amplified arguments for the schools to implement a more “useful” curriculum and to make French, rather than Latin, the default language of instruction. Advocates of instruction in the vernacular claimed that the traditional education “substituted words for things” (running afoul of sensationist principles), failed to prepare students for civil society, and set them apart from the rest of their countrymen, that it cloistered them. Louis-René de Caradeuc de La Chalotais, whose Éssai d’éducation nationale is discussed in Chapter 2, quipped that “a foreigner to whom one explained the details of our education would imagine that France’s principal goal was to populate Latin seminaries, cloisters and colonies.”¹¹ But establishing French as the language of instruction ran into resistance not only from pedagogical tradition, but also from the many dialects spoken across France, the regional languages known derisively as patois. Reformers hoped that the two problems – ancient and regional – might be solved simultaneously and that establishing French as the uniform and standard language of instruction would help to make it also the standard language of Frenchmen. This pursuit of linguistic unity was, for its advocates, a prerequisite for and first step towards the realization of a unified French culture, one wherein scholarly and social influences collaborated in shaping the characters of individuals and of the social collective.¹² Increasingly, the schools, their curricula, and their internal regulations were imagined as part of, and as preparations for, civil society rather than learned enclaves set apart from social affairs.

Montesquieu gave voice to this new paradigm in his claim that the “laws of education … prepare us for civil life.” When he extrapolated from this that “the laws of education will be therefore different in each species of government: in monarchies they will have honor for their object; in republics, virtue; in despotic governments, fear,” he made clear a radical (and potentially troubling) consequence of the emerging consensus: if different types of governments depended on different sorts of educational systems to reproduce themselves, might not a change in education foment a change in government?¹³ In light of the tremendous formative power ascribed to childhood education in eighteenth-century thought, and appearing at a moment when the foundations of French social and political life were subject to increasing criticism, condemnation, and reimagination, Montesquieu’s work seemed to present an unsettling and double-edged prospect: any meaningful reform of education would almost certainly result in significant political change; at the same time, any political change would need an effective reform of education to succeed. By making explicit the political nature of the debate, Montesquieu dramatically raised the stakes of the “education question” and, in so doing, reaffirmed the importance of education in Enlightenment thought.

That education was important, few doubted. Far less consensus existed about what should be done with this almost uniquely powerful instrument of social, political, and moral influence. Due in part to the long-term optimism of texts like Condorcet’s “Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind” and the self-evident ambition of projects like Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the debates over education are often presented as part of a confident Enlightenment’s assertion of its historical mission. After all, Helvétius declared that “education can do anything,” and programs for educational reform offered philosophes an apparently “reasonable way of accepting the world of the present without sacrificing the possibilities of the future.”¹⁴ The vision of human and social progress underlying such sentiments allowed Enlightenment thinkers to reconcile the promise of human intelligence and human agency with the shortcomings of the world around them. It also presented a venue for concrete and sustainable action to make that world a better and more “enlightened” one. And yet, a practical pessimism coursed through the Enlightenment debates, a sense that while much could be done, little would; Enlightenment philosophy transformed our sense of what education could do, but the philosophes were remarkably pessimistic about the prospects for reform.¹⁵

While Harvey Chisick and others have drawn our attention to the “limits” of the Enlightenment, the exclusions and ellipses in proposals for reform are just part of this break in eighteenth-century views of education.¹⁶ The philosophes’ pessimism was not only an indictment of self-interested or short-sighted rulers (though it was often th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Politics: a revolutionary idea and a practical problem
• Prologue: the educational “system” of eighteenth-century France
• 1 Education and an ambivalent Enlightenment
• 2 National education: promise and paralysis
• 3 Public instruction: a new pedagogy for a new politics
• 4 Constitutional principles and concrete proposals: reconsidering Talleyrand and Condorcet on public instruction
• 5 Revolutionary politics à la plume: the public on education and politics
• 6 New wine in old bottles? Ancien Régime schools imagine the future
• 7 Republican instruction: an elusive ideal
• Conclusion: Politics: real, pursued, and promised
• Bibliography
• Index