The École Royale Militaire

Noble Education, Institutional Innovation, and Royal Charity, 1750-1788

Haroldo A. Guízar

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783030459307
• eBook ISBN: 9783030459314
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: History of Education
• Index: History

This book explores the Paris Ecole Militaire as an institution, arguing for its importance as a school that presented itself as a model for reform during a key moment in the movement towards military professionalism as well as state-run secular education. The school is distinguished for being an Enlightenment project, one of its founders publishing an article on it in the Encyclopédie in 1755. Its curriculum broke completely with the Latin pedagogy of the dominant Jesuit system, while adapting the legacy of seventeenth-century riding academies. Its status touches on the nature of absolutism, as it was conceived to glorify the Bourbon dynasty in a similar way to the girls' school at Saint Cyr and the Invalides. It was also a dispensary of royal charity calculated to ally the nobility more closely to royal interests through military service. In the army, its proofs of nobility were the model for the much debated 1781 Ségur decree, often described as a notable cause ofthe French Revolution.

© The Author(s) 2020

H. A. GuízarThe École Royale MilitaireWar, Culture and Society, 1750 –1850https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45931-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Paris Ecole Royale Militaire: An Introduction

Haroldo A. Guízar¹

(1)

University of York, York, UK

Haroldo A. Guízar

Email: [email protected]

[T]he young nobility must be sent to foreign wars. These suffice to maintain the whole nation in the émulation of glory, in the love of arms, in the contempt of fatigues and of death itself, and finally, in the experience of the military art.

—François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon, Télémaque, Book XII, 171

End Abstract

Volume VI of the Correspondance Littéraire of Grimm and Diderot contains a purportedly anonymous poem by a Danish visitor (in fact King Christian VII of Denmark) presenting his impressions of the sights he had taken in during his séjour in Paris. Some stanzas were dedicated to the Ecole militaire, a preparatory school then still under construction:

I’ve seen the school where the young nobility

Is instructed to shine on the fields of honour;

August site, temple of valour,

Worthy of Rome or Greece

But to help better put us in mind

Of the defenders of the patrie

And how the State takes care to nourish them,

All of its buildings’ a wise symmetry

To our eyes seems to offer:

Those bureaux de loterie,

And playing cards which industry

In châteaux has known to sustain.¹

Christian VII, who visited Paris in 1768, eventually fell into the pits of severe mental illness; however, his stanzas on the school lucidly tie together several of the thematic strands that characterised it as an institution. These are its status as a monument to noble military glory, the kingly charity it disbursed, and the public financing it received via gambling.² As an institution, the school suffered much worse than jibes or satires concerning its funding mechanisms; however, its strong lottery-fed finances in the end ironically proved a perpetual handicap, an ever-ready pretext to reform or abolish it. It is the intention of this book to provide an overview of the main institutional developments of the school. This begins with a look at its financial bases, followed by a description of its place in eighteenth-century debates on nobility and education, its curricular evolution, and finally a chapter showing how it functioned as a charitable institution in a remit beyond that of simply providing the education that served as its primary raison d’être.

Part I

Voltaire gave perhaps the pithiest summary of the Ecole militaire’s nature in the unfavourable comparison he made of Rousseau’s pedagogic intentions for Emile to those of the military school: ‘… he feigns, in a useless novel by the title of Emile, to raise a young gentilhomme by taking care not to give the sort of education dispensed in the Ecole militaire, such as the learning of languages, geometry, tactics, fortification, his country’s history, and is far from inspiring in him the love of his king and patrie; he limits himself to training a carpentry apprentice’.³ It is true that Voltaire was less enthusiastic about the school’s nature in other writings, for instance, in the entry ‘Education’ of his Dictionnaire philosophique. In an imaginary dialogue between a parliamentary Conseiller and an ex-Jesuit, Voltaire has the ex-Jesuit ask if his erstwhile pupil would not have wanted to receive an education such as that offered in the Ecole militaire. The Conseiller demurs, while simultaneously criticising the collège’s education. The preferred mode of education described there is that of arts and crafts.⁴

Voltaire’s mixed feelings on the most ambitious state-backed architectural and pedagogical project of his century are nonetheless a good reflection of the generally uneven sentiments that the school inspired. They thus serve as a suitable point of departure for this study. As it turns out, studying the Ecole militaire strictly through the lens of pedagogical history, noble assistance, financial structure, or any other single angle would skew any evaluation one might wish to make on its nature and utility. Given its status as France’s first free publicly funded preparatory school under direct government control, one that took part of both the currents of the High Enlightenment and Michel Foucault’s Military-cum-disciplinary Enlightenment, it is more than a little surprising that it hasn’t been the subject of a dedicated monograph aiming to examine some of the principal themes it embodied. The only extant published book-length works on the school are limited to its buildings’ architecture, and comparatively little of its history is accessible to an Anglophone audience. It is thus the aim of this book to make a start towards the filling of this overlooked gap in the history of education.

The Ecole militaire, remarkable both as a stand-alone institution (best remembered as Napoléon Bonaparte’s alma mater) and for its varied legacy in several quite distinct realms, has never been the substantive object of study for historians of education that it might otherwise have been. This is despite the fact that it marked an important, historic step in the transition from the two dominant forms of instruction current in ancien régime France towards a more modern, public system of education. These two forms were communal religious instruction in collèges and private tuition delivered inter privatos parietes, within the confines of the domestic home’s walls. There was no other comparable government-run and funded preparatory school of the Ecole militaire’s size or ambition in the whole eighteenth century. If, after Napoleon III’s fall in 1870, it could be claimed that ‘the Ministry of War in France has done more for the education of men … than the Ministry of Public Education’, then during the ancien régime, the Ministry of War was the de facto Ministry of Education, and the Ecole militaire was its flagship institution.⁵ As Map 1.1 shows, France had the most extensive system of institutes for military (and secular) education in the world prior to the advent of David Bell’s ‘total war’. The Ecole militaire was a pivotal institution in this network of schools, being the most high-profile and controversial of all those it coexisted with. It furthermore served as a crux of the system, whether through its administration of provincial schools (the écoles royales militaires) and funding of those schools’ students, or by its function as a feeder for the cavalry, artillery, engineering, and naval schools as well as for the army at large.⁶

Map 1.1

Eighteenth-century French military schools

To repeat, the Ecole militaire had no government-backed institutional peer in France. It was far from an international outlier, however, and can instead be seen as part of much broader European social, political, and intellectual currents. After ephemeral early seventeenth-century initiatives, military schools for the nobility appeared in more or less permanent iterations from the opening of Turin’s Accademia Reale in 1678 on.⁷ Azar Gat asserts that such schools’ establishment may be taken as ‘one of the major indications of the influence of the Enlightenment’, a strong claim tempered by the fact that these institutions of sometimes indifferent quality only ever touched a minority of the noble officer class.⁸ Just as Frederick William I’s Cadet Corps in Berlin, heavily infused by Pietism, can be seen as part of a general ‘pedagogization of human existence that was an essential characteristic of the enlightenment’, so did the Ecole militaire’s educational pretensions squarely place it in that category of the Enlightenment.⁹ The Berlin Corps’ Pietism, as well as the experience of a 1712 face-to-face encounter with Fénelon by Field Marshal B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Paris Ecole Royale Militaire: An Introduction
• 2. Financing and Administering the Ecole Militaire, 1750–1793: Its Origins, Evolution, and Demise
• 3. Debating the Ecole Militaire: The School as an Institutional Solution to the Predicaments of the Nobility
• 4. The Ecole Militaire’s Curriculum: Its Antecedents and Conception
• 5. Testing Theory at the Ecole Militaire: The Implementation and Modification of Curricular Concepts, 1753–1785
• 6. Beneficent Paternalism: The Ecole Militaire as a Charitable Institution
• 7. The Ecole Militaire: Some Conclusions
• Back Matter