Conclusion

The conclusion discusses how re-examining the ‘education question’ in Ancien Régime and Revolutionary France offers new insight to the cultural dynamics at work in the political upheavals of late-eighteenth century France. It argues that recognizing the practical nature of many of the debates over education – even into the radical period of the Revolution – helps us to situate revolutionary politics within its historical moment and to better understand how participatory and representative politics were pursued after 1789. The conclusion situates the pursuit of both public instruction and representative government within the broader legacy of the Revolution, a legacy that has shaped modern political culture in lasting and fundamental ways. It also argues that approaching the political and cultural history of revolutionary France through the interplay of ideas about education and practical efforts to establish new institutions (political and pedagogical alike) suggests new ways to think about the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and about the legacy of the Revolution for the theory and practice of democratic politics ever since.

Republican instruction: an elusive ideal

The collapse of the constitutional monarchy and the establishment of the French Republic presented a deep fissure in the history of the Revolution and, with that, in the ambitions and expectations of revolutionary pedagogy. And yet, a close examination of the republican debates over education, and especially of the practical reform efforts undertaken by the National Convention and by local authorities and school administrators, suggests important continuities across the monarchy-republic divide. These attempts to preserve, reform, and reimagine educational institutions during the first years of the Republic suggest that the pursuit of public instruction, of contestatory politics, of critical and contributive citizenship, and of an engaged and educated citizenry was more sustained, more ambitious, and more nuanced than is often recognized. These points are highlighted in a re-examination of how the revolutionaries sought to use particular pedagogical instruments, such as republican catechisms, political festivals, revolutionary songs, and the like, and of their continued attempts to make the educational institutions inherited from the Ancien Régime work for the new Republic.

Revolutionary politics à la plume: the public on education and politics

This chapter analyzes the letters related to education sent to the National Assembly by citizens across France between spring 1789 and autumn 1792. It argues that this correspondence reveals a debate over public instruction and participatory politics that extended in meaningful ways beyond the Assembly and far beyond those arenas considered in most histories of education and the French Revolution. These letters also illustrate how people believed the new politics and new models of citizenship would work. Letter-writing allowed citizens an opportunity to intervene in political deliberations and disputes and to help realize the participatory promise of article 6 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. With that in mind, this chapter analyzes the letters sent to the Assembly as attempts to imagine and articulate new models of education and of political society and as practical expressions of the sort of politics for which education was supposed to be preparing French citizens.

Prologue

This prologue surveys the institutional landscape of education in Ancien Régime France. It describes the array of formal and informal institutions offering education in pre-revolutionary France, including the petites écoles, collèges, universities, and academies. It also lays out the curricular traditions within which many of those institutions worked and highlights the relationship among the institutions, helping us to better understand why the expulsion of the Jesuits from their collèges in 1762 set off a national crisis.

Introduction

The introduction situates the problem of educational reform within the overlapping contexts of Enlightenment philosophy and revolutionary politics. Discussing the influence of sensationist philosophy and new expectations regarding the political public, it describes education’s place at the heart of debates over the nature, character, and purpose of French politics, culture, and society. It describes the range of sources upon which this study draws, the structure of the work, and the work’s central foci. These are: education’s place at the center of a crisis in Ancien Régime politics, one that was sparked by the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1762 but came to envelope debates about the French nation and nationalism, the state, and the social order; the emergence and nature of “public instruction” as an element in the revolutionary pursuit of a representative and participatory political order; and the reach of the ensuing debates over education, citizenship, and politics beyond the officials assemblies and publications of revolutionary politics, a breadth that suggests a broad engagement with the prospects and possibilities for contributory citizenship after 1789.

New wine in old bottles? Ancien Régime schools imagine the future

While the Assembly and the public debated the possible reform of education, the administrators, instructors, students, and others affiliated with the schools were left navigating uncertain political, social, and institutional terrain. They too participated in the wide-ranging debate over educational reform discussed in the preceding chapters, proposing their own answers to questions about whether the educational institutions inherited from the Ancien Régime could be integrated into the new society and new politics, whether they could be turned into instruments of “public instruction.” This chapter examines local attempts to accommodate and realize the new politics in and through education by analyzing letters, proposals, memoranda, requests, and programs for reform generated by or for universities, collèges, petites écoles, and other educational institutions during the years of the constitutional monarchy. These sources reveal institutions and individuals trying to anticipate, accommodate, and influence the course of revolutionary politics, show mounting frustrations as the delayed promise of educational reform and as controversies over the role of religion in politics complicated the process of actually running schools, and remind us of the entanglement of practical, political, and ideological imperatives that characterized the work of revolution.

Public instruction: a new pedagogy for a new politics

The coming of the French Revolution led to a dramatic reconsideration of what was possible and what was practical in eighteenth-century France and, with that, a rejuvenation of the debates over education. Intertwined with debates about the nature, legitimacy, and efficacy of representative government, the revolutionary debates over education gave rise to the ideal of “public instruction.” Public instruction transcended the Ancien Régime’s distinction between moral education and technical instruction, aiming instead to integrate the acquisition of skills, the cultivation of habits, and the development of politically-virtuous sentiments. This ideal underwrote ideas about active and contributory citizenship and reflected the ambitions and expectations of the constitutional regime being designed by the National Assembly.

National education: promise and paralysis

Chapter 2 analyzes the debates over education that followed upon the expulsion of the Jesuits from Paris in 1762 and from France in 1764. The expulsion created practical as well as political problems for Louis XV’s France, helping to intertwine Enlightenment debates over the purpose and practices of education with on-going debates about the composition, character, and powers of the French state. It offers a new interpretation of the post-expulsion debates and reforms, arguing that where historians have customarily seen consensus and a series of cooperative but incomplete reforms, there was in fact a deep crisis in Ancien Régime politics, one that centered on ideas about the French nation, state, and society.

Constitutional principles and concrete proposals: reconsidering Talleyrand and Condorcet on public instruction

Chapter 3 examines the proposals for educational reform presented in September 1791 and April 1792 by the philosophes-statesmen Talleyrand and Condorcet, on behalf of the National Assembly’s constitutional committee and the committee of public instruction, respectively. Both Talleyrand and Condorcet sought to integrate the spread of knowledge and the cultivation of civic sentiments, and each of them tried to translate the dynamics of representative and participatory politics into new institutional practices and social norms. Recognizing the role of “sentiment” and sociability in their proposals allows us to understand better how each sought to fulfill the constitutional promise of a free, public, and national system of education and to realize the political and social ambitions represented by that promise. As Talleyrand noted when presenting his plan, “it is impossible to have understood the essence of the constitution without recognizing that all of its principles demand the support of a new system of education,” a point that makes a fuller understanding of these proposals all the more important.

Education and an ambivalent Enlightenment

This chapter highlights the central place of debates over education in Enlightenment thought, with particular attention to the interweaving of political and pedagogical concerns in the mid-eighteenth century. Influenced by sensationist theories of mind and of the self, thinkers during this period came to see education as formative of the individual character and of the social collective. This contributed to a deeply ambivalent strain in Enlightenment thought, one wherein the possibilities opened up by new ways of thinking about education were undercut by a sense of social, political, and institutional inertia. This ambivalent Enlightenment is analyzed in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Claude-Adrien Helvétius, and in debates over female education.