Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (57 page)

primary-school instructors; in the long run, however, that role would fall

(at least in part) to students’ parents. The districts, on the other hand, were

57 Bosher,
French Finances, 1770–1795
, p. 314.

58 See, on these issues: Crouzet, “Wars, Blockade, and Economic Change in Europe,

1792–1815,” pp. 567–88; and Woloch,
The New Regime
, p. 388.

59 Woronoff,
The Thermidorian Regime and the Directory
, p. 97.

The second attempt to stabilize the Revolution

233

supposed to retain a permanent function of oversight in matters relating to

the schools.60

Unfortunately, implementing the Lakanal Law proved to be impossible.

Even in the best (i.e., most peaceful) of circumstances, the legislation might

have failed. Instructors in primary education were expressly forbidden to

accept supplementary compensation from parents for boarding or tutoring

their children and never received a legal mandate to enhance their incomes

by engaging in secondary occupations. Moreover, local authorities endeav-

oring to apply the new legislation encountered a legion of problems. They

were pressured to set up additional schools in small rural communities;

they had difficulties separating boys and girls in the classroom owing to

the shortage of
institutrices
; and they became enmeshed in bitter contro-

versies over the utilization of nationalized rectories supposedly earmarked

for the purposes of primary education.

But the inescapable factor of war was also telling here, as it was in vir-

tually every other area of revolutionary beneficence. As Isser Woloch has

put it, “military mobilization had claimed an entire cohort of young men

for the army, leaving civil society bereft of potential new recruits for public

school teaching.” Local boards of education were reduced to the desper-

ate ploy of petitioning the War Ministry for the discharge of soldiers with

“very weak physical conditions” who could be more useful in schoolrooms

than on European battlefields. Such military discharges assumed some sort

of working relationship between the Executive Commission on Public

Instruction and the manpower bureau in the War Ministry; unfortunately,

that collaboration never materialized, and as a result the primary schools

never could acquire the requisite
instituteurs
. The war effort sabotaged

the Lakanal Law in a more indirect way as well – through its disastrous

impact upon the French economy. By undermining the paper currency,

the war made it all the more unthinkable for
rentiers
, urban workers, and

government employees dependent upon the shrinking asset of salaries paid

in
assignats
to enroll their children in public schooling. Just as obviously, inflation turned the fixed salaries of
instituteurs
and
institutrices
into de-risory compensation – and we recall that these individuals had no other

legally allowed sources of income. Finally, the war-related economic

crisis, leading as it did to popular unrest in the spring of 1795, hardened

the social attitudes of the Thermidorian deputies, making it easier for them

to countenance a fundamental retreat in the area of primary education.61

That retreat took the form of the so-called Daunou Law of 25 October

1795.62 The Daunou Law provided for the creation in the departments of

60 Woloch,
The New Regime
, pp. 181–82.

61 Ibid., pp. 189–91.

62 On this legislation, especially as concerned its establishment of Central Schools in the departments, refer to Palmer,
The Improvement of Humanity
, pp. 230–32, 242–45, and 252–57.

234

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

secondary-level “Central Schools.” Yet it gave little in the way of assurances

that there would continue to be a mission in elementary education, stating

only that public primary schools would somehow be instituted in the

Republic’s cantons but neglecting to specify any curricular or other con-

nections between these projected institutions and the Central Schools. As

one historian has all too justifiably concluded: “The Daunou Law – which

lasted well into the Napoleonic Era – abandoned the principle of universal

and free primary education. It also left the
instituteurs publics
on their own (save for free lodging or an indemnity) . . . with no salary from the state and

no distinctive status to go along with their titles.” Hence, the legislators

left in place “a kind of shell – a thin network of ostensibly state-sponsored

schools.”63 In effect, elementary schooling in France became an arena of

unregulated competition between “public” institutions, hampered as they

were by all the problems enumerated above, and religious and other private

schools to which those parents able to defray educational expenses usually

preferred to send their sons and daughters.

The antiroyalist coup of Fructidor, Year V (September 1797) and its po-

litical aftermath seemed to augur new initiatives in the area of education.

Woloch has even spoken of a sort of coalition of government officials,

educators, and deputies trying in late 1798 and 1799 to place educational

issues once again back on the Republic’s legislative agenda. Alas, it was

not to be – and, in large measure, for the same old reasons. In the summer

of 1799, the “military and political crisis touched off by the war of the

Second Coalition overwhelmed the legislature. Debates on such matters as

education had to be suspended. . . . A passionate republican commitment

to free public schools – forged in the ideological zeal of 1793 but tempered

in subsequent experience – came to a dead end.”64 Once again, the revolu-

tionary state’s commitment to war had taken priority over its commitment

to education.65

Military pressures similarly limited the government’s ability to alleviate

the misery and enhance the living standards of its citizens. To be sure, war

initially bid fair to play a positive role in this area, insofar as it helped

in 1793 to bring to power Jacobin politicians who entertained relatively

generous ideas on the subject of government-sponsored
bienfaisance
. In

March 1793, the Convention presented a blueprint for a national system

of poor relief, and then in truly ground-breaking legislation over the next

63 Woloch,
The New Regime
, pp. 192–95.

64 Ibid., p. 206. As Palmer has shown, things did not go quite so badly in the late 1790s for the new Central Schools in the departments. Still, they, too, were adversely affected by the insatiable manpower and financial demands of the war. Palmer,
The Improvement of
Humanity
, pp. 230–32, 242–45.

65 See also, on this general issue, H. C. Barnard,
Education and the French Revolution
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).

The second attempt to stabilize the Revolution

235

year or so it endowed this blueprint with some meaningful details. The

Jacobin-dominated legislature proclaimed a specific national responsibility

for those falling into certain categories of need and made provisions to

allocate moneys from the Treasury to the enumerated individuals via the

district administrations. Those declared to be deserving of the state’s benef-

icence included old and infirm indigents; “mothers and fathers who have

no resources other than the product of their labor, whenever the product

of their labor is no longer commensurate with the needs of their family”;

widows with young children; orphans living as foster children with ne-

cessitous families; and aged agricultural workers, rural artisans, and rural

widows. The Convention, with an eye to its indispensable
militaires
, also

came up with a package offering “patriotic assistance” in the form of subsis-

tence pensions to the impecunious dependents of volunteers and draftees,

as well as more substantial stipends to wounded veterans.66

This was all very impressive on paper, and really visionary in that it

looked forward to a much later era in which governments would gener-

ally view the provision of such public assistance as one of their primary

responsibilities. In the France of the late 1790s, however, it was only a

matter of time before state projects of
bienfaisance
encountered multi-

farious constraints imposed by state-engendered war. For one thing, the

revolutionaries were driven by the financial burden of war to reverse the

cautionary stipulation of March 1793 that charitable properties should

be nationalized only “after the complete and definitive organization of

public assistance” had been placed “in full activity.” On 11 July 1794, the

legislators decided that such properties and their attached endowments

(with the sole exception of actual hospital buildings) should be confiscated

and sold off as soon as possible. Because the authorities did not reverse

this policy until October 1796, and did not return unsold properties to

the affected institutions until 1797, institutional charity over that period

became almost totally reliant upon government funding.

This was bad enough in that it recalled how the Constituent Assembly,

pressed by war-dominated state indebtedness earlier in the Revolution,

had confiscated and sold off Church buildings, lands, and endowments,

thus drastically undercutting the charitable and other social functions of

ecclesiastics in France.67 What made the new rounds of confiscations

of charitable institutions and endowments so baneful to the purposes

of revolutionary
bienfaisance
, however, was their
timing
– right in the midst of an economic crisis that itself reflected the immense strains

imposed upon the country by its ever-widening military commitments.

66 See, on all of this, Woloch,
The French Veteran from the Revolution to the Restoration
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); and Woloch,
The New Regime
, pp. 247–50, 293–95.

67 On this matter, refer again to McManners,
The French Revolution and the Church
, passim.

236

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

The hyperinflation and widespread crop failures of this period worked to-

gether to reduce the financial aid pledged by the government to charitable

institutions and to pensioners inscribed by name on the
Grand Livre de

Bienfaisance Nationale
. Funds originally earmarked for hospitals, orphan-

ages, and workshops all too often were diverted toward emergency pur-

chases of grains and other foodstuffs. At the same time, the collapse of the

currency virtually nullified the value of pensions paid out to aged farm

workers, necessitous parents, artisans, and widows. As one example: in-

stallments of 207,000
livres
in
assignats
allocated to twenty departments for September 1795 were in real terms worth only a few thousand
livres
by that

time. Hence, the related burdens of war and a weakened economy radically

diminished the promised benison of state assistance to needy citizens and

to institutions caring for the truly indigent.68

It is revealing that the government’s humanitarianism in the late 1790s

was always curbed by its prior concern for
militaires
and military issues.

Take, for instance, what one historian has uncovered regarding disburse-

ments by the Commission on Public Assistance:

About 62% of its total funding between floréal Year II and the end of . . . Year III paid for medical services to
militaires
. . . in France. Moreover, one third of the Commission’s non-hospital expenditures went for “patriotic assistance” to the

needy dependents of
militaires
. Obviously plans to make the national government responsible for
bienfaisance
were being diverted and distorted by the side effects of military mobilization in a democratic society.69

Wounded and ailing soldiers occupying hospital beds in swelling num-

bers meant that facilities were effectively unavailable to noncombatants in

French society. This turn of events bespoke a set of military-patriotic values

that had prevailed even at the height of the “idealistic” Terror. Bertrand

Barère, in setting forth a bold new plan for state assistance to incapacitated

farm workers, had stressed their moral equivalency to the Republic’s most

celebrated citizens, its men in arms: “Let the public treasury open at once

to the defender and the nourisher of the fatherland.”70 Is it at all surprising

that, with the decline of Jacobin idealism later on, the state should have

abandoned any notion of such a moral equivalency and frankly favored

militaires
and their dependents and survivors in the dispensation of assis-

tance? Pensions to the deserving (but noncombatant) poor were terminated

in legislation of late 1796; military pensions managed to survive until 1799,

when even they were scaled back due to the monstrous financial burden of

the War of the Second Coalition.

68 Woloch,
The New Regime
, pp. 259–63. On the interplay of these issues in the provinces see Alan Forrest,
The French Revolution and the Poor
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); and Robert M. Schwartz,
Policing the Poor in Eighteenth-Century France
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).