Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (117 page)

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Authors: Jonathan Israel

Tags: #History, #Europe, #France, #Revolutionary, #Modern, #18th Century, #Philosophy, #Political, #Social

BOOK: Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre
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Implementation was speeded up. A key objective was that the Republic should employ teachers trained and paid by the state. Garat, appointed chairman of the Convention’s commission for public education, was entrusted, among other tasks, with supervising the team composing the new textbooks to be used by the state’s teachers in the secondary schools. Garat wrote the textbook for history himself; Diderot’s former aide, Daubenton, that for natural history, and Volney, back from the Midi, the civics textbook, a work emphasizing liberty, the Rights of Man, and the Constitution.
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The Assembly enactments of 1794–95 adopting these educational reforms, later referred to collectively as “the Daunou law,” covered everything from primary schools to national festivals. Like Condorcet before him, Daunou urged a symbiotic relationship between public instruction and republican institutions, deeming each structurally dependent on the other.
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The package exerted a long, profound influence on the subsequent development of French republican education and tradition. Lakanal and Deleyre, among the most philosophique deputies, were appointed to oversee what was intended to be a crucial component, the Paris École Normale. Garat’s commission in effect revived Condorcet’s plan to establish a higher-learning education institute in Paris as the apex of an integrated national network of écoles centrales immediately under his projected national institute of sciences and arts and pivotal to the new system of primary, secondary, and tertiary education. This École Normale, established on the grounds of the Paris Jardin des Plantes, was for training schoolmasters, not least in secularism
and republican awareness, and for laying the ground plan for what would eventually become the world’s first comprehensive system of state-organized and funded universal education. At the École Normale, students who were at least twenty-one years old, with appropriate educational qualifications and proven civic consciousness and moral caliber, would converge from every part of French society.
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Figure 18. (a) Volney, (b) Daunou.
(a) J. Boilly, portrait of Constantin François Chasseboeuf, Count of Volney, lithograph. Paris, Musée Carnavalet, Paris. © Roger-Viollet / The Image Works. (b)
Pierre Claude François Daunou
, engraving. Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles, France. © RMN–Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

The inaugural ceremony of the École Normale, dedicated to teaching civics and secular values as well as the academic disciplines, took place amid high hopes on 20 January 1795 in the amphitheater of the Botanical Gardens with Garat, Volney, La Harpe, Lagrange, Laplace, Monge, Daubenton, and the celebrated chemist, Claude-Louis Berthollet (1748–1822), all delivering celebratory lectures that amply reflected the fact that France now led all Europe in social science, chemistry, and several branches of mathematics. Regular lectures commenced at once with Volney teaching history in the manner introduced by Condorcet, based on the idea of
histoire universelle
and the progress of the human mind, encompassing not only Europe but the Islamic world, China, Japan, and the pre-Muslim Persians, all supposedly progressing toward liberty, human rights, democracy, and republicanism. Condorcet’s outright refusal to make “national history,” nation-building, and patriotism the core of historical studies infused the new philosophical conception of history and historiography, as did the underlying commitment to metaphysical monism and one-substance philosophy.

Plagued by financial difficulties, the École Normale closed down after a few months, though it was revived again by Napoleon in 1808 (and then again closed by the Restoration monarchy in 1822). But the écoles centrales and the Institut de France in Paris soon figured among the post-Thermidor Revolution’s foremost successes. The Institut de France, established by decree in October 1795, was the apex of the whole new system. This national institute for the sciences and arts was intended to replace the old royal academies, suppressed in 1793, and to organize and supervise the whole education system, together with scientific and scholarly research and debate. For the first time in human history, proclaimed Lakanal, the most eminent researchers in the social and natural sciences would, as Condorcet had urged, become the educators of a people. It gathered the most eminent savants and scholars into a single organization at the Republic’s heart, dividing them into three classes: (1) mathematical and physical sciences, (2) moral and political sciences, and (3) literature and fine arts. The second class in particular came to embody a revolutionary new approach to research,
knowledge, social sciences, and education rooted in the philosophies of Diderot, Helvétius, Beccaria, d’Holbach, and Condorcet.

The Institut was publicly inaugurated on 4 April 1796 with a glittering ceremony held in the newly refurbished exhibition hall of the Musée Nationale des Arts, attended by the entire Directoire and more than fifteen hundred invited guests. A speech by Daunou underlined the necessity for full freedom of thought and independence of research within the Institut and for performing the Institut’s public role. The Brissotin director, Letourneur, rejoiced that the philosophes who had made the Revolution “by attacking tyranny and superstition” now finally enjoyed that formal primacy over France’s official culture, public instruction, and education that was rightfully theirs.
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The Institut, hoped the Directoire, would assist the Republic politically and socially by instilling confidence in its laws and institutions, helping revive commerce, agriculture, and industry, promoting medicine and hygiene, advancing military and naval technology, and stimulating urban and architectural improvements.

The philosophe-révolutionnaires viewed the Institut as a kind of National Assembly of the world republic of science and letters, precisely the reason that Marat and Robespierre so abhorred the concept. The nomination in November 1795 of forty-eight principal philosophes, scientists, and scholars to constitute the “electing third,” responsible for choosing the other ninety-six members, institutionalized the philosophique ideal that society’s leading minds should choose the academic senate and inevitably encouraged rivalry and intrigue as well as lively discussion. Brissot, Condorcet, Desmoulins, Pétion, Cérutti, Volney, Lanjuinais, Lakanal, and the men who had made the democratic Revolution had always maintained that only philosophical reason and its dissemination through society could defeat ignorance, error, and the ingrained popular prejudices nourishing tyranny that rendered society and politics hostages to villainy and inherently irrational, unstable, and repressive. Enlightenment in their eyes was above all a process of eradicating prejudices, ignorance, and mistaken traditional views. Social harmony and stability depended, they believed, on forging rational laws, securing basic freedoms, and ensuring a viable constitution, besides laying an adequate basis in morality, social harmony, and civics to enable society to accomplish its goals, all of which were unattainable, they insisted, without extirpating credulity, intolerance, and religious authority.

Social science conceived as applied moral philosophy based on monism and one-substance philosophy, and the key to constitutional,
political, and social stability within a democratic republican framework, saturated the thinking of the Institut’s intellectual leadership, the group known as the “Idéologues.” This group, including Daunou, Volney, Destutt de Tracy, Ginguené, Lakanal, Deleyre, Roederer, Garat, Sieyès, Cambacérès, and La Révellière-Lépeaux, had their headquarters in the Institut’s second class, that of moral and political sciences. An astounding total of no less than twenty-eight of the leading intellectuals elected to the Institut’s second class had figured in the revolutionary legislatures and on their committees, mostly but not entirely among the Brissotins. Other prominent materialists, atheists, and anti-Christian deists among their number were Naigeon and Cabanis. Several were associated with the economist Say’s
Décade philosophique
, the journal that virtually became the house review of the Idéologues, a group nurtured in the circle around Mirabeau and drawn from the salons of Mesdames Helvétius, Condorcet, and Roland that most explicitly sought to revive the legacy of the revolutionary parti de philosophie of 1788–93.
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The Idéologues, in effect, reconstituted the Radical Enlightenment in its post-Thermidor aspect. No less than thirty-four members of the Institut’s second class, a strikingly high percentage, had been imprisoned or forced to emigrate during the Terror, including Daunou, Ginguené, Destutt de Tracy, Volney, and the former Benedictine monk, the Abbé Martin Lefebvre La Roche, friend and secretary of Helvétius, the man entrusted by him, and later, Mme. Helvétius, with editing the first complete and freely edited posthumous edition of Helvétius’s works. Tied by friendship to several others of the group, Jean-Baptiste Say, an ex-Protestant habitué of Mme. Helvétius’s salon and also that of Helen Maria Williams,
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acolyte of Clavière and Roederer and warm admirer of Diderot, whom he regarded as the “best antidote against the reactionary poison of superstition and servitude,” emerged among the foremost propagators of this revived Brissotin ideology of Idéologie.
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Idéologues neither sought nor achieved a monopoly over the Institut’s proceedings, prize competitions, or policies, but were the men who chiefly gave expression to the philosophique standpoint underpinning the Revolution’s values, aims, and ideology.
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A crucial part of the Institut’s activities was the presentation of its work to the public each trimester via announced days of public readings, debate, and lectures. On 3 July 1797, for example, a day devoted to the Classe des Sciences Morales et Politiques, the Institut offered public lectures on future international collaboration and peace in a world of republics committed
to the pursuit of the
bonheur général
(by the philosophe Delisle de Sales), a discourse on economics and colonies by Dupont du Nemours, three mémoires by Roederer, one of the Institut’s most active speakers, on public finances, a mémoire by La Révellière-Lépeaux on civil religion and national festivals, a lecture on the medieval maps in Venice’s Saint Mark’s Library, and reports of Volney’s impressions of the United States.
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The cultural milieu fomented by the Institut’s public meetings and prize competitions pitted two rival currents represented within the Institut against each other. Ardent republicans predominated, but not exclusively. They remained at odds with a rival group of crypto-royalists (strong among the historians) who scorned the militant deists and especially the materialism, atheism, and democratic doctrines of the Idéologues.

Another of Condorcet’s projects energetically revived in the later 1790s was the society of the Amis des Noirs, which had lapsed under the Montagnard tyranny in 1793–94. The second Society of Friends of the Blacks “and of the colonies,” again featuring the Abbé Grégoire, was essentially a Parisian intellectual salon—albeit including a number of blacks, among them several former slaves. Expressly embodying the legacy of Condorcet and Brissot—and while he was in Paris often chaired by Sonthonax—it was a group of a few dozen intellectuals but one with a specific political agenda. Martinique and and other French islands, under British occupation, remained bastions of slavery, while Haiti had largely broken free of the Republic’s control, but all of these might soon be regained by the French so that there were hopes both of extending abolition and helping to build new approaches to the social integration of blacks into republican society. Volney believed that educating the blacks was the only ultimate solution; when he visited Jefferson in Virginia for three weeks in June 1796, he was deeply shocked both by the sight of slavery itself and the justifications for black abasement that he constantly encountered.
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At the same time the revived Amis des Noirs had to fight the resurgent colonial interest within France. Under the Directoire, especially during the elections of 1797, powerful conservative longings and prejudices surged once again and this backlash demanding religion and monarchy included many voices seeking to reintroduce slavery in the colonies. As the second Amis des Noirs saw it, slavery, oppression of blacks, and the pretexts for it needed to be vigorously rebuffed. Among their arguments was that of Say, who became an active member in 1798 and sought to
demonstrate theoretically that paid free-black labor could as a general rule produce sugar at a lower cost than slave labor. The most detailed analysis of the troubles in Haiti was drawn up in the years 1797–99 by Garran-Coulon, an admirer of Toussaint-Louverture and forthright defender of “the principles of the Declaration of Rights.”
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