Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (72 page)

It was also the first (male) democratic Constitution in world history without any hint of theocratic power. Population, each individual treated as equal in his interests, was the exclusive basis of representation in the national legislature, each deputy notionally representing forty thousand people. Article IX of the new Declaration of Rights, “that the law should protect public and individual liberty from oppression by those who govern” was itself a massive advance in the development of mankind. Large quantities of printed copies, it was agreed, following the final reading, should be dispatched to all towns and judicial bodies in France with ten copies for each deputy in preparation for the referendum.
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Outside the Convention a ceremonial cannon was fired as a signal to begin the general rejoicing: the Constitution was finished at last. Through July and August 1793, celebration of the finalization of the world’s first democratic constitution filled all France with new hope. When the votes cast in the referendum were counted, 1,714, 266 voters were found to have endorsed the Constitution with only around 12,000 against.
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As for the Constitution’s chief author, Condorcet, he had to go straight into hiding. Denounced in the Convention on 8 July 1793 by Chabot, speaking for the Comité de Sûreté Générale, he was charged with penning a clandestinely published tract,
Aux citoyens français sur la nouvelle constitution
, published in late June. It criticized the newly approved Constitution, terming it “undemocratic” and, a feature that particularly outraged Chabot, apt to produce “a new tyrant in place of the king.” Condorcet was accused also of persisting in circulating copies of his February draft constitution, claiming it was better than that approved by the Convention. The Montagne controlling the now-purged legislature pronounced Condorcet guilty of a capital crime and ordered his arrest pending trial for betraying the people.
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CHAPTER 14

Education

S
ECURING THE
R
EVOLUTION

Prior to 1789, the Enlightenment had comparatively little impact on primary and secondary schooling in France. Well before 1789, however, Enlightenment discourse had convinced many that it was necessary to move away from school teaching based on the catechism and Catholic doctrine, and had forcefully propagated the idea, associated especially with Diderot, the encyclopédistes
,
and Helvétius, that education can play a decisive role in changing the moral profile and character of society. Unsurprisingly, a close link existed at all stages during the Revolution between Enlightenment reform ideas and proposals propagated in the decades from the 1740s to 1788 and the post-1789 revolutionary transformation of education, first in theory and then gradually in reality.

Only when there were no more adults unable to read, write, and do basic arithmetic, affirmed Condorcet, like Turgot, Mercier, d’Holbach, and other philosophes of the previous generation, would society consist of independent individuals no longer reliant on others to perform the elementary transactions of their everyday lives. The attempt to introduce compulsory universal primary schooling under exclusively secular state supervision, and revolutionize secondary and higher education, were among the boldest, most significant undertakings of the democratic republican Revolution of 1788–93. From early on, conflicting approaches to these challenges marked out key differences between the basic social and cultural goals of the rival factions battling for control of the Revolution. Hence, the political disputes and ideological clashes surrounding educational issues during these years constitute an important indicator to the character and nature of the Revolution overall. That a large proportion of the democratic republican revolutionary
vanguard were former tutors, librarians, journalists, and literary men was of itself a potent factor for educational reform.

Constitutional monarchists, centrists defending a restricted suffrage, authoritarian populists, and Left democrats all developed their own distinctive positions on education policy, and their divergent stances reflected the wider differences separating these competing antagonistic blocs. Thus, Sieyès’s preference during the years 1789–92 for restricting the franchise, and his distinction between “active” and “passive” citizenship, excluding part of the adult population from the electorate, was tied to his assumption that much of society would remain uneducated.
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By contrast, commitment to democracy in Condorcet, Brissot, Daunou, Lanthenas, Lakanal, Romme, and Lanjuinais directly shaped their collective summons for free and universal primary schooling, and a transformed secondary education, as preconditions for aware, meaningful, and involved participation and the citizenship of all.

Literacy rates in France had gradually risen since the seventeenth century and at a basic level were relatively high by the 1780s, at least in the cities. In Paris, approximately two-thirds of salaried workers could read at an elementary level and literacy rates for women of this class were only slightly lower. In the villages, literacy rates were markedly lower, albeit with a noticeable tendency for reading ability to be more widespread in the rural northeast and Alsace and lower in the south and west. But if most urban adult men and women could sign lists and read at an elementary level, only a small fraction were capable of absorbing to any extent or examining seriously the vast body of ephemeral literature available from 1787–88 in the poor quarters of the towns and countryside, the cheap pamphlets, extracts, and
feuilles volantes
constituting the bulk of the revolutionary reading material they were apt to encounter.
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Before 1789, French towns and villages possessed an elaborate, long-established network of schools supported by donations, endowments, and municipal grants but with both elementary and secondary schooling overwhelmingly directed toward religious instruction. Most teachers both in town and countryside were priests or under priestly supervision. What the populace imbibed from the printed material at hand in schools, often
catéchismes
, was Catholic piety and doctrine (or alternatively, in places, Protestant teaching), a school culture slanting popular attitudes in directions that republicans and philosophes, but also the centrist faction led by Barnave and the brothers de Lameth, viewed negatively. The first fundamental change in French education on the ground followed an Assembly decree, of March 1791, requiring
the
maîtres d’école
, France’s schoolmasters, to take the civic oath swearing fealty to the National Assembly and, where applicable, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. French education hence first became a bitter, and soon ferocious, ideological battlefield during 1791 on the initiative of the liberal monarchists, no less than the democrats.

The revolutionaries of 1789 needed little persuading that schooling should become more secular, broadly available, and differently organized. Rousseau’s masterpiece
Émile
(1762), the book where he chiefly expounds his educational ideas, focusing on private individual tuition, sharply separating education for boys and girls, and powerfully advocating a shift away from book learning and reading,
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had appeared regularly in new editions from 1762 down to the years immediately after his death in 1778. Since around 1782 there had been few new editions. But with the onset of the Revolution in 1789 ensued a veritable explosion of fresh editions and greater differentiation in their format and cost, evidence confirming that this key work was being even more widely read than earlier. No one could discuss, reflect on, or write about education during the French Revolution without having Rousseau’s
Émile
in mind.
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Yet, while Rousseau helped put educational reform very much in the air, his book made no plea for “public education,” and conflicting reactions to his arguments only accentuated the sharp divergence of approaches under consideration among the revolutionaries. In fact, Rousseau had relatively little direct impact, except rhetorically, on the debate prior to June 1793 and at first his call to make schooling less academic and book-oriented exerted scant appeal.
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The main emphasis among the revolutionaries was on the need for public education and on preparing good citizens. “Nothing is more suited to perfect the human species both morally and physically,” proclaimed Sieyès, “than a good system of public education and instruction.”
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Yet it was no part of Sieyès’s revolutionary constitutional monarchism between 1788 and 1792 to demand free and universal public education as a preparation for democracy, even though he too deemed it the duty of a well-ordered state to minimize the number of adults unfitted for “active citizenship” to the smallest proportion feasible, in particular by widening access to and raising the quality of education.

Mirabeau drafted the first extended reflections on the changes needed by a Revolution aiming to replace religious doctrine in the schools with the “cult of liberty, the cult of the law” during the months before his death (in April 1791). These were further elaborated and published
shortly afterward by his disciple Cabanis. Mirabeau was actually the first revolutionary leader to publicly expound the un-Rousseauist thesis, central to the Revolution, that without a fundamentally transformed system of “public education,” the new political order and constitution would not survive but soon be supplanted by what he called “anarchy and despotism.” To equip men to enjoy their rights and generate an authentic volonté générale from all the private wills of men, the state must take direct charge of the schools and replace religious authority, theology and “sectarian superstition” with exaltation of the new civil values as its basis. Mirabeau clearly established the revolutionary principles that teachers as a group must never be permitted to oppose “la morale publique,” must be uniformly placed under the departmental and civic authorities, that the general guidelines should be those stipulated by the philosophes, and that merit and ability were the qualities that should be chiefly rewarded in teachers.

“The present Revolution is the work of writers and of philosophy. Should the nation,” admonished Mirabeau, “not respect its benefactors?”
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Opponents of the Revolution were already disparaging it as a barbaric revolution “of Goths and Vandals.” “Philosophes, littérateurs, savants, artists, the nation should honor and recompense them all.” Teaching in the universities and colleges must switch from being Latin-based to being conducted in French, the roles of theology and law severely curtailed, and more emphasis put on professional training in administration, medicine, surgery, and pharmacy, with separate medical colleges entrusted with issuing qualifications for all practicing the medical professions. Standards of training for various other professions too, including notaries and bakers, must be fixed, regulated, and upheld by public authority.
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All this was indubitably revolutionary. Mirabeau did not, however, call for free, obligatory, or universal primary schooling, or place the principle of equality at the forefront of the debate; indeed, he expressly rejected free primary education and endorsed Rousseau’s principle that teaching for girls and boys should be separate, in different schools and fundamentally different.
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Universal secular education, building equality, and providing equality of opportunity in the early years of the Revolution was pursued as an ideal only by the democratic republicans. A nationally uniform school system, conceded Condorcet in the first of a series of discourses on education that he published in the
Bibliothèque de l’Homme Public
between 1790 and 1792, cannot prevent the social predominance of those “whom nature especially favors” in terms of ability and intellect.
However, a balanced, meaningful equality of rights, he argued, requires only that natural advantages should not create a legalized, institutionalized subordination of the less gifted and that everyone should be educated sufficiently to make the main decisions in their lives without being directed by others. Besides possessing literacy and arithmetic, this meant acquiring the ability to sift information, “reason” correctly, grasp “truths” when these are adequately expounded, spot errors, and develop an independent, critical judgment without which the citizen is ill-equipped to avoid the snares the malicious and devious set for them, or “repel the errors” with which elements of society “wish to render them victims.” The more a nation expands the numbers of those elevated by the Enlightenment, the more the nobility, priesthood, and bureaucracy are swamped by well-educated commoners, the more society may “hope to obtain and keep good laws, a wise administration and a truly free constitution.”
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