Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (73 page)

Condorcet’s chief point was that a “free constitution and society in which all classes of society enjoy the same rights cannot survive where the ignorance of part of the citizenry prevents them knowing its nature and limits, obliges them to pronounce on matters of which they have no knowledge, and to choose when they are unable to judge.” Such a constitution would surely “destroy itself after a few stormy upheavals and degenerate into a form of government that merely preserves order amidst a people ignorant and corrupt.”
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Here was a doctrine frequently reiterated through the 1790s: “an ignorant people,” as Lanthenas expressed it in April 1792, “lapses back very easily into slavery, a dreadful truth proved by all that has impaired the Revolution, restricted liberty and endangers liberty today.”
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Closely connected to this claim was the idea, dear to all republicans, that “l’instruction publique,” besides educating children and youth, necessarily also involved reeducating adults and especially artisans and manual laborers. For tyranny cannot easily reestablish itself without restoring ignorance first: in fact, affirmed Lanthenas (another of the reformers conscious that the Revolution was in the main disregarding Rousseau’s views on education), echoing Diderot, Helvétius, and d’Holbach, weakening liberty and equality goes hand in hand with instilling superstition, prejudice, and error.
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According to Pierre-Claude-François Daunou, “grand vicaire” of the constitutional bishop of Pas-de-Calais before becoming a Convention deputy and who, with Condorcet and Lakanal, was one of the Revolution’s three foremost educational reformers, adult instruction should consist of three main
elements: public lectures and conferences to promote secular morality, what he called “l’éducation morale” (as well as teach agriculture and commerce); public libraries established in all parts of the Republic containing not only books but also natural history exhibits and antiquities; and, third, the fixed national festivals commemorating great revolutionary events and seasons of the year.
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A free society provides education for all its citizens, held Condorcet (doubly contradicting Rousseau), identical for men and women. All valid education in a democratic state should aim to teach “truths” on the basis of proofs and demonstrations, and how could the differences between the sexes possibly imply any difference between the truths being taught or the manner of demonstrating them? A separate or lower level of schooling for women, such as Rousseau’s admirers advocated, must inevitably institutionalize inequality, not only between husband and wife but between brother and sister and son and mother, causing undesirable effects within the family. What authority can “maternal tenderness” exert over sons where the mother’s ignorance renders her an object of disdain or ridicule in her sons’ eyes? Women possess identical rights to men and thus the same right of access to enlightenment, which alone enables women, as it does men, to exercise their independence and rights.
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Since boys and girls require the same schooling, contended Condorcet, they should be taught together by the same teachers, male or female. Women are perfectly capable of teaching at any level, including from university chairs, a claim Condorcet substantiated by citing the example of two women virtual professors who had taught sciences at Bologna University. Grouping boys and girls together in the same schools, besides, was the only practicable approach at the primary level, as it would be difficult to establish two schools in each village or find enough teachers to school the sexes separately. Familiarity between the sexes was no bad thing, added Condorcet, as it would restrain latent tendencies toward homosexuality.
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Subsequently, though, in his report to the Assembly of April 1792, he bowed to the majority view, discarding the call to teach boys and girls together (except in villages where there were sufficient population and resources for only one school). Even so, he adhered to his un-Rousseauist principle that what is taught should be broadly the same for boys and girls.
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“Friends of equality and liberty” must ensure the state provides public instruction that renders “reason” itself populaire. Otherwise, held Condorcet, the revolutionaries would quickly forfeit the fruits of their
efforts. Even the best-framed laws cannot render an
ignorant
equal to an educated person or emancipate individuals sunk in credulity and prejudice. The more the laws respect men’s rights, personal independence, and natural equality, the more potentially they also ease the path for the “terrible tyranny” that cunning can exercise over ignorance when the
ignorant
becomes simultaneously the agent and victim of the devious. In a land with a free constitution where “a troop of audacious hypocrites” creates a network of affiliated societies in a hundred other towns, recruiting uneducated accomplices and fomenting herdlike acceptance, they can easily propagate everywhere the same false opinions that infuse the main organization. A people devoid of education would be consigned hand and foot to the “phantoms of belief and snares of calumny.” Such an organization easily gathers under its banners every scoundrel, dishonorable talent, and ambitious mediocrity, and understands that it can capture power by dominating the uneducated mass through seduction and “terror.” Under the “mask of liberty,” the uneducated and ignorant would themselves become the agents as well as the victims of a shameful and ferocious tyranny.
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Inequality of education is one of the main sources of “tyranny” counted among Condorcet’s favorite maxims, implying the need to instill into the population through education a whole new attitude toward morality, authority, social status, and the state.

During the early Revolution, it was not only in the National Assembly that education policy was debated. Not yet a deputy, Condorcet published his views in the journals. Daunou first seized the public’s attention between October 1789 and January 1790 through his
Lettres sur l’éducation
appearing in the
Journal Encyclopédique
. The Cercle Social did much to promote awareness in France of the vital importance of the debate about l’instruction publique, creating its own national education committee meeting weekly working alongside the Cercle’s directoire and submitting recommendations as to how primary, secondary, and higher education should be reformed. Headed by Cérutti, the Piedmontese ex-Jesuit journalist ally of Mirabeau, it included the future Montagnard Joseph-Marie Lequinio (1740–1814) and Athanase Auger (1734–92), an educational and legal reformer especially eager for the new primary schools to inculcate civics, the new morality, and the rights and duties of the citizen.

If the Cercle strove to bring the Enlightenment to the masses in the cities,
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Cérutti and Lequinio, as the
Feuille villageoise
’s editors, endeavored to bring la philosophie to the peasantry. An early issue of
La Feuille
villageoise
of October 1790, explaining the Declaration of Rights of Man to villagers, insisted that rights, and the other key truths about society and politics the peasantry must imbibe, possess no basis in religion but derive from philosophy. A philosophe is a “man courageous enough to say and write all the truths useful to men,” writers whose books the parlements burned and whom they persecuted and banished “or worse,” as philosophes expound those indispensable truths ancien régime authorities did not wish ordinary folk to discover or learn about.
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The Legislative Assembly set up its twenty-four-member national Comité d’Instruction Publique in October 1791, and by the autumn of that year boldly ambitious plans were being aired. This committee, chaired by Condorcet, was charged with drawing up a comprehensive plan for reforming all stages of education. Until late 1791, relying on the constitutionalist clergy and those religious teaching orders still functioning to operate the schools seemed the only practicable method to transform the schools, given the lack of nonclerical village school-masters to provide an alternative in the countryside. But gradually the perspective changed. The ideas of Mirabeau, Talleyrand, Cérutti, Garat, Auger, Daunou, Cabanis, Lakanal, and especially Condorcet himself, slowly coalesced into a detailed plan for the reform of public instruction presented to the National Assembly in its mature form by Condorcet on behalf of the Comité d’Instruction Publique in April 1792.
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The guiding doctrine of the Revolution’s education theorists was that a democratic republic requires its citizens to be educated to understand and fulfill the requirements of their own liberty, their civic responsibilities, and duties, as well as contribute to the advancement of the nation’s prosperity and their own fulfillment and happiness as individuals. What is taught must therefore be unreservedly based on Enlightenment and science. Children from poor families must be given the opportunity to develop their talents on as equal a footing as possible with the help of society.
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Universal education—that is, education of all citizens—is essential to society, and hence the responsibility of society. Primary schooling must be universal, compulsory and free, and administered by the state. Condorcet’s report was printed, discussed, and widely applauded but as yet not acted on.

Condorcet distinguished four levels of education: primary, secondary, tertiary (the level of what he called the “instituts”), and higher education in what he called the “lycées.” The entire system was to be supervised by a national “society” or academy of sciences and arts. Secondary schooling was for the children of families that were able to forego
their offspring’s work for longer than the rural poor, especially children intended for work outside agricultural labor. Despite the marked dis-equilibrium between the urban and rural contexts his plan introduced, secondary teaching too, insisted Condorcet, must be universal in character and based on the principle of equality. Every town with four thousand inhabitants or more should have a secondary school equipped with a small library and a cabinet with meteorological instruments, a natural history display, and models of machines. In these schools, children from ten to thirteen would principally be taught mathematics, natural history, moral sciences, history, geography, politics, chemistry, and physics.
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The traditional orientation toward Latin, Greek, and theology would cease. Condorcet apparently did not think it desirable to teach Latin and Greek, or classical literature and rhetoric, at any level. This fitted with the wider Enlightenment preoccupation, reaching back to d’Alembert’s article on “colleges” in the
Encyclopédie
, with countering the emphasis on rhetoric in Jesuit and other pre-Enlightenment education and replacing rhetorical persuasion and eloquence with “reason,” genuine argument, and demonstration.
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Condorcet’s scheme envisaged primary education from six to ten, providing levels of literacy and awareness sufficient to enable citizens to follow politics, vote, sit on juries, and hold local office of the kind that any citizen would be expected to undertake. Every village or community counting four hundred inhabitants or more should have its own primary school and teacher. Besides reading, writing, and arithmetic, children would learn about the Constitution and the rudiments of philosophique morality and be taught about local agriculture and products. Human rights and basic (nonreligious) morality should also be taught to further strengthen awareness of political realities. On Sundays, the schools would feature public debates with adults present who would discuss social and political issues with the teacher and children.
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No people can enjoy an assured stable liberty, insisted Condorcet, if teaching the political sciences is not generally adopted in and outside the schools, and if the enthusiasm that teaching politics arouses in citizens’ minds “is not directed by reason, if it can be aroused by what is not the truth.”
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Universal, secular education effectively became a state goal, given high priority by the Revolution only after the republican triumph of 10 August 1792. But clearing the way ideologically still left many practical obstacles: How would the new secular schools, teachers, and schoolbooks be paid for? While Article XIII of the 1789 Declaration
of the Rights of Man and the Citizen required that taxation should be apportioned equitably among the citizenry according to capacity to pay, it remained vague about what taxation was for. As head of the National Assembly’s constitutional committee, Condorcet presented his expanded affirmation of the Rights of Man on 15 February 1793. Article XXII of the 1793 Declaration, more forthright than that of 1789, stipulated that “no contribution may be introduced,” except to support public needs on the basis of “utilité générale.” This opened the door to Condorcet’s costly schemes, as did Article XXIII (with which the Montagne concurred, but Sieyès disliked) that elementary schooling is the concern of all, and owed by society to all its members equally.
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Though supposed not to challenge the private religious views of parents and families, the task of “public education,” it was agreed, was to teach civics, morality, and the public sphere without conceding any role to religion. It was thus primarily the philosophique principles of the revolutionary leadership, originating in Mirabeau and Condorcet especially, that led to reconsideration of the exempt status granted the regular clergy’s teaching orders under the 1789–90 legislation. On 4 and 18 August 1792, the Legislative Assembly forbade members of the orders to concern themselves further with public education, and in effect suppressed the remaining religious orders.
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