Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (74 page)

Although Brissotins and Montagnards plainly intended different things under the heading of education, they mostly agreed that free, uniform, and universal primary schooling was indispensable to a society based on liberty and equality. All children in every canton of every department should have access to primary schools not only to learn arithmetic, reading, and writing, and to speak “correctly,” but also learn the Rights of Man and the principles of the Revolution, Constitution, and government of France. Almost all the revolutionaries proved hostile to encouraging or teaching in local dialects, patois, and regional languages, such as Provencal, Breton, Flemish, and Basque. All children should be taught a common, centralized French language, study elementary geography and the history of the world’s peoples by epochs, and imbibe secular morality detached from religion “without which neither liberty nor happiness on earth,” as the Montagnard Montgilbert put it, “can exist for men.”
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The essential function of the public elementary schools, the Brissotins envisaged, was to equalize opportunity, establish the hegemony of talent, and ensure equality between social classes, as well as (potentially) between men and women. Higher education was to provide a
modernized curriculum and serve the whole of society and not simply the gifted, with advanced education organized to produce the individuals of superior talents needed to staff the administration, magistracies, and higher political councils of the Republic, as well as its seats of learning, schools, and institutes. It was precisely a major function of primary education, argued Concorcet, to enable the mass of the citizenry to recognize those enlightened men to whom they could best and most safely entrust their interests, and of secondary and tertiary education to supply the stream of talent the people need to enshrine and protect their rights and safeguard their happiness. In this connection Condorcet stressed the need for special provisions for youths of superior talents lacking means to pay for higher education.
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Condorcet and his colleagues thought that the teaching of every discipline at all levels of schooling needed to be revolutionized. Society must acquire a wholly new conception of, for example, history (
une histoire toute nouvelle
). Instead of being about kings and military exploits, and still less religion, history should be about the “rights of men and the vicissitudes to which these have everywhere been subjected, and the knowledge and enjoyment of these rights.” History should be a study where the wisdom and prosperity of nations is judged according to their ranking regarding men’s rights, the advance and retreat of social inequality, the historical process that constitutes “almost the sole source” and measure of the well-being and misery of civilized men.
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The system envisaged in 1791–93 was intended to accomplish a wide spectrum of effects but along divergent lines depending on whether one’s ideological preferences were democratic republican or Montagnard.
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Brissotin plans for educational reforms faced stiff opposition from the Montagne, who detected an affront to equality in Condorcet’s ideas, disliked his emphasis on developing talent through secondary and higher education, and had reservations about his proposal to strip religion out of education and replace it entirely with philosophy, science, and mathematics. Much of the Convention, either out of principle or because of the war emergency, was reluctant to approve his sweeping recommendations, and objected to erasing religion from education, at any rate, as drastically as Condorcet proposed. “Some philosophes,” recalled Levasseur later, “sought to minimize religious instruction in the name of toleration. Many Montagnards, filled with hatred of priests, agreed.” Robespierre and Danton, though, he recorded, did not but rather resisted, preferring to retain conventional religion in education. It was not only the war and the Republic’s difficult financial situation
that impeded the progress of the democratic Left’s educational plans but also objections to their aims.
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If primary and in principle secondary schooling was for everyone, tertiary education for children from thirteen to seventeen in the institutes, and higher education for youth from seventeen to twenty-one, Condorcet’s fourth stage, were intended for those with the talent and the ability to benefit from such opportunities. If the Montagne was deeply suspicious of this program, Brissotins and Montagnards could agree at least on the need to shut down the old university system, dominated by theology and law. The universities’ theology faculties had already been closed down during 1791. The universities were then comprehensively dismantled in 1792–93, the Sorbonne closing altogether in April 1792 and the endowments of its colleges being sold off; the other ancient universities—Toulouse, Montpellier, Caen, and others—were suppressed in particular during the summer and autumn of 1793.

Meanwhile, the old system of primary schools was in ruins. All leading figures in the revolutionary government, including Sieyès, understood the urgency of introducing a comprehensive new public system to replace them. From February 1793 when Sieyès rejoined the National Convention’s Committee of Public Instruction, he began collaborating more closely with Condorcet, Lakanal, and Daunou, and, in May, became the committee’s president. On 8 March 1793, the Convention issued an edict appropriating all surviving school endowments in an attempt to find the resources needed to implement far-reaching reform plans. On 30 May 1793 one elementary school was decreed along the lines recommended by Condorcet for each village with more than four hundred inhabitants. But efforts to put the plans into practice were dramatically interrupted by the journée of 2 June 1793, ending the Brissotin ascendancy and causing fundamental changes in revolutionary school policy.

On 26 June 1793, the latest version of the education committee’s general reform of the school system was presented to the Convention by Joseph Lakanal (1762–1845), a philosophy professor and Voltairean deist close to Condorcet who was later, in 1816, exiled from France as a regicide (he migrated to the United States, where he eventually became first president of the University of Louisiana). A philosophe and educator, he was also a prominent egalitarian and pioneer of methods of imposing progressive taxation, a specialist at devising tax forms that impinge on the rich. The situation was urgent, Lakanal stressed, as the old system of education had broken down, but nothing substantial had
yet replaced it on the ground, so that in most places youth was practically “abandoned to itself.”
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For both Brissotin and Montagnard Jacobins, public instruction involved far more than just school education. Both sets of reform plans envisaged a permanent system of public festivals and celebrations at the departmental and local level to commemorate the Revolution’s great events and principles, the seasons of the year, and other natural events. The Convention also considered establishing “national theaters” in each electoral district to accommodate large gatherings, debates, and celebrations, as well as drama, music, and dance. Where in the past the Church provided opportunities for local communities to convene in festivity, mourning, processions, and morally uplifting communal events, under the new order “public education” was rooted in the new festivals and the electoral districts forming the basis of France’s projected representative democracy.
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Brissotins and Montagnards disagreed about the character and form of primary and secondary education and, even more, over Condorcet’s and Lakanal’s institutes, afterward dubbed
écoles centrales
, designed to replace ancien régime higher education. The latter issue also inevitably raised the wider question of the status of science, scholarship, and advanced research in society, including the question of how to reform the old royal academies, not least the Académie Française. Almost from the outset, the latter’s forty members had been sharply divided in their views on the Revolution. As the Revolution itself became more fragmented, the split deepened. While Suard, Marmontel, and other Academy conservatives rejected the Revolution and its aims, pro-Revolution academicians, headed by Condorcet, Chamfort, and La Harpe, urged revolutionary principles and a program of far-reaching reform.

To the revolutionaries, the Académie Française in its existing format and the other academies, national and provincial, represented an unacceptable vestige of monarchical culture and patronage, uncritical, stilted, and top-heavy with ceremonies, eulogies, and court flattery. Mirabeau, backed by Condorcet and Chamfort, had initiated moves in the Assembly to integrate the academies into the projected new vision of national research. Royal patronage and deference to Church and aristocracy were to be eliminated from the administration, practices, and culture of the nation’s advanced scholarship and science, and the role of the academies, including those of the arts and architecture, revised to fit the Revolution’s core goals. But here a rift developed between reformers and those advocating the academies’ abolition. This eventually
became an aspect of the conflict between Brissotins and the Montagne, albeit on this issue Chamfort sided with the Montagne. Already among the project papers circulating in April 1791, around the time of Mirabeau’s death, was a vehement attack on the royal academies penned by Chamfort that was far too acerbic for Condorcet, who planned to reform, not destroy, the academies. The Académie Française must be suppressed, insisted Chamfort, since its entire way of proceeding was a survival from the ancien régime; its pre-1789 leadership, d’Alembert especially, had been excessively meek under royal authority (though Chamfort himself, Morellet later pointed out, had for years accepted this uncomplainingly).

Prospects for the academies deteriorated sharply with the Montagnard victory of June 1793. Where Condorcet and his colleagues sought to remodel the ancien régime royal academies so as to embody the Enlightenment and serve as a national network or “society” of research, debate, and consultation organizing and directing the nation’s intellectual and cultural life, and the entire national system of primary, secondary, and higher education, Marat and Robespierre were against anything of the sort. The Brissotins had wanted the old structure of privilege based on royal favor and status replaced by a new system of merit and honors built on autonomous, self-selecting intellectual distinction and excellence alone. Lavoisier and other leading scientists and educationalists, including Lakanal (who alone remained on the committee) after June 1793, continued to champion this strategy. But science and scholarly research now lost their former high priority for the regime. In fact, Marat and Robespierre stepped up the attack on the academies as refuges of elitism, prerogative, charlatanism, and imposture, as privileged, irrelevant, and detrimental.

Marat and Robespierre particularly disliked Condorcet’s, Danou’s, and Lakanal’s idea that the academies should be consolidated under a new institute or super academy, a national society or directorate of the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. For this was clearly designed to create a kind of senate of philosophes and scientists, largely independent of the Convention and the Jacobins in thinking, policy, and appointments, empowered to preside over the entire educational and scholarly sector.
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Where Condorcet’s vision meant enthroning the Enlightenment in a supervisory position, directing the educational system and ultimately the entire nation in esprit public via la philosophie, Marat and Robespierre intended a comprehensive dictatorship in the name of equality. Condorcet’s Enlightenment vision was a scheme
educational, moral, and scientific, and ultimately also political, nurturing a democratic republicanism in which the people’s attitudes and responses would be refined and elevated so as to become receptive to the ideals of the expounders of philosophy and social science. This the Montagne wholeheartedly rejected, though Romme, one of their main spokesmen in educational affairs, strove valiantly to combine Condorcet’s and the Montagne’s divergent positions.
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Cutting back scholarship and learning was inherent in the Montagne’s approach and its agenda, and this led to its plan, enthusiastically urged by Marat, to extinguish the academies, including the art and military academies, altogether. For his part, the painter Jacques-Louis David loudly denounced the academies’ influence in the arts, depicting them as a patronage mechanism inherently elitest and alien to ordinary men. Accordingly, the Convention abolished all the academies, national and provincial, on 8 August 1793, including, soon afterward, the military academies.
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The Académie Française, hallowed sanctuary of literary, intellectual, and linguistic studies, founded by Richelieu in 1635, held its last meeting on 5 August. When Chamfort heard the news of the academies’ dissolution, he was at Malesherbes’s residence at Fontainebleau discussing the implications of a change so shocking to some, defending it before the former minister and the philosophe Delisle de Sale.

During the summer of 1793, the Committee of Public Instruction, led by Lakanal and Grégoire, fought a rearguard action to salvage some elements of state support for scholarship and science. The Academy of Sciences at least should be spared, they urged, given its intrinsic usefulness to military technology, saltpeter production, and advancing chemistry and the war effort. The academy also supervised the commission, occupied since 1791 with overhauling France’s system of weights and measures according to universal metric criteria, preparing a new system likely to be adopted everywhere. Despite help from friends, Lavoisier’s attempt to rescue the inner core of the Academy of Sciences’ activities via a private Free and Fraternal Society for the Advancement of the Sciences was firmly blocked. The Jacobin leadership was adamant. When his society attempted to continue their activities, the ex-academicians found the Academy’s rooms, archives, and equipment all sealed and bolted against them.
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Montagnard attitudes toward science, scholarship, and research proved even more Counter-Enlightenment in character than their aims in elementary and secondary education.