Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (75 page)

When the finalized general education reform plan based on the ideas
of Mirabeau, Sieyès, Condorcet, and Lakanal came before the Convention on 15 July 1793, it was Robespierre himself who rose to block it. He spoke in favor of the rival, more populist scheme formulated by the “true Jacobin” Louis-Michel Lepeletier (1760–93) prior to the latter’s assassination by a former royal guard in January 1793 (
figure 9
). Lepeletier’s and Robespierre’s objective was to regenerate society on a Rousseauiste basis and “create a new people.”
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Universal elementary education, Montagnards concurred, should be the basis of public instruction. But Lepeletier, Robespierre, and even more emphatically Saint-Just, all uncompromising Rousseauists, wanted boarding schools separating children from their parents for long periods—boys from five to twelve (or later) and girls from five to eleven—to enable society to more fully mold their development, morals, and outlook. In every respect, Robespierre and Saint-Just wanted more emphasis on surveillance, physical exercise, and group activities.
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The most essential difference between the rival philosophies as regards primary education was that Robespierre’s was less concerned with fashioning enlightened, independently thinking individuals accustomed to evaluating proofs, less preoccupied with what he called
l’instruction
, than instilling virtue, raising children in a collective fashion, feeding them on frugal but healthy meals, and dressing them uniformly, moral formation he termed
l’éducation
.

In short, Montagnard education was not for knowledge, judgment, or critical appraisal, and least of all intended to teach civics, independent thinking, and political consciousness, as in Condorcet, Lakanal, and Daunou, but rather intended for mass indoctrination and Spartan behavioral and moral molding. Few of those passing through the Montagnard primary school system were intended to proceed to secondary and higher education. More Rousseauist than Mirabeau’s, Condorcet’s, Sieyès’s, Daunou’s, or Lakanal’s conceptions, Robespierriste education chiefly stressed primary schooling, viewing the nation’s children as pliable material to be fashioned by the Montagne to produce a disciplined new nation reminiscent of the ancient Spartans, hardened by gymnastics, consensus-oriented, and geared for discipline, austerity, and uniformity.
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This wide gap between education for Enlightenment and schooling for virtue and collective action, between republican Left and authoritarian populism, between the educational vision of the Revolution of 1788–93 and that of 1793–94, of course, directly mirrored the wider ideological rift separating the vying political blocs. Unlike Condorcet’s plan of teaching morality without any religion, Robespierre’s plan envisaged that children would be strongly imbued with “natural religion.”

Figure 9. The “Exposition” in the Place des Piques (today the Place Vendôme) of the corpse of Michel Lepeletier prior to his pantheonization on 24 January 1793. Image courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Another striking difference was the emphatic reversal of Condorcet’s scheme for joint primary education of girls and boys. Since character formation rather than enlightenment was now the goal, separating the sexes acquired a central place in Montagnard school policy. Throughout his writings, Rousseau’s concern when discussing girls and women, as Mercier, Mirabeau, and Cabanis emphasized, was that females had their own separate role in society and should become imbued with fitting modesty and good morals.
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While both boys and girls would learn to read, write, and do arithmetic, and sing patriotic hymns, they would
otherwise largely be taught different things, boys learning carpentry, surveying, and arduous gymnastics while girls were destined to “spin, sew and bleach.”
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Montagnard populist and democratic republican school policies were thus not just different but inherently antagonistic. The former was really a form of organized ignorance, the other designed above all to conquer popular ignorance. Cercle Social intellectuals saw themselves as the teachers of the masses, not just of an elite;
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Montagnard publicists utterly scorned such teachers. If most of the Convention showed little enthusiasm for the scheme to take children from their parents to educate them in boarding schools, there was robust support for a Rousseauist switch from education as promoting knowledge of philosophy, the sciences and arts to education as character formation, de-emphasizing the philosophique goals of learning and judgment. Rousseauism fused with anti-intellectualism typified Montagnard thinking and also pervaded the attitudes of other foes of the Enlightenment. A member of the Convention’s education committee who loudly rejected Robespierre’s politics but agreed with his Counter-Enlightenment stance was Michel-Edme Petit (1739–95), one of the deputies who attempted to indict Marat in April 1793. It was not philosophy, insisted Petit, but inculcating belief in God and immortality of the soul, together with Rousseau’s deism and love of nature, that were necessary for an adequate esprit public. Of all forms of aristocracy, “the most pernicious for republicans,” he agreed with the Montagne, in an impassioned speech in the Convention on 1 October 1793, “is that of science [i.e., learning] and the arts.”
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Petit’s address was a fiery exhortation against Condorcet, la philosophie, and “all the plans for education” in the Revolution thus far. An ardent adherent of Rousseau’s educational antiphilosophisme, he abominated the approach of the philosophe reformers, and especially their doctrine that “nothing concerning religious cults will be taught in the primary schools.”
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“Despite all the efforts of the Bayles, Mirabeaus, Helvétius, d’Alemberts, Boulangers, Frérets, Diderots and all modern imitators of Epicurus and Lucretius, the sublime idea of a God who rewards and punishes remains in all sound minds and all upright hearts triumphing over the obscure errors and brilliant sophisms of which egoism and crime are always in need.”
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Besides, the stress on history, geography, social sciences, and all academic disciplines was quite wrong, in his estimation, being of scant use to those destined for artisan, mechanical, or laboring occupations. The educational system should
focus on vocational skills and tasks essential to ordinary, everyday life. La philosophie should yield to “the ordinary” and the God of Rousseau, giving the religion of the people a central place in primary education. If the education reformers succeeded in prioritizing academic learning, sciences, and arts, they would ruin France’s children, preparing them for leisure and enjoyment instead of manual labor, for luxury instead of austerity. Primary education should be to prepare children for a life of work, austere morals, and “simplicity.”
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The primary school system envisaged by the Convention’s education commission came haltingly into existence in 1793 but only in the most skeletal fashion. Lakanal personally took charge of a pilot scheme in the Dordogne in the southwest in October 1793. Each of Bergerac’s four sections acquired an elementary school at that point installed in a confiscated émigré residence. Partitions and benches were furnished. The teachers, men and women recruited from the local société populaire to ensure that they had the right Jacobin and de-Christianizing credentials and attitudes, were paid equally, receiving the relatively high salary of 1,200 livres each, placing them on the same level as constitutional curés. To provide for this, a common municipal educational fund was established to which the town’s poor contributed little, and most funds were exacted from the affluent.
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Religion disappeared from the curriculum; family influences over the forming of children’s attitudes were curtailed. The republican quest to revolutionize elementary education then continued, albeit with the scope and length of primary education considerably reduced, under a package of decrees promulgated on 19 December 1793 proclaiming elementary education free, general, and obligatory in France.
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Municipalities were summoned to find premises and teachers, and pay their salaries. The Convention and its committees would supply the basic guidance and the textbooks. Close supervision at the local level would be via the municipalities and revolutionary committees. Marseille was among those cities where by late 1793 the municipality was actively taking concrete steps toward standardizing, secularizing, and expanding primary schooling.
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The Condorcet-Lakanal system of free, standardized, and secular universal primary education with teacher’s salaries paid by the Republic thus haltingly evolved into reality in late 1793, if in a degraded version. It was rapidly undermined within months, however, by the collapse of the Republic’s printed money and consequent rapid reduction of teachers’ salaries to unsustainably low levels.
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From the ambitious perspective of the plans of 1791–93, the primary school reform program of
1793–94 could be judged to have been a catastrophic failure.
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Many or most of the thousands of new primary schools hoped for failed to materialize. But measured in terms of the difficulties the Revolution faced, the Revolution in education was far from an unmitigated failure even in 1793–94, and its achievements went much further subsequently. In most departments of France, a substantial proportion of the planned primary schools eventually came into existence possessing a very different character from the primary schools of the past.

After Thermidor, the Conventions’s Comité d’Instruction Publique was drastically changed. Consisting henceforth of sixteen members chaired by Lakanal, it introduced a series of key reforms in the autumn of 1794. Especially important was the Lakanal law of 17 November 1794 (27 Brumaire of the Year III), which included the words “ignorance and barbarism will not have the triumphs they promised themselves!” The changes marked the complete overturning of Montagnard insistence on character formation and equality of attainment as the central principles of children’s schooling while especially repudiating Marat’s and Robespierre’s views on Enlightenment, adult education, and higher education.
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It also reintroduced an element of choice for parents, allowing the continuance of private religious schools where approved by local authorities. Primary schools were now to be maintained at the rate of one for every thousand inhabitants, to be divided into boys’ and girls’ sections. Departments were advised as to how many schools and teachers each of their districts was to maintain. Teachers were to be recruited and paid by departmental and civic authorities at nationally fixed rates, 1,200 livres remaining the level for most teachers.

The attempt to place the entire cost of the education reforms on the public purse at a time of such difficulties and exigency greatly hindered realization of the plans especially for universal, free, and compulsory primary education. Administrative difficulties and serious disequilibriums between town and country, and between different districts, abounded. After the advent of the Constitution of 1795, which authorized the functioning of private religious schools, triggering a proliferation of what republicans called “écoles anti-républicaines,” especially during the years 1795–97, rival private Catholic schools cut into the numbers of teachers available for the public schools and their ability to function. The revised education law framed by Daunou and adopted by the legislature on 25 and 26 October 1795 was hurriedly framed, encouraged the reemergence of private schools, and notably failed to boost provision of teachers in public primary schools or
their supervision by the state. Daunou, even earlier in 1793, always displayed considerably less enthusiasm than Condorcet, Lakanal, or Romme for measures prioritizing teachers paid and supervised by the state over private teachers.
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Nevertheless, a substantial minority of the planned schools were functioning within two years of the Lakanal decree.
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More impressive were developments in tertiary and higher education. Although it took time, the network of écoles centrales (the realization of Condorcet’s lycées) eventually became the Revolution’s most concrete educational legacy. In the proposed draft law on secondary and tertiary education of December 1794, the écoles centrales differed little from Condorcet’s earlier instituts and, like the latter, also came under the supervision of the planned Institut National des Sciences and des Arts, except that Lakanal added plans, inspired partly by Adam Smith, to teach commerce and agriculture as well as the sciences and academic subjects. Comprehensive formal suppression of secondary and higher education colleges in France and their replacement by the écoles centrales, one in each departmental capital, on the lines recommended by Condorcet and Lakanal began in earnest with the Convention’s decree of 25 February 1795.
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Financial exigency and the pressures of war certainly caused delays, as did the difficulties created by the wide gap left by the Daunou law between the educational levels attained by the top year in the primary schools and the high starting level required by the écoles centrales. Yet, remarkable progress was achieved.