The Enlightenment in Practice: Academic Prize Contests and Intellectual Culture in France, 1670–1794 by Jeremy L. Caradonna (review)

Traditionally, the essay contest has occupied a relatively minor place in histories of the Enlightenment public sphere, discussion of its contribution to the intellectual and literary life of eighteenth-century France being largely limited to passing references in descriptions of the parent Academies. Jeremy Caradonna aims to rehabilitate the role of the essay contest, elucidating its distinctive contribution to Enlightenment practice and arguing that it provides an important new outlook on the contemporary public sphere. Making use of material from forty-seven Academies in Paris and the provinces, he outlines a well-defined and largely democratic practice in which anonymous submissions and complex judging procedures created an open and accessible route towards involvement in public debate, even for groups traditionally viewed as excluded from intellectual exchange. While the author touches on the concours as a tool of the monarchy under Louis XIV and discusses its appropriation by the Revolution after 1789, it is the intervening period that provides the most compelling evidence for his case. The mid-eighteenth-century concours was, in his account, a practical tool for communication between state and public: a forum for real critical debate about important contemporary topics like slavery and the urban poor, and a way for the establishment to engage the expertise of independent researchers on technical matters from street lighting to sanitation. It was thus a route by which aspiring littérateurs, scientists, and engineers could be noticed, gaining either the cultural capital necessary to enter the privileged academic world, or practical employment in their specialism. Caradonna’s somewhat repetitive exposition develops into a wide-ranging examination of how the perspective of the concours reveals the real breadth of the thinking, reading, and writing public under the Ancien Régime. As he acknowledges in his Conclusion, his study inevitably suffers from the abridging necessary in such a broad work. Intriguing individual case studies like the discussion of slavery are addressed relatively briefly, and he includes only a limited analysis of the literary aspect of concours submissions. Yet, while it can be frustrating merely to touch on such vast questions as the concours’ facilitation of artisanal contributions to public improvements, the interest generated by these brief descriptions is perhaps Caradonna’s aim. Each chapter might be a starting point for more detailed study. For historians of science, society, and literature, Caradonna provides both fertile potential subject matter and a framework for reading the concours essay as a genre in the context of broader intellectual trends. His interpretation occasionally seems to overreach his evidence: the presence of a handful of women in these contests does not negate existing work on the literary marginalization of the female sex, and his own description of the limitations of concours democracy severely troubles the egalitarian account on which he is perhaps a little too insistent in his framing discourse. Nonetheless, this work’s contribution to destabilizing a purely canonical Enlightenment is assured by the archival research at its heart: it is the scholarly documentation of an underexplored cultural practice that constitutes the most valuable aspect of Caradonna’s study.