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143 q Chapter 5 The Concours Académique, Political Culture, and the Critical Public Sphere The prizes proposed by literary and economic societies , when they are useful or add to the progress of knowledge, are an excellent institution. First of all, they inspire and maintain emulation, rousing minds, exercising them, and training them for observation and the habit of research, etc. And second, they facilitate the spread of Enlightenment. —Annonces, affiches et avis divers [de Toulouse], 25 December 1771 In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere—still the most influential interpretation of the public sphere in Enlightenment Europe—Jürgen Habermas argued that the liberal public of the eighteenth century, grounded in the intimacy of the conjugal family and facilitated by the rise of bourgeois consumerism, broke off from court society and established itself as a sphere of cultural action free from the absolutist state. In the story told by Habermas, the enlightened public sphere provided a range of venues in which private individuals could join together, criticize sociopolitical institutions, and exert their collective or respective wills on the government through the new concept known as “public opinion.” In his words, “the public’s rational-critical debate of political matters took place predominantly in the private gatherings of the bourgeoisie.”1 Over time, as the circulation of the periodical press facilitated the transmission of public opinion, the public sphere began to function as a kind of freelance political oversight committee, monitoring the inner workings of the state and subtly undermining the once-absolute power of European monarchs. The bourgeois public sphere, which regulated civil society, stood in opposition to the state and dutifully played the role of political watchdog. In France,Habermas suggests, the public sphere found its fullest expression in the early years of the French Revolution, when free political discussion finally achieved codification in the articles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the 144 CHAPTER 5 Citizen. Habermas then claimed that the archetypal public sphere quickly eroded over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the line separating the state from society grew ever more porous and as advertising and commercial interests drowned out the voices of disinterested political debate. Alas, the half-life of the rational, enlightened public sphere proved irritatingly short. Academic competitions complicate Habermas’s depiction of the public sphere. First of all, the concours forces us to reconsider the oppositions that Habermas placed between the public sphere and the state. In France, the state and the public sphere were always intimately tied together. One finds fault with Habermas, for example, when he argues that it is “clear” that the “[civil] society confronting the state” in the emergent public sphere became “separated...from public authority” (24); or when he claims that “bourgeois” civil society directed its rational “polemics” at the ostensibly irrational “absolutist bureaucracy” (53); or, finally, when he suggests that “the bourgeois public sphere evolved in the tension-charged field between state and society” (141). These statements contain a morsel of truth, but they also presume the existence of a unified and homogeneous premodern state. What Habermas never seems to consider is that the state in early modern France functioned (or malfunctioned) as a complex and often disharmonious entity. The academies, the royal agricultural societies, the intendants, the governors, the municipalities, the estates, the controllers-general, the bureaucrats, the king, and so on were all part of that composite entity known as the French monarchy. One should never assume that these sundry parts of the body politic always cooperated with one another. The crown quite often lacked clear chains of command or a universally approved political program. As a result, it often worked at cross purposes with itself. This chapter demonstrates that the concours brought to the fore many of the inconsistencies of the state. When a royal academy hosted a contest on tax reform, sponsored by an intendant, in which both minor bureaucrats and provincial savants (and even foreign concurrents) came together to think rationally about means of governmental reform, the wall separating the state from the public sphere simply falls away. Far from being a Manichean division , the state and the public sphere in this period often blended together so as to become virtually indistinguishable. Certain intendants, such as Turgot, and certain finance ministers, such as Bertin and Necker, valued, at least to a limited extent, public criticism of both governmental policies and deeply rooted social practices. All three of these individuals appealed to public...

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