Virtuous Competition among Citizens: Emulation in Politics and Pedagogy during the French Revolution

Shortly after the demise of the Directory and the First French Republic, the National Institute sponsored a prize contest on the question, Is emulation a good means of education? The contest, as historian Martin Staum has noted, was one of several means by which the academy hoped to help reconstruct a democratic society no longer based on legal inequality. Emulation, as a means of encouraging the instruction of future citizens, was considered essential to this regeneration. ¹ Reflecting the broad significance of this concept, the respondents hardly limited their commentary to emulation in the schoolhouse. Rather, they described emulation more broadly as a type of virtuous competitiveness natural to all men. "The sentiment of emulation," wrote Georges-Marie Raymond in his contest essay, "is a law of human nature, which is stamped on the heart of man by the same hand that formed him; and in fact, this sentiment has become the principal motive for human action." ²

I would like to suggest that this view of emulation was an essential quality of the free citizen developed during the French Revolution, at a time when the destruction of corps and privilege promised a liberating but also frightening transformation of social relations. With the demise of Old Regime structures, individuals were freed from oppressive institutions, but their social identity was threatened either by dissolution in a sea of anonymity or by the prospect that distinction would be gained solely through ambition and avarice, passions that undermined the civic culture of democratic society. One method for resolving this tension between individual and social needs was to reshape the concept of emulation. As a pedagogical tool under the Old Regime, emulation molded the mind and morals of the child, encouraging individual effort and engendering the values necessary for correct social comportment. After 1789, legislative debates over educational and professional reforms granted this process of moral development greater scope, expanding its goal beyond the scholastic setting to make emulation an inherent character trait of the male citizen. By reconciling civic virtue and individual effort, emulation relieved anxieties about the social implications of the Revolution and helped shape the character of the emerging liberal society.

During the eighteenth century, emulation was a concept in flux, shifting from imitation to competition in both the pedagogical domain and in broader social contexts. Emulation as imitation was a key precept in the early-seventeenth-century Jesuit collège, where copying exemplary models made classical studies an essential component in the development of moral character. Young boys were expected not simply to memorize, translate, or copy Latin and Greek texts, but also to imitate or emulate the heroic characters and principles described therein. One of the key lessons that the ancients provided was that civic virtue, the ability to act disinterestedly for the common good, was an essential component of public life. Once he passed the threshold of adulthood, the young man was supposed to be devout and docile in matters of religion. In society at large, he was also expected to behave with the virtuous self-sacrifice of Brutus and Cato and the justice and disinterestedness of Solon. The role of examples in both scholastic and virtuous emulation meant that the teacher himself became an exemplary model. Success in maintaining discipline came as much from his ability to inspire admiration and attempts at imitation as from the threat of punishment. Indeed, for the Jesuits, emulation was attractive precisely because it reduced the need for punishment. The Old Regime teacher, therefore, was expected to be "gentle," "honest," "obedient" and, of course, "pious," as well as knowledgeable.³

By the end of the Old Regime, this emphasis on imitation had become more competitive, more public, and more focused on encouraging competence and social productivity rather than the inculcation of virtue. In the collège experience of emulation after 1700, simple imitation of text and teacher was superseded by the increasingly...