Enlightenment and Public Education during the French Revolution: The View of the Ideologues

E n lig h te n m e n t a n d P u b lic E d u c a tio n ihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA d u r in g th e F r e n c h R e v o lu tio n : T h e V ie w o f th e Id e o lo g u e s T H O M A S E . K A I S E R That the social reforms of the French Revolution were inspired in large part by the ideas of the Enlightenment has long been recog­ nized. That the Revolution in turn molded the social ideas of the revolutionaries who carried the banner of the Enlightenment into the political struggles of the 1790s has been much less appreciated, largely because until recently relatively little scholarly attention was paid to the last generation of philosophes. It is the general purpose of this article to reconsider the relationship between Revolutionary politics and the social policy of the late Enlightenment through an examination of the educational program of the group eventually known as the Ideologues (id e o lo g u e s ), self-proclaimed champions of the Enlightenment cause and active participants in the politics of the Revolutionary era.1 The shifting course of their pedagogical notions across the Revolution provides as clear a demonstration as any of the political pressures to which the pro-revolutionary philosophes were subject and their sensitivity to those pressures. To the Ideologues, grouped around the salon of Mme Helvetius in Auteuil, the Revolution represented an essentially spiritual struggle for the soul of France. As they saw it, the Old Regime had collapsed principally because of its moral and intellectual corruption; those 95 96 / KAISERihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA who sought to reconstruct the new order were waging, in Condorcet 's words, not a "revolution of government" against a "despot" but a "revolution of opinions and wills" against "error and voluntary ser­ vitude."2 The new society, they held, would never be secure until a new system of education, based upon the principles of enlightened social theory, was established to extirpate "error and voluntary ser­ vitude" and to teach citizens the truths that made them truly free. Into their programs for the redesign of French education, therefore, the Ideologues poured their greatest energies and their highest hopes. What the Ideologues in fact encountered during the Revolutionary decade was a political struggle fraught with dangers, a struggle that would test their stamina and theories to the limit. Three characteris­ tics of the Ideologues' educational program and philosophy would be most affected: first, the degree to which the program was aimed at the removal of social inequalities; second, the degree to which the program would allow for and encourage academic freedom for teach­ ers and students; third, the degree to which the Ideologues would admit to the potential fallibility of the ideas they proposed as the basis for curricula. Concentrating more on principles of argument than on specific proposals for institutional change, this article will show how the Ideologues, prompted by political developments, al­ tered their program in these three respects; the result, it shall be ar­ gued, was an educational policy that came to embrace forms of elit­ ism and authoritarianism which the Ideologues at the outset of the Revolution had sworn to destroy.RQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA I The distinguishing feature of the Ideologue educational program down to the Directory lay in its attempt to provide the means for universal self-emancipation from self-imposed tutelage and at the same time to reconcile the freedom obtained through self-emancipa­ tion with social rationality. The lingering doubts which the pre-Revolutionary philosophes harbored with regard to the possibility of uni­ versal self-emancipation3 were swept away by the emergence of a politically significant popular movement, early in the Revolution, that made any so-called "aristocratic" program of education politi­ cally unfeasible. With the old academies torn down and the hold of the Church on education broken, most Revolutionaries looked to the P u b lic E d u c a tio n d u r in g th e F r e n c h R e v o lu tio n...