Ital?" And he adds that " the only means for attaining an

end so desirable is to make Paris the centre of public instruc-

tion."

Besides the gain that will thus accrue to instruction, Rolland

sees this other advantage, that, through uniformity in instruc-

tion, there will be secured a uniformity in manners and in

laws. By means of a uniform education, " the young men

of all the provinces will divest themselves of all their preju-

dices of birth ; they will form the same ideas of virtue and

justice ; they will demand uniform laws, which would have

offended their fathers."

By this means, finally, there will be developed a national

spirit, a national character, and a national jurisprudence,

" the only means of recreating love of country." Is it not

true that the great magistrates of the close of the eighteenth

century deserve also to be counted among the founders of

French unity ?

401. Turcot (1727-1781). — In his Mdmoires to the king

(1775), Turgot set forth analogous ideas, and also demanded

the formation of a council of public instruction. He made

an eloquent plea for the establishment of a civil and national

education which should be extended to the country at large.

" Your kingdom, Sir, is of this world. Without opposing

any obstacle to the instructions whose object is higher, and

which already have their rules and their expounders, I

think I can propose to you nothing of more advantage to

your people than to cause to be given to all your subjects an

360 THE HISTORY OF PEDAGOGY.

instruction which shows them the obligations they owe to

society and to your power which protects them, the duties

which those obligations impose on them, and the interest

which they have in fulfilling those duties for the public good

and their own. This moral and social instruction requires

books expressly prepared, by competition, and with great

care, and a schoolmaster in each parish to teach them to

children, along with the art of writing, reading, counting,

measuring, and the principles of mechanics."

' ' The study of the duty of citizenship ought to be the

foundation of all the other studies."

" There are methods and establishments for training

geometricians, physicists, and painters, but there are none

for training citizens."

In sfcjsord, La Chalotais, Rollancl, Turgot, and some of

their contemporaries, were real precursors of the French

Revolution in the matter of education. At the date of 1762

the scholastic revolution began, at least so far as secondary

instruction is concerned. The Parliaments of that period

conceived the plan of the University of the nineteenth cen-

tury, and prepared for the work of Napoleon I. But they

left to the men of the Revolution the honor of being the first

to organize primary instruction.

[402. Analytical Summary. — 1. This study exhibits the

evils brought upon a country by an education controlled and

administered by a dominant Church for the attainment of

its own" ends ; and also the efforts of a nation to save itself

from imminent disaster by making the State the great public

educator.

2. The right of the State to self-preservation is the vindi-

cation of its right to control and direct public education.

The State thus becomes the patron of the public school ;

ORIGIN OF LAY AND NATIONAL INSTRUCTION. 361

the product it requires is good citizenship ; and for the sake

of securing this product the State endows the school, wholly

or in part.

3. The situation in France, as described in this .study, is

an aggravated case of what may occur whenever education is

administered by a class having special interests and ambi-

tions ; and under some form there must be the intervention

of the State as a means of protecting its own interests.

4. When education is administered in the main by the

literary class, there is some danger that the instruction may

not be that which is best adapted to the needs of other

classes.]

CHAPTER XVI.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. — MIRABEATJ, TALLEYRAND,

CONDORCET.

CONTRADICTORY JUDGMENTS ON THE WORK OF THE FRENCH REVOLU-

TION; GENERAL CHARACTER OF THAT WORK J THE STATE OF PRI-

MARY instruction; what was taught in the schools; discipline;

the situation of teachers; the recruitment of teachers;

what the school itself was; the peculiar work of the

revolution; the cahiers of 1789; mirabeau (1749-1791) and

his travail sur l'instruction publique ; DANGERS of

IGNORANCE ; LIBERTY OF TEACHING J THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY

AND piE RAPPORT OF TALLEYRAND; TALLEYRAND (1758-1838);

POLITICAL PRINCIPLES OF UNIVERSAL INSTRUCTION; FOUR GRADES

OF INSTRUCTION ; POLITICAL CATECHISM ; INDEPENDENT MORALITY J

THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY AND THE RAPPORT OF CONDORCET;

CONDORCET (1743-1794); GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS ON EDUCATION J

INSTRUCTION AND MORALITY; INSTRUCTION AND PROGRESS; LIBER-

ALITY OF CONDORCET; FIVE GRADES OF INSTRUCTION J PURPOSE

AND PROGRAMME OF PRIMARY INSTRUCTION J IDEA OF COURSES

FOR ADULTS ; THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN J PREJUDICES J FINAL

JUDGMENT; ANALYTICAL SUMMARY.

404. Contradictory Judgments on the Work of the

Revolution. — An historian of education in France, Th£ry,

opens his chapter on the Revolution with these contemptuous

words, " One does not study a void, one does not analyze a

negation." 1 A more recent historian of public instruction

during the Revolution, Albert Duruy, arriving at the work

of Condorcet, certainly the most important undertaking of

1 Thery, Ilistoire de V education en France, Paris, 1861, Tome II. p. 188.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 363

the pedagogy of the Revolution, does not hesitate to record

this absolute and summary judgment: "We are now no

longer in the real and in the possible ; we are travelling in

the land of chimeras ; we are soaring in space at heights

which admit of only ideal attainment." 1

How easy it is to say this ! To believe these facile

judges, one who would estimate the efforts of the Revolu-

tion in the matter of public instruction would have to choose

between a nothing and a chimera. The men of the Revolu-

tion have done nothing, say some ; they are dreamers and

idealists, say others.

These assertions do not bear examination. For every

impartial observer it is certain that the Revolution opened a

new era in education, and the proof of this is to be found in

the very documents that our opponents so triflingly condemn,

and the practical spirit of which they misconceive.

405. General Character of that Work. — It is not

that the men of the Revolution were educators in the strict

sense of the term. The science of education is not indebted

to them for new methods. They have not completed the

work of Locke, of Rousseau, and of La Chalotais ; but

they were the first to attempt a legislative organization of a

vast system of public instruction. It is just to place them

in the front rank of the men who might be called "educa-

tional statesmen." Doubtless they lacked time for apply-

ing their ideas, but they had at least the merit of having

conceived these ideas, and of having embodied them in

legislative acts. The principles which we proclaim to-day,

they formulated. The solutions which we attempt to put in

practice after a century of waiting, were decreed by them.

The reader who will follow the long series of reports and

1 Albert Duruy, U instruction publiquc ct In /.'< rtj>iti<>it, p. 80.

364 THE HISTORY OF PEDAGOGY.

decrees which constitutes the pedagogical work of the Rev-

olution will have witnessed the genesis of popular instruc-

tion in France.

406. The State of Primary Instruction. — In order

to form a proper appreciation of the merits of the men of

the Revolution, it is first necessaiy to consider in what a

deplorable state they found primary instruction. What a

contrast between that which they hoped to do and the actual

situation in 1789 ! I very well know that fancy sketches

have been drawn of the old regime. A very showy enu-

meration has been made of the number of colleges ; but we

have not been told how many of these colleges had no pro-

fessors, and how many had no pupils. And so of the

schools ; they are found everywhere, but it remains to be

shown what was taught in them, and whether anything was

taught in them. 1

Party writers who are bound to gainsay the work of the

French Revolution in the matter of education, generally put

under contribution, to serve their political prejudices, the old

communal archives. They cite imaginary statistics which

prove, for example, that in the diocese of Rouen, in 1718,

there were 855 schools for boys, and 306 schools for girls,

for a territory of 1159 parishes.

It is first necessary to verify these statistics, whose accu-

racy has not been demonstrated, and whose figures were

evidently obtained onl}' by counting a school wherever the

rector of the parish gave lessons in reading and in the cate-

chism to three or four children.

But there are other replies to make to the traducers of the

Revolution who tax their ingenuity to prove that instruction

was flourishing under the old regime, and that the Revolution

1 J. Simon, Dieu, patrie, et liberte, p. 11.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 365

destroyed more than it created. With' this assumed efflo-

rescence of schools of which we hear, it is necessary to

contrast the results as shown by authentic statistics of the

number of illiterates. In 1790 there was 53 per cent of men

and 73 per cent of women who could not sign their names

to their marriage contracts.

Besides, we must inquire what was taught in these pre-

tended schools, how many children attended them, and what

was the material and moral condition of the teachers who

directed them.

407. What was taught in the Schools. — Instruction

was reduced to the catechism, to reading and writing. On

this point there can be no dispute. The official pro-

gramme of the Brethren of the Christian Schools did not go

beyond this. The ordinance of Louis XIV., dated in 1698,

has been pompously quoted.

" We would have appointed," it is there said, "as far as

it shall be possible, masters and mistresses in all the par-

ishes where there are none, to instruct all children, and in

particular those whose parents have made profession of the

pretended reformed, religion, in the catechism and the prayers

which are necessary ; to take them to mass on every work

day ; and also to teach reading and writing to those who mil

need this "knowledge."

But does not this very text support those who maintain

that the Monarchy and the Church have never encouraged

primary instruction except as required by the necessities of

the struggle against heresy, and that primary instruction

under the old regime was scarcely more than an instrument

of relitiious domination ?

Most often the school was simply a place to which parents

sent their children for temporary care. Writing was not

always taught in it. A school-mistress of llaute-Marne

366 THE HISTORY OF PEDAGOGY.

was forbidden to teach writing " for fear her pupils might

employ their knowledge in writing love-letters."

408. Discipline. — Corporal punishments were more than

ever the order of the day. The bishop of -Montpellier, at

the end of the seventeenth century, forbids, it is true, beat-

ing with sticks, kicks, and raps on the head ; but he author-

izes the ferule and the rod, on the condition that the patient

be not completely exposed.

409. Condition of the Teachers. — That which is graver

still is that the teachers themselves (I speak of lay teachers,

who, it is true, were not numerous) lived in a wretched con-

dition, without material independence and without moral

dignity. In general, there were no fixed salaries. Wages

varied from 40 to 200 francs, arbitrarily fixed by the vestry-

board or by the community, in return for a great number of

services the most various and the least exalted. The school-

masters were far less teachers than sextons, choristers,

beadles, bell-ringers, clock-makers, and even grave-diggers.

" Attendance at marriages and at burials was counted at the

rate of 15 sols and dinner for marriages, and 20 sols for

burials." And Albert Duruy concludes that in this there

were substantial advantages to the school-masters ; J — advan-

tages dearly bought in every case, and repudiated by those

who were interested in them. "The more services we ren-

der the community," said the teachers of Bourgogne in their

complaints in 1789, "the more we are degraded." 2 The

school-masters were scarcely more than the domestics of the

cure.

1 Albert Duruy, op. cit., p. 16.

2 Doleances preseuted to the States-General by the teachers of the

smaller cities, hamlets, and villages of Bourgogne.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 367

Tn order to live, they were not only obliged to accept

these church services, but they also became shoemakers,

tailors, innkeepers, millers, etc. The teacher of the com-

mune of Angles, in the High Alps, was a "barbers'

surgeon."

Thus there was no assured salary, and consequently no

moral consideration. " In the communes, teachers were

regarded as strangers and not as citizens ; like tramps and

vagrants, they were not admitted to the assemblies of the

commune."

410. The Recruitment or Teachers. — Nowhere were

there normal schools for the training of teachers. The

schools were entrusted to the first comer. The bishop

granted his approbation, or permission to teach, after an

examination of the most summary kind. The duties of

teaching were the means of subsistence which were accepted

without call and without serious preparation. In Provence,

school-masters attended kinds of " teachers' fairs" for the

purpose of being hired. In the Alps, teachers were numer-

ous, but only in winter. They tarried in the plain and in

the valleys only dining the inclement season. They returned

home for the labors of the summer.

Consequently, most of the schools existed only in name.

" The schools," we are told, 1 " were in vacation for four or

five months." For a half of the year, the school-masters

were free to follow another trade, or, rather, to devote them-

selves more completely to their ordinary trade, which their

school duties did not always interrupt.

411. What the School Itselfwas. — School-houses were

most frequently merely wretched huts, wooden cots, and nar-

row ground-floors, badly lighted, which served at the same

1 A. Duruy, op. tit., p. 10.

368 THE HISTOEY OF PEDAGOGY.

time as a domicile for the school-master and his family, and

as a class-room for pupils. Benches and tables were things

rarely seen, and pupils wrote while standing.

In a word, the state of primary instruction, when the

States-General opened in 1789, was as follows: schools

few in number and poorly attended ; few lay teachers, trained

no one knows how, without thorough instruction, and, as

they themselves said, "degraded" by their inferior position ;

few or no elementary books ; gratuity only partial ; finally,

a general indifference for elementary instruction, which phil-

osophers like Voltaire, and Rousseau, and Parliamentarians

like La Chalotais, themselves lightly esteemed.

412. The Proper Work of the Revolution. — I do not

say that the Revolution accomplished all that there was to be

attempted in order to bring instruction up to the needs of the

new society ; but it purposed to do this. Every time a lib-

eral ministry has decided to work for the promotion of in-

struction, it has revived its plans ; and it is these same plans

that by a vigorous effort public authority has attempted to

realize in recent times.

413. The Reports of 1789. — Already, in the reports of

1789, public opinion vigorously pronounced itself in favor of

educational reforms. " The colliers of 1789, even those

of the clerg}* and the nobility, demand the reorganization of

public instruction on a comprehensive plan. The cahiers

of the clergy of Rodez and of Saumur demand ' that there

may be formed a plan of national education for the young ' ;

those of Lyons, that education be restricted ' to a teaching

body whose members may not be removable except for neg-

ligence, misconduct, or incapacity ; that it may no longer be

conducted according to arbitrary principles, and that all pub-

lic instructors be obliged to conform to a uniform plan

THE FKENCH REVOLUTION. 369

adopted by the States-General.' The cahiers of the nobility

of Lyons insist that ' a national character ' be impressed on

the education of both sexes. Those of Paris demand ' that

public education be perfected, and extended to all classes of

citizens.' Those of Blois, ' that there be established a coun-

cil composed of the most enlightened scholars of the capital

and of the provinces and of the citizens of the different

orders, to form a plan of national education, for the use of

all the classes of society, and to edit elementary treatises.' " 1