Read an Excerpt
The School of the French Revolution
A Documentary History of the College of Louis-le-Grand and its Director, Jean-François Champagne, 1762-1814
By R. R. PALMER PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1975 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05229-8
CHAPTER 1
THE COLLEGE OF LOUIS-LE-GRAND
1. A new college for scholarship students is established
The background and meaning of this document, which launched the new College of Louis-le-Grand, are explained in the Introduction. The plan to improve the use of the old endowments was successful; where they produced only 195 scholarships when consolidated in 1764, the number had increased through more efficient management to about 500 in the 1780's.
Letters patent on the consolidation of small-college scholarships and the establishment of a provisional central office of the University of Paris at the college of Louis-le-Grand.
November 21, 1763
Louis, by the grace of God king of France and Navarre....
Our attention to all that concerns the education and instruction of our subjects, especially those whose means do not allow them to enjoy the same advantages as others, has persuaded us that nothing would be more useful than to combine in the same College [Louis-le-Grand] all those scholarship endowments in various colleges of our good city of Paris in which the disappearance of income has long since brought an end to public instruction. By enabling the scholars of the said colleges to profit from the public exercises at Louis-le-Grand, we will restore the original situation in which the scholars had the advantage of instruction in their colleges by the masters of our University; and we will obtain for them a sounder education in morals and discipline, which had been greatly undermined by division among various decayed colleges.
We will charge our University with continuing oversight through a board composed of its principal members, and by so useful an institution we will form a prolific nursery of teachers who are needed by our State, and who will spread the spirit of emulation that is so desirable for the education of our subjects.
We will carefully maintain at the same time the rights and intentions of the founders; and since we have grounds to expect that the administration that we will establish for all properties of the said colleges will increase their income, the use made of this income according to regulations that we will prescribe will even reinforce the rights of the said founders, since a larger number of sons of poor families, whom the founders had principally in mind, will feel the benefit through an increase in the value of their scholarships....
We are the more determined on this arrangement from having observed, on the advice of the most capable persons in our University, to whom our court of Parlement with our good pleasure has entrusted the examination of this important question, that the University regards this consolidation as the only way to reform abuses that have slipped into the said colleges or to render so many scholarship foundations truly useful to our State. ... In testimony of our affection for the University, we have found no more appropriate use for the surplus buildings of the College of Louis-le-Grand than for the University to house its tribunal, hold its assemblies, and deposit its archives there....
We hope that the example of a wise and sound administration will enable our University, together with our said Court of Parlement, to complete our views for the improvement of education, by proposing the most suitable plans, without delay, for the reform or greater perfection of the full-program colleges of our said University, and even of all our realm....
2. Social origins of the students
This item is the only one in the present collection that is not an original document. It is taken from a compendious three-volume history of Louis-le-Grand published in 1921 by one of its professors of history, Gustave Dupont-Ferrier. In this passage he reports his impression of the social and geographical backgrounds of the students, formed in the course of his prolonged and detailed exploration of the records. In the absence of any organized statistics from the period itself, the passage gives an excellent picture of Louis-le-Grand after 1763.
The college drew fewer of its students from the aristocracy than it had in the days of the Jesuits. The thought that it was if anything less "popular" after 1792 is worthy of comment. During the Terror and under the Directory the families willing to have their sons at Louis-le-Grand, or "Equality College," were those most intensely committed to the Revolution and most hostile to the former status of the nobility, the church, and the royal family. The heads of these families were by no means lower-class; they were a "revolutionary bourgeoisie" of men in business and government, science and the professions, reinforced by skilled workers, shopkeepers, and property owners of many descriptions. The sons of such men at Louis-le-Grand, before the Revolution, formed part of a broader social mixture which included the more noble and the more humble at its extremes.
Before the Revolution the scholarship students were generally classified by diocese, rather than by province, civil district, seigneury or town. The ecclesiastical origin of most of the endowments is shown in this way, as in so many others. ... The part of France most productive of scholarship students was the territory between the Loire, the English Channel and the northeastern frontier; hence, Flanders and Cambrésis, Ponthieu, Artois, Picardy, Normandy, Brittany, Maine, Touraine, lie de France, Champagne, the county of Rethel, and the two Burgundies. Besides this group, one other region yielded many scholars: the Massif Central and adjoining regions, notably Auvergne, Velay, Vivarais, Limousin, Perigord, and Bourbonnais. The ecclesiastical province of Narbonne was an annex....
The presence of paying students, unlike that of scholarship holders, reflected choices made by their parents. By noting the homes of the parents we can judge the force of attraction of our college on various regions of France and on some foreign countries. It seems certain that more than half the paying students came from families residing in Paris or its immediate environs as far as twenty or thirty leagues away. There were some from Picardy, Champagne and Lorraine, a few from Anjou and Brittany, almost none from Normandy and the South. Colonials and foreigners were even more conspicuously absent. The small group of Language students may be added, which included a few boys born of French parents at Constantinople and in the Levant. Until the end of the Old Regime our college was neither mainly Parisian not yet truly national; too many provinces were not represented....
In a word, by geographical origin, our establishment after 1763 was very different from what it had been in the time of the Jesuit Fathers; boys from the South, the West, the colonies and foreign countries no longer took the road to old Louis-le-Grand.
The same shift occurred in the social composition of both paying and scholarship students. A few nobles continued to come; we find boys in the college from the families of Castlenau, La Morandière, Saint-James, Clermont-Tonnerre, and Rohan-Soubise. But after 1763 they were the exceptions; the higher nobility is hardly represented; the nobility of the robe is, however, less rare. The new Louis-le-Grand received above all the sons of subordinate officers in the households of the king or princes; sons of lawyers, attorneys, notaries, court clerks, and bailiffs; of mathematicians, professors, writers and interpreters; also of postal officials. Even more frequently the college welcomed the sons of drapers, dealers in linens, and cotton and woollen merchants; grocers and grain traders; hosiers and haberdashers; jewelers, gilders, and purveyors of mineral waters; to which may be added the progeny of master tailors, cabinet makers, masons, locksmiths, bakers, and "chandlers"; in short, the offspring of the bourgeois of Paris and other cities, including men in business or in substantial agriculture.
The social milieu from which the scholarship students came was apparently much the same as for the paying students; there was generally little distinction, except for fewer coats of arms. Noble scholarship boys were the exception, but would include the viscounts of Montfort and Ségur, and the families of Vareilles, Guesdon de Beauchesne, Saint-Marseault, La Corgue, du Fresne de Virel, Montpesat and d'Olonne. The lower robe and plain commoners were the rule. Sons of coopers, glaziers, blacksmiths, binders, shopkeepers, etc., were legion. A quarter of a century before the Revolution the college was openly democratized.
Nevertheless, even after the night of the 4th of August, "noble scholarship students" continued to be appointed in 1790. On the whole, indeed, it seems that the social milieu of the scholarship students was slightly higher from 1792 to I797 than it had been a few years earlier; a third of our youth were now the sons of civil servants; a third had fathers in commerce, agriculture, or industry; and a third of the fathers were army officers, landowners, or simply men who lived on an income. It is very certain that the social classes fraternized at this time. Sons of hat-makers and stocking-merchants, barrel-makers and grocers, winegrowers, innkeepers, and house-porters rubbed elbows with those of generals, representatives of the people, and members of the Institute. Descendants of Alain Chartier, the great Corneille, and de Gressot sat on the same benches.
3. An abortive suggestion for a modern university
We have here a suggestion that never developed very far, but that reflects the diversity of academic planning in the 1760's. It was made by J. J. Gamier, director of the College of France and professor of Hebrew, in a little book called De l'Education Civile published in 1765. The College of France had never had any actual students. Garnier's idea was to create an actual student body for it by drawing on some of the older scholarship holders at the new Louis-le-Grand. There would thus be something like graduate work in the arts and sciences, corresponding to the professional studies in law, medicine, and theology. Such an arrangement might have resembled the development that was then beginning at Gottingen and other German universities, where the practice of lecturing and publication on a variety of subjects was opening the way to the modern university of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The French government a few years later integrated the College of France into the University of Paris, but conservative opposition in the traditional faculties was such that no consequences of any importance followed.
The Royal College [College of France], founded by Francis I for the reformation and renewal of studies, has been in a position for two centuries to announce to all Europe, as it were, the changes and the expansion that have occurred in public education. It was at the Royal College that we saw the beginning of the study of Greek and Oriental languages, Geometry, Astronomy, Medicine, and sound Eloquence. The Royal Professors, besides the services rendered by their lectures, have from the beginning published a great many works in matters pertaining to their respective subjects. No literary body in Europe can count, in proportion to its size, such a great number of publishing scholars. Hence our kings have always honored this Company with their special protection. Of course the weakening of learning and the frivolous spirit that have overtaken our literature have reduced the number of students in a School that teaches only serious matters, and that seems to exist only to improve the talents of grown men. But despite this kind of desertion the Royal College can still be regarded as the Seminary of Academies. The youth who come to it have finished their schooling and are attracted only by love of the work. That is precisely the kind of students that we want for the new institution that we propose....
The second place suited for the new establishment is the College of Louis-le-Grand or the Scholarship College. The purpose there is to bring together young men from almost all provinces in the kingdom, to whom the State offers a decent subsistence and a distinguished education. These scholars should be considered to be national students. It is appropriate to try on them an experiment that can only be to their own advantage as well as in the general interest of society. To add something to their education is to fulfill the wish of the founders, who brought them to the capital to receive a better education; it is to share the views of the University, which has assembled them in one house in order to give better attention to this portion of youth that is especially entrusted to it; finally, it is to comply with the views of a wise Monarch who has announced, in his Letters Patent on consolidation of the small colleges, that his intention was to use the new College as a nursery of trained teachers, who would then disperse to spread the spirit of emulation in all parts of the kingdom.
These two schools — the Royal College and the College of Louis-le-Grand — will be open to all who desire to profit from them and will suffice for the present, until time and experience will have shown more clearly what may be expected. There will be time to multiply them if the event comes up to our hopes.
4. A program of teacher training is launched
Although it did not adopt Garnier's plan (Item 3), the French government devised a program of practice teaching for the training of future professors in the colleges. As has been explained ill the Introduction, the agrégation was introduced in 1766. It disappeared in the Revolution, but was later reintroduced, and has charactered French education ever since. Its perennial features are already evident in this initial decree: it is for teaching rather than for original scholarship, it has a validity throughout the country, it varies by category of subject (philosophy, rhetoric, grammar), it is highly competitive, and in principle only as many candidates pass as there may be available positions in which to place them.
A slightly later decree of August 1766 specified the subject matter of the competition. The candidates, with variations according to the three categories, were to take three kinds of tests: one a written composition, one an oral argument or an explanation of the kinds of readings that students would do, and the third a kind of practice lecture, consisting of a half-hour of connected discourse and a half-hour of questions and discussion conducted by one of the candidates with the others. At Louis-le-Grand, to prepare for this competition young men were allowed to retain their scholarships for another year after the maîtrise ès arts, and to hear lectures by professors at the College of France. But there were never more than a handful of such candidates, and the whole development was interrupted by the Revolution. Probably the candidates are included under Philosophy in the table in Item 11 below.
The word agrégation etymologically means "taking into the flock," so that an agrégé is one so taken in, that is, a fellow or an associate. The phrase in the following text is docteurs agrégés, and they are here called "associate doctors."
Letters patent establishing associate doctors in the Faculty of Arts of the University of Paris
May 3, 1766
Louis, by the grace of God king of France and Navarre....
Article I. There shall be established in perpetuity in the Faculty of Arts of our University of Paris sixty places for associate doctors, of which one-third shall be especially attached to the teaching of Philosophy, one-third to the teaching of literature in the Rhetoric classes, and the other third to the teaching of grammar and elements of the humanities in the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth classes....
II. The said associate doctors will be required to reside in Paris, to attend assemblies of the said Faculty, to assist in teaching exercises, in committees, in student compositions for University prizes, in the annual contest and in other activities in which the Faculty may need their services. They will also act as substitutes for professors and teachers who are unable to meet their classes because of illness or other legitimate reasons, and be present at the defense of philosophy theses and other public exercises of the students, in order to engage in disputation against them or to propose questions when required to do so by the person presiding....
III. It is our wish that, beginning next October 1, no one may be chosen as professor or teacher [in the ten colleges] except from among those who are at present professors or teachers in the said colleges, or among the associate doctors attached to the category in which the vacancy occurs, and actually qualified according to conditions as set forth below....
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The School of the French Revolution by R. R. PALMER. Copyright © 1975 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
