Gender based approach

 Darlyn Levy, Harriet Applewhite, Mary Durham Jone – three American

feminist historians, 1970s, published documents relating to French
revolution of 1789 called – Women in Revolutionary Paris
 Revealed that women participated in every major event of 1789 revolution.
 This kind of researches targeted to make women visible through history, not
necessarily of the masculine conceptions of society and polity.
 In 1980-1990s historians, brought about a shift in the historiography, from
studying women as such to exploring to how gender might be used as an
analytical tool of historical studies. These feminist historians widened he
scope to include revolutionary discourse, policies, events and cultures within
their analysis. Focused on how the revolutionaries re-fashioned gender roles
for men and women.
 Besides borrowing the new concept of historical analysis from various
disciplines, the shift towards feminist historiography centered on the
category of gender, also widened the range and kind of sources- now a lot of
nonconventional source of history writing began to be used. For ex –
biographies, and autobiographies, novels, personal diaries, plays, imageries,
etc - these sources dealt with that kind of subject matter which lay at the
threshold of the inner and the outer, kind of source material which enabled
the historians to explore how the particular kind of conceptions of
domesticated women, of what is in the public sphere.
 Many historians began to argue that the agency enjoyed by women was
greatly restricted because of the revolution – the exclusion of women from
the declaration of the rights of man and citizen, was neither an accidental
fact nor a prejudicial exercise, but rather they were excluded because the
republic was conceived as an exclusively masculine space.
 These are the two types of feminist historiographical trends, which often
overlap.
 Clear Goldberg Moses identify two major strands in contemporary French
and American feminism – one strand is founded upon the universal
discourse of equality, the other strand is based on the discourse of valorized
difference(being proud of the difference and imposing it). He says that the
first strand can be traced back to the experience of the French revolution –
 because the discourse on equality enshrined in the enlightenment was
claimed by everyone. For instance, early feminist thinkers such as Woolson
Craft, drew much inspiration from the French revolution. According to
Moses, some of the ideas formulated during the French revolution in the
course of women protest activities were to have extremely significant
consequences for the development of feminism across the national
boundaries in the 19th-20th centuries. Moses agreed that the principle thinkers
of enlightenment may have been misogynistic in their outlook, but at the
same time, they also propounded ideas such as the natural rights of equality
which were recognized by the revolution and granted to people.
 Marxist historians argued that articulate feminism developed in the women
of upper classes, wrote declaration of rights of women in 1791. The bulk of
women who played an active role in the revolution were socially tied to the
popular women.
 The unofficial pamphelets of poorer women, written mostly by illiterate
women who dictated their idea to scribe at the eve of the meeting of the
state’s general – spoke of the harsh conditions of their trade, like
overcrowding of the city hospitals, of the injustice of the grain collectors and
of the luxury of the bishops and the plight of the poorer priests. Sobul points
out that until the banning of the women’s club in Oct 1793, women
participated actively in the politics of the sectional organizations. Darlene
Levy and Applewhite argue that the concept of the militant citizenship, ex
the right to bear arms and to use force as citizens of the republic was an
important feature and important activity during the revolution.
 Society was founded on the principle of military patriotism – Society for the
revolutionary republican women in 1793.
 Olven Hufton – argues that atleast in the immediate sense the decade of
revolution ended up as a decade of debilitating women especially in the
women of working women. They were hit hardest of all by the economics
ravages and political instabilities of the time. They also fell prey to a number
of insecurities. She also sees the revolution primarily as an attempt by the
big city folk to control the masses of the poor peasants in the rural areas.
Rural women also resisted the Jacobin attempts of de-christianization
through innovative methods.
 How it was possible for women to subvert the revolution in different ways,
Hufton argues.
 Mary Jaccoubs interprets the imagery of the breast feeding mother, which is
central to the revolutionary iconography, examines it symbolically and
psychologically. Nation as a breast feeding mother to its children, the
citizens and how this brings the tension regarding the role of women at the
heart of the modern nation state. Women had become the symbol of the
mother nation, which would bind citizens in a psycho-social bond – all the
citizens of the nation are the children of a common mother, they are siblings.

Lynn Hunt’s Revolutionary Origin of Human Rights

 How the question of gender was linked to the bigger question of human
rights.
 She shows how the most deeply rooted prejudice of all, proved to be the
view that women were unsuited to political life by their very nature. She
says that although many thinkers both male and female had raised the
question of women’s status over many centuries, most of them laid stress
primarily on the women’s right to education, rather on the right to vote and
to contest. The status of women did not excite same interest, if measured in
the number of publications, as was evident was on the question of slavery,
on rights of Jew, on the question of rights of Calvinists. Partly this lack of
interest was resulted because they were not recognized as truly oppressed
like the others.
 Most of France’s female population worked as peasants, shopkeepers and
the like, yet they were defined primarily by their sex and relationship in
marriage, but not by their own occupation. It was consequently by no means
certain that the rights of man were imagined as applying in the same way to
women as well. Hunt although agrees that women question does stray
behind in the wake of human rights agitation in 17th century. However, like
all the other question of right, the question of the rights of women also
received an enormous boost during the revolution.
 This triggered a debate of who is included in the poor, the propertied, the
religious minorities, the blacks and the women. Question arose, on where the
line should be drawn, the question of citizenship drove the revolution into an
increasingly radical direction after 1789.
 However the reign of terror created the situation of paradox. It expanded
rights in certain directions, like the abolition of signorial views and slavery.
But at the same time, it curtailed the freedom of speech and activities of
women. In 1804, Napolean through his new civil code relegated women to a
legally inferior status.

Jone Landes took up the argument of the exclusion of women from modern
sphere. Argued that the crucial factor for women during the revolution was
not their participation but rather their formal exclusion from political life
altogether.
 Women were not simply forgotten or ignored by the revolution’s new
leaders, rather the collapse of the old patriarchy gave way to a more
pervasive gendering of the modern public sphere.
 The lines b/w public men participating in civic life at one hand and
the domesticated women caring for family and children were more
purposively drawn by Jacobins than even before in the past.
 Landes examines writing montesque, roussteau, and Condersit to
show how these shaped the revolutionaries ideas of a patriarchal
society.
 She shows how in the Persian Letters by Montesque, he cleverly
narrates the tale of a revolt against the domestic despotism by the
wives in an oriental haram who have been abandoned the untempered
rule of the eunanchs during their husbands or masters travel to France.
It features a strong moral lesson regarding what can happen if women
are either too free or too suppressed. Therefore the challenge is to
discover their proper place. In this satirical conventional European
travel narrative, outsider view the inside and readers are made aware
of what to a foreign sensibility are their own excessive social
 practices. Instead of dignified simplicity or pleasing delicacy, the
women of France have a crude immodesty.
 In addition, it identified women with some of the most distasteful
French customs which are open or public forms of pleasure such as
gambling and Fashion.
 According to Landes, Rousseaue’s ideal of virtuous citizen defined
virtues in extremely masculinists terms as it celebrated manliness,
virility, self-reliance and other virtues stereotypically associated with
men. Those behavioral traits which were popularly seen as feminine,
were regarded as bad, such as irrationality, susceptibility to strong
passions so on and so forth.
 Landes shows how even one of the most liberal French aristocrat,
Condorset, who also formulated the most developed version of the
early protest of the revolutionary period on behalf of the women, how
he also compromised because of his decision to base the rights on
one particular qualification. Condorset proposed that women ought ot
be eligible for elections to governing bodies as early as 1787. In his
most famous feminist essay of 1790, ‘On the admission of women to
rights of citizenship’……..
He also ridiculed the idea of founding a liberal regime in which
women existing rights and liberties would be undermined.
He rejected all prejudicial statements regarding women inferiority and
political incapacity. He wondered why motherhood and other passing
indispositions ought to be more compelling liabilities then gout or any
other disease. He says that the democratic principles require extension
of rights to all persons irrespective of superior education or genius and
he recalled many superior women from past epoch.
 For women’s purported lack of reason, he observed that there may be
two gender based forms of reason. He said that women are not
governed by the reason of men, but they are governed by their own
reason. He imitated that women’s interests may differ from men’s, but
he also attributed this as something which has resulted from legal
barriers. Women may without failing in rational conduct govern
themselves by different principles and seek a different goal. He
 pronounced that it is as reasonable for a woman to concern herself
with her own personal attractions as it is to inculcate for an orator men
to his own voice and his gestures.
 However, since Condorset also defined the rights of property owning
sections ofcourse including the molators, blacks, all who will pay
taxes, etc, this becomes a qualified bourgeoise and noble men. Their
rights were envisaged, they were thought free to exercise political
rights. But the same line of argument of Condorset meant the
exclusion of majority of women from political rights.
 Further, Condorset submitted that a liberal representative form of
government already served as a guarantee against the active
participation of all the populists.
He believed that women like agricultural labors or artisans will not be
torn from their homes by the task of governing the republic.
Condoret seems to have been arguing that property alone not race or
gender is legitimate criteria for citizenship in a liberal polity.
 He believed that because of the representation limits will be set on
wide scale democratic participation.
 Thus according to Landes, Condorset was anxious that once
emancipated, women will neglect their feminine duties. She says that
this proves to be the most challenging of all possible objections to
women’s cause.
Further Condorset promises most emphatically, that although women
should be granted political rights, they need not be expected to
exercise them fully, surely not to assume political leadership or to
wield real power. Still, Condorset disappoints his most misogynist
allies as he still questions the gender divide. Although the necessity of
performing certain natural duties might be a motive for not giving a
women the preference in an election, it is not a sufficient reason for
women’s legal exclusion. But ultimately, Condorset also subscribes to
the Republican or Rousseouist demand of changing women’s
behavior.
  She argues that the new bourgeoise political sphere was in many ways
more regressive than what elite women had experienced under the old
regime.
For instance, the authority, often very real authority, enjoyed by
actresses and aristocrat women who ran salons was severely clamped
down by the revolutionary regime.

Carla Hesse – The Other Enlightenment

 She tries to prove how during the revolution women’s writing, activities, etc
grew.
 She challenges the monolithic enlightenment as created by male
philosophers such as Voltair, Rousseou etc.
 She takes her starting point as the contradiction b/w the notion of an
enlightenment, and the traditional definition of The Enlightenment.
 Hesse follows some historians like Roger Sharties, Robert Dantian who
presented the enlightenment in social and cultural rather than purely
intellectual terms and who made us aware that there were many
enlightenments.
 The women writes whom Hesse has studies, they represent one of these
enlightenment. One that has been neglected by historians until very recently.
Hesse examines women’s relationship to literacy, publishing and authorship
in the old regime. She suggests that the gradual displacement of spoken by
the written word in public life, a process which was finalized by the
revolution led to a decline in women’s influence over language , particularly
since many women were illiterate.
 In contrast to the prominence according to a few saloniers by historians,
Hesse maintains that women were relatively marginal to the old regime
literary culture, and the number of published female writers were relatively
constant over a last few decades.
 Still as Hesse, shows, after 1789, the number of women writes grew steady,
even though the revolutionary ideology tended women to private sphere, and
even though there were increasing restrictions on women publications, a
growing literary marketplace led to increasing participation of women in the
 public sphere. Rather than silencing women, as has generally been claimed,
the revolution actually inspired women to become active participants in the
new culture it was creating. Women actually burst into print in
unprecedented numbers.
 According to Hesse, women’s writings more than tripled in this decade –
1789- 1800s. This coincided with the collapse of the old regime patronage
and privilege. Even during the terror and under Napolean which were the
periods of greatest anxiety about women’s public participation, women
writers were never systematically discriminated against as women. It was
what they wrote and published, rather than who wrote and published that
matter.
 Apart from some prominent exceptions, as a group, women writers were on
the whole, neither marginal nor aristocratic. Hesse offers case studies of a
number of prominent women writers to show how fiction served as a
feminine vehicle for philosophical inquiry.
 Similarly Hesse interprets, Isabelle Chariors novel ‘The three women’ as a
critique of the Kantian moral theory which denied women moral autonomy.
Chariors very choice of genre as well as the content of her novel challenged
the dominant philosophical paradigm.
 Hesse concluded thus that the novel proved to be the ideal form for women
to explore issues of moral autonomy and to critique their society. She argues
that literature allowed women to construct selves that transcended the
definitions of gender imposed by science and law, thus while revolution did
not give women political or legal rights, it did allow them to make claims to
intellectual equality and to invest a distinctive poetics of self-making and it
is this that Hesse calls – The Other Enlightenment.
 She identifies two strand of enlightenment – First strand was a Lockeian
tradition that emphasized political rights and equality. And the second strand
was influenced by the ideas of Kant, one which focused upon moral self
determination and the exercise of public reason.
Hesse’s focus is on the second strand, in which women define themselves.
She supports a broad definition of the term feminism, in terms of the cultural
production of womanhood.
She traces enlightenment in a long tradition of women’s writing.
  Historians have argued that women have not been active participants
in shaping intellectual history because they lacked opportunity of
education or access to institutional positions that would allow them
to do so.
 Hesse contains that women have participated in philosophical enquiry
but through an alternative genre, such as the
 She challenges a male defined concept of philosophy and asks us to
think about intellectual history in a new way, one that does not
presuppose the exclusion of women
 However according to Joan De Jean, Hesse’s account of the
revolutions liberating effect is based upon a wrong chronology of
history of women’s writing in France. At no time was French women
writing more crucial to the development of the French literature than
during the old regime. On the other hand, during the 19th century,
women writers in other European countries first became really
prominent, French women writers paradoxically did less to affect the
evolution of French literature than they did prior to the revolution.
 Despite this fact, Hesse plays down those accomplishments.
For ex – Maurice Levere’s bibliography, published in Paris in 1976,
wherein he tells that in the case of the period from 1687 to 1699,
when a new generation of authors was coming of age, 33% of the
novels were written by women. The genres that were chosen by the
women writers that were chosen by the women in 1790s were actually
evolved/created in the 17th century, i.e. in the ancient regime. These
genres flourished until the end of the old regime and they were
displaced soon after.
 Further in order to proof the revolutions’ liberating effect on
literature, someone should study those writers whose career was not
already under way.
 Hesse radically underestimates that tradition which she characterizes
as private and non-political.
Revisionist and conservationist scholars share two essential features of the
French Revolution

 Both group believed that revolution marked a step backwards for the women
group
 Both give importance to the idea of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and agree that it
was his highly contentious ideas that give rise to new notions of domesticity.

The best ex of the appropriation of this feminist historiography for neo-

conservative purposes is found in Simon Shama’s ‘Citizen’.
 Simon Shama depicted the 1793 trial of the Queen as one facet of the
stormiest phase of the sexual politics in the revolution.
 For revisionists, the Jacobins attack on Mary Antoniette, and other women
such as Madam Rowlan, as well as the general close of female political
clubs in 1790, are emblematic of pervasive Rousseauin politics. All these
events are examples of establishment of democratic despotism based on
Rousseau’s ideas.
 However, the masculinistic conception of the society that emerged from the
revolutionary process, should be seen in terms of a gradual development.
They did not acquire their final shape at the very act of the beginning of the
revolution. For instance, the kayars had put forward a number of specifically
feminine demands, such as the equality before the law, marriage law
reforms, and the protection of women’s trades.
 The year 1789 also witnessed the flurry of those radical feminine activities,
the opening of women’s clubs, reading circles and even established a
printing press. Even though the Jacobin phase bring some restrictions on the
participation of women, it should be seen as a process unfolding within a
certain conquest, not necessarily as something inhabitable in the beginning
of the revolution in 1789.
 Even when a masculinity discourse based on virility and strength emerged
within the revolutionary discourse, the fact is that the agency of women
developed to the proportion that it was feared.
The need felt by the Jacobins to ban women’s club in October 1793 is an
emblematic example of this fear.
 The articulation of the demand by women to wear arms as patriotic citizens
of the nation.
 There has been another conservative dimension or perspective of looking at
women’s activities during the revolution. It is argued that French revolution
frequently articulated an intensely conservative view of the role of women in
society which was paradoxically exemplified by the very protests they were
engaged in. Ex the centrality of women in the October 1789 journey wherein
the basic demand was the regulation of rising bread prices.. It is seen as an
expression of the conception of women as sustainers of family. Similarly,
their resistance to the de-christianization campaign is interpreted in terms of
their social role of defenders or sustainers of community values.
 None of these things reflect the focus on political transformation.
 However this argument runs the risk of exaggeration, since it ignores the
very militant and radical nature of women’s actions and that too on their
own will.
 It could also be argued that these conceptions of the social role of women
conservative though they were in many cases simply reflected the role that
women actually played in the French society. This implicit conservatism is
neither new nor remarkable. Whatever was remarkable and new was the
participation of women as active agents in the revolution. It was far beyond
their normal social experience. This radical potential of the mobilization is
undeniable and that is what needs to be referenced.
 However the focal point seems to have been altered since the past two
decades. For ex – Christind Faure wrote a book in French language in 1985,
and published it in Paris, its English translation by Claudia Foldman and
John Burkes in 1991, titled, ‘Democracy without women: Feminism and the
rise of liberal individualism in France’
 However the focus of Faure had considerably changed by 2005. This is
reflected very well in anals special issue on this history of French revolution
in 2005.
Now she began to draw attention to public speaking of women during the
French revolution. Besides the paper of Faure, this issue of Anals also
featured a range of vocal female journalists, saloniers, and writers.
 In a very recent historigraphical essay on gender, authors Clyde Marlo
Clumauzille and Guilleang Mazeau, call upon historians to not simply seek
out the romantic illusion of the proto feminism defended by a few heroines.
Millions of ordinary women using their discretion readjusted gender
relations in everyday life without having wished for it or without obviously
having to forsee the situation. Along these lines Claumezille just produced
an archival study of Parisian prostitutes. She explores their social profile and
analyses the fluid new popular sexual culture of revolutionary practices, and
in what language they were questioned and they responded. She also
theorized the prostitute’s interactions with the states as diminished citizens.
 When the directory imprisoned the prostitutes, they responded by tapping
into the official judicial language to demand justice not as citizens with full
political rights but rather as citizens without full rights.
 Clumzille argues that the police categorization of prostitution never
completely replaced the republican political category of citizens – meaning
the language of interrogation was influenced by new ideas of citizenship,
this is a change that is coming, not full blown but at the same time it is not
regression.
 There were limits in political citizenship for women, but they asked what
kind of citizenship women can claim.
 One premier journal of gender history in France dedicated its 2016 issue to
women citizens across the centuries and across the globe – the coeditors of
this journal, they argued that today it is no longer a question of one
citizenship but of citizenships in plural that is political, but also social,
economic, and cultural.
They suggest that social citizenship includes, access to social rights but also
refers to engagements, mobilizations, forms of resistance and arts.
 In other words, these editors have expanded the analysis of citizenship as a
concept. They go beyond legal demarcation of citizenship from above to
emphasize how actors themselves defined it from below in their work.
 Some of the historians who have produced these new works on different sub
categories of women, they have argued that gender identity does not matter
as much as other means of claiming or conceptualizing citizenship rights.
 Katie Jarvis has examined the politics in the marketplace and has tried to
show how work, gender and citizenship discourses mingled with each other
on the revolutionary front. Jarvis proposes that the Parisial marketplace,
their citizenship claims that women deserve their citizenship rights as
women but rather on the ground as food retailers they were performing
useful work and therefore should be given equal rights.
 They were thus invoking a form of economic citizenship in France which
was on the way to capitalism. As citizen workers they pressurized the state
for access to market stalls, or fair forms of price-control
 Jean Clement….. shows that the counter revolutionary women sometimes
joined men on the battlefield without concealing their gender identity,
sometimes perhaps even highlighting their gender identity. Several noble
women led troops against the republic and attained mythic status as brave
women, leading militias in the revolution.
 Dominique Goldnieau suggests that individual female soldiers could have
multiple motives to join the army. This may include the desire to escape
poverty, or to escape abuse or to follow the husband into the battlefield or to
express patriotism and to win glory or to play with gender identity. But for
women like Pauline Leon who lobbied publicly for women’s right to arms,
the rise of women as citizens of the nation inevitably held the centre stage,
precisely because the revolution linked citizenship with the prospect of
bearing arms.
 This recent historiography often identifies the recent revolution and above
all the Napolean age as more important than the Jacobin era for the crafting
of the notion of domesticity. One example is Lindsay Parker’s book,
‘Writing the Revolution: A French women historian in Letters’ – it is a
biography of a Jacobin wife, Rosaline Julienne. Rosaline was heavily
engaged in revolutionary politics, strategizing with her husband and son and
attending the conventional gatherings. But after the terror, especially during
Napoleanic era she withdrew into the family, and she was traumatized by the
twists and turns of revolutionary politics and violence. The domestic world
emerges as a refuge from the revolutionary confusion.
 The experience of women during the revolution represents really a
series of interlocking but contradictory processes.
 It includes emancipatory potential, as well as repression fighting a protracted
battle. One does not cancel out completely the possibility of progressive
change and the other aspect of revolution. Gender is at best comprehended in
terms of the dialect b/w complex conflictual opposing forces rather than as a
single line of development.
The history of relationship of men and women in the revolution then
discloses considerably ambiguities and considerable tensions. Such
ambiguity necessarily cancels out the possibility of smooth narratives
organized around a simple constant theme whether class, community or
gender because the identities or solidarities of people kept shifting and were
rarely clearly defined.
 Moreover it is important to analyze the revolutions short term but also the
long term effects on women and women’s right. This actually takes us back
to those scholars who have tried to understand the role of French revolution
in the subsequent feminist discourse and movement in the world around.
 The important shifts in the historiography on french revolution, through
perspective of class, gender or culture, they are not specific as such.
Globally historiography has witnessed such shifts and therefore it is this
time/context, is reviving a lot of older question and brining them into the
interest.
 The globalization of economy has brought newer important questions to the
attention of social scientists including historians. You see this in the analysis
of French revolution through class, culture, or even feminism perspective.
 October 31, 2023
Salient features of pre-1789 French History

 Uniformity of France as a nation state today is not something that was there,
as we know it today.
 All kinds of identities and entities are not given once and all forever, they
are subject to historical change and the same applies to France. Therefore,
like all others, French nation state is a modern nation state, and the
revolution has had a major role to play in it, but is not limited to it.
 It is a result of a very diverse kind of processes unleashed by modernity,
such as improvement of communication and transportation, centralization of
administration, homogenization of legal structures, and integration of
economy under enlarged borders of French state free from innumerable
internal barriers. Other forces include print,
 It was a transition of France from a politically divided society of orders into
a nation state which at least theoretically claimed to recognize the equality
of all citizen before the law, with exception (slaves and women in
particular).
Universalistic tone of the discourse employed equality to all.
 French revolution is important because it started these transition processes in
the entire world. Therefore it provides us a classic case to understand this
transition.
 Thomas Pickety’s understanding of the revolution in – Capital – first chapter
in his work begins with the experience of French revolution.
 France generally divided by 5 geographical zones. Wet summer, drought,
plateaus, etc – economic conditions have been different for these 5 zones.
 In the legal traditions of the pre revolutionary France, written law and roman
usages were common in Southern France. While customary usages were
given more important in the North. This also led to difference in terms of the
dominant inheritance practices in both regions. The law of primogeniture in
South – father could advantage one child in order to keep the property intact.
Family constituted basically the unit here, not the individual, since the
individual who inherits the property, will take care of the rest of the family
with the family property.
 On the other hand, in the northern areas of France, equal division of property
b/w heirs was the customary practice. Therefore, fragmentation of property
was obvious in the Northern regions of France.
 Linguistic variation – These legal differences were reinforced by linguistic
variations – Landock which was spoken in Southern france was closer to
Latin than Landoyle, which was spoken in Northern France.
 Economic Life – France remained an overwhelmingly agrarian society, with
rural inhabitants representing 85% of the population even in 18th century
France.
 Poor communication meant that there was little impetus to produce for the
long distance market outside the community, and there were strong pressure
to ensure one’s own supply for food.
 There were things that were produced in France for long distance trade, but
they were refined luxury items. The process of capital accumulation was
limited by mass poverty – is an assessment made by Roger Price.
 There were repeated cycles in which population growth first stimulated
production, but then the growth of population itself was brought to an end by
shortage of food, because there is a limit.
 Limited capital accumulation and mass poverty – but this could also be
looked at differently – but before we do that, this remained generally the
pattern of French economic development, before a qualitative change that
occurred in the 18th century, to be traced in the development of new
technology in production.
 In the modern period therefore, you do not come across the same
demographic crisis.
 Therefore, you see a constant trend of an increment of population in the
modern period.
There may be some moments where you can see a decline, but it is never
coming to a complete halt.
 Lower/smaller unit based productivity agriculture
 What is also happening simultaneously is that these moments of crisis are
met by proto industrialization which was in France atleast a rural
phenomenon, and this helped the French people in times of crisis.
 Religion – In the so called middle ages, or medieval period, you find that
Church supported the division of society in terms of those who prayed,
fought and those who worked. (three orders of the feudal society )
 However this situation was not free from religious disagreement, particularly
among the better educated sections of the society, a humanist interest in
biblical studies and a criticism of clerical abuses.
 By large, Protestantism emerged from this realization of clerical abuses or
the need to reform. It appealed to about a fifth or a quarter of the population
of France at some or the other time. In particular, it became more popular
among relatively more literate urban communities of professional men and
artisans than the rural classes or the poorer classes, uneducated and illiterate
people. The rural areas in France remained overwhelmingly loyal to the
Catholic Church, some exceptions were there like Ceventes. These areas
were also motivated by their desire to abolish the Tithes which is a tax
impose by the Church.
 In France the protestants got limited success. But they certainly left
everlasting impact, which you would see in the documents of Lynn Hunt.
For example – it faced opposition from the French monarch, then the
concordat of 1516 between the Papacy and the French monarch had already
established the supremacy of monarch on the Church – he was now allowed
to control the appointments of the bishops and the clergy as well as the
financial transaction of the church. Secondly, Protestantism was perceived as
a threat to the secular and religious basis of French monarch. Third in
comparison with the parts of Germany the press and the universities in
 France appeared to have exercised a lesser dynamic role in the diffusion of
new ideas.
 Even though protestants were not in a position to established their
dominance in France, but by the 1560s they had become strong enough to be
completely eliminated.
 Wars b/w 1592 - 1598 b/w Catholics and Protestants, both sides rejected the
possibility of a compromise. Result was, edict of Nantes signed in 1598,
which offered Protestants a compromised peace with politico-military
guarantee of their freedom and they were assured their right to freedom to
worship in the way they want. Zootowns were the towns which were mainly
located in the Southern France and the Protestants were given control of and
they administered these towns. The relation of state with the Church was
marked by interdependence as well as conflict. The clergy got appointments
to various state offices because of its initial monopoly on writing at the same
time that it represented the royal intervention in the appointment of clergy
and the claim of the emperor to being the direct representative of god on
Earth. On the other hand, the emperor disliked the claim of clergy that they
constituted the highest spiritual authority on earth.
 During the early middle ages, the French rulers collected the taxes to fight
particularly the religious wars, or the crusades, but they were not permanent,
or regular initially. On the contrary, initially, any attempt on behalf of the
royal authorities to impose taxes was resented by the nobility, clergy and
commercial groups. However gradually, the royal authority became
powerful, the monarch became to assert their superiority over local
seigniorial dues and rights. It presented itself as the protector of justice and
public order, on these grounds the monarchical authorities claimed their
right to collect permanent taxes. The misery caused by the 100 year war in
England and the widespread internal disorder, encouraged the notion of an
ideal government order. It was the vision of a state which is strong enough to
maintain order in a society. Although, bitter disputes over taxation
continued, the royal impositions were gradually accepted. Monarchy also
made efforts to subdue the military nobility by offering them the
employment or the space in royal service. Throughout medieval Europe,
Princes and monarchs had developed some of their authority by granting
 these privileges to those who came under their sway or shelter. In this sense,
French experience of absolutism was nothing unique. But even this is
important, because the king is bringing everbody in his network. According
to David Parker, the peculiarities of French development of absolutism was
such that by the early 16th century, we find a particularly powerful monarchy
coexisted with a particularly well developed tradition of provincial and
corporate economy.
 These provincial leaders have their own army, even when Monarch created
his own army in 1547 called Gendarbury, which had one lakh soldiers.
However, the provincial government was in charge of the troops, and they
recruited their own clansmen to their troops.
 Judicial case – From 13th century onwards, the French emperor established a
new kind of judicial body, called parlements, and these were comprised of
the officials appointed by the monarchs. Their influence began to spread
rapidly. By the end of the 14th century, even the matters of faith and those
pertaining to sacrements, excommunication, and various other kinds began
to come to this judicial body. Even questions related to marriage and heresy
began to come to the parlement. In addition to establishing parlements, the
monarch also established the court of sovereign, called Grand council. Its
powers were ill defined and very wide ranging. This court acted as both a
supreme court of appeal as well as a court of first instance, it was frequently
used by the crown to consider cases in which it had a particular interest or
which were politically significant. It could even revoke the decisions of the
parlement.
Limiting factor over monarchy during absolutism
 Presence of other foreign powers on the French political scene.
 The fantacidal antagonism prevalent amongst the royal family and the
provinces.
 Absence of an institution which might represent different regions and
sections, because the development of the estates general in France was much
less vigorous than the growth of parliament in England. It was not fully
representative of all French regions either. For this reason, it was incapable
of overriding the forces of provincialism and localism. Not a single meeting
of the estates general during the period of 14th to 15th centuries was truly a
 national gathering. The delegates from distant parts were generally unwilling
or unable to participate.
 The substantial political and financial privileges were enjoyed by many
towns.
 There were also differences in terms of taxation between different regions.
 Absolute monarchy and royal authority created newer posts at every level, of
fiscal as well as judicial administration, and these were often for sale.
 It is in this context that a lot of historians have emphasized the fact of
venality of office, as an important feature of French absolutism which also
led to its decline.
 Even when the royal authority adopted this measure of sale and purchase, it
did not provide fool proof solution to the crisis or challenges they were
facing, because there is a limit to all such measures.
 This process reaches a point beyond which it became impossible to expand
this network, which is also seen as a crisis.
 Even when , the authority thought of appointing some officers who were
called to supervise the realm at different levels, and tried to ensure that these
are the posts that are not open to sale and purchase, this could not happen
either because quite a good percentage of these intendeds were actually
working on those posts which were venal.
 Further these intendance also had their own traditional ties and networks
with each other.
 Even though royal authority constituted the newer judicial bodies, like the
parlement, in order to subdue the authority of church or ecclesiastical courts,
none of the existing bodies were abolished.
 Meaning a lot of courts to surpass, to reach the judicial bodies established by
the royal authority.
 All three measures did facilitate the extension of royal authority over the
Church.
 In the monarchy, the possession of land and financial resources in the hands
of the nobility was yet another limiting factor.
 The nobility economically and legally dominated the peasantry.
 They had the capacity to use force even sometimes against the monarchs.
 Nature of the revolts was more plebian, against the monarchy.
 The capacity of these nobles was strengthened by their role as the Governor
of the provinces and as the military commanders of Gendarbury.
 In this sense the system of governorship was both an instrument for the
extension of royal authority as well as a superb mechanism for the
preservation of noble interest.
 The governorship was not a bureaucratic form of administration but a
patrimonial one as they were also inherited or bestowed upon the holder of
power or patrimony.

The intellectual challenges posed to absolutist regime

Changes in History Writing
 Essay by Philliks Leffler
 According to Leffler, both conceived as well as open changes in History
writing, presented in the long run a challenge to absolutist group.
 He agrees that historians were severely constrained by censorship, by the
risk of imprisonment and by their own dependence on pensions and other
economic benefits to be received from the state.
 Alternatively if they decided to publish anything anonymously, then also it
was also not a very good deal because neither this brought recognition to
them, nor the risk of the destruction of the existing copies of such published
works could be avoided.
 Nonetheless, historians were affected by intellectual developments in their
environment where the opposition to absolutists monarchs like Louis XIV,
was growing from those around him, in salons, clubs or even those who
were exiled.
 Therefore historians adapted to this climate of growing opposition and found
alternative means to incorporate this criticism in their own works.
For example, instead of using history as a traditional instrument to support
the divine right of the monarchy, even the official historians began to use
history to urge upon a redefinition of the monarchy through a methodology
which analyzed the strengths and the weaknesses of the nation.
 They began to use such historiographical concepts as institutional change,
social change, cultural uniqueness and secular reasons, to criticize the
French monarchy without directly talking about it.
 It was described as history raisonnee, even the royalist historians began to
write national histories, which revealed a unique but fluid cultural heritage.
 Implicitly, and perhaps even unintentionally, these historians shifted away
their focus from the King whose behavior was expected to exalt timeless
virtues of the nation which was in process.
This naturally led to an interest in the question about the origins.
 By the late 17th century, lively debates began being focused on the beginning
and nature of French monarchy. This led to the assessment of the relative
importance of the French institutions.
 Further there were many historians who were writing about French history
from abroad.
 They were able to read a lot of reports about French history and
contemporary situations which were published in the journals abroad.
 They were also citing sources for the verification of their claims.
 When the edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685, there was an explosion of
criticism while some hugenots attacked the decision for its treachery, its
ineptness and stupidity. Other hugenots gave arguments which were for
natural law and popular sovereignty.
 When they discussed internal and foreign policies, they argue that the King
is accountable to his own people, be it worldwide, and these authors
substantially broadened the scope of history writing for the French
revolutions.
 These Hugenots writers expressed the economic and social hardships caused
by the ill-advised policies of Louis XIV.
 As political theorists, they also questioned the divine right of the King to
rule over a particular population.
 The latter tendency was visible amongst those left wing capitalists who
came to be known as Gerondins, because their main leaders came from the
department of Geron.
 The second tendency was visible wihin the group that comprised of extreme
radicals, who formed the nucleus of future republica party. Their real social
origin was in the Jacobin club. Of course it is difficult to trace the Jacobin’s
origin. One view has been, that their origins can be traced in the year
preceding the revolution, in courtelier club.
 It was an abandoned monastery across Siene, where radicals used to meet.
 They were also known as Montagnards, because they used to occupy the
higher seats in the assembly. THESE radical wings wanted to destroy
everything, in order to create a new social order.
 They were ready to pursue even violence for their aim.
 This later became a distinct part of the Jacobin ideology.
 They were the protagonist of republicanism, although they established their
network all over France, their base remained in Paris.
 The deputies on mission went to provinces, and it consisted on Jacobins.
 With the arrest of the King, and attack on the tulieries, you see that filantes
lost their way, and became meaningless because they were the supporters of
monarchy.
 Now the main division remained b/w Gerondins and Montagnards.
 This was also the time when various popular societies were established,
where professional men and journalists demanded for popular and wide
franchise and the right to recall the deputies.
 The lower middle class traders and artisans and the skilled workers, who
were the main clienteles of these groups. These people had some common
thoughts, ideas and demands. For example, they had a commitment to
democracy, they had a contempt for a moderation of the constituent
assembly, and they had a suspicion towards the king.
 It is in this context the final element the new situation was that France
declared war on Austria on April 20th, 1792.
 It is the time when first use of Guillotine was made on 25th April 1792.
 After three months, about 25000 members of the popular societies, and
national guards, they attacked the tuileries palace on 9th and 10t of August.
They massacred all 600 royal guards.
 The conservative legislative assembly members fled and came now under
the dominance of the radical members, under the control of the Gerondins
majority.
 Gross has presented an account of Jacobin’s social and economic policies,
by the deputies on mission in the provinces of France. He has studied the
work of Jacobins in less contentious zones. But the provinces had other kind
of counter-revolutionary forces. Gross shows how the conventional deputies
travelled from villages and towns across France, what kind and newer
policies they introduced and how?
 These convention deputies conducted field trials in social justice and
promoted a family ethos of fair shares for all. They did it by encouraging
people to reconcile their disputes, instituting famine relief, rationing
systems, setting up employment schemes, encouraging income redistribution
through graduated taxation, redistributing immigrants’ property and
common lands, stimulating educational initiatives, and above all, suckering
the sick, poor and the needy.
 Jacobins were not proto-Bolsheviks, rather they were proto-liberal who
differed from their Jerondin counterparts and from thinkers such as Adam
Smith only in degree not in absolute.
 According to Gross, historians have presented a bad image of deputies on
mission, because they have studied only the violent and ruthless henchmen
who were very small in number, rather than the large liberal group of
deputies, who avoided violence and were generous and kind. About 20% of
the deputies belonged to the hardliners like Jevocks, while the remaining
80% represented the mainstream aligned Jacobins.
 Gross highlights the views and the behavior of five deputies who he argues
were representative of the modern mainstream. He maintains that though the
welfare state experiments of the Jacobins or deputies on mission were short-
lived, these were not Utopian dreaming and radical ravings rather practical
and possibly sustainable schemes, instituted by serious minded and realistic
men.
 He also traces the institution of deputies on mission not so much to the short
term need to win the war, but more to the plans for long term familial
reshaping of society. These were located along the lines underscored in the
enlightenment, and lineated under the constituent assembly.
 Gross reminds that Jacobins ideological prudence often stands out in marked
contrast to the boldness of their language. This is a reversal of the work of
 Furet and other historians where they argue that the discourse determined or
shaped political behavior.
 When Furet noticed that the language of moderates and radicals were
similar, he demonstrated the radical nature of the revolution since 1789.
However Gross turns this interpretation on its head by minimizing the
ideological differences amongst revolutionaries, it also allows him to argue
that most terrorists were operationally no more radically than the other. By
this logic, someone like Robespierre will appear to be somebody closer to
Adam Smith or John Locke or somebody like that.
 Debate b/w Albert Soboul and Richard Mourie
 Sans-culottes were the coalition of heterogeneous social petty
bourgeoisie, such as artisans, craftmens, tailors, traders, etc.
 He suggested that aristocracy was their main enemy.
 In 1789, the hostility towards the aristocracy was shared by all
members of the third estate.
 When the crisis reached is height, the sans-culottes distanced
themselves from the third estate
 Certain sections of the bourgeoisie envisioned a compromise, but the
montagnard bourgeoisie and its Jacobins faction, which received
support of sans cullotes, they remained the determined leader in the
struggle against the aristocracy.
 However Soboul also recognized that the economic crisis had
generated conflict b/w the sans culottes and the upper section of the
third estate. Nevertheless Souboul does not treat this conflict as the
struggle of the have vs the havenot. Because the sansculotttes
included the artisans who belonged to the propertied classes.
 According the soboul the friction was b/w sans culottes and the upper
sections of the third estates. It was also b/w those who believed in the
notion of limited and controlled property ownership and the partisans
of total ownership rise, such as proclaimed in the declaration of 1789.
 It was the opposition b/w those who believed in controls and taxation
and those in favor of economic freedom. It was an oppiosition b/w
consumers and producesrs. Sans culottes denounced the respectable
people, the propertied classes or the rich/big man in general as
opposed to the little man which they were themselves.
 Therefore sansculottes were not against small property, being artisans,
shopkeepers or journey men, they either owned property or aspired to
own it. Therefore they favoured the institution of porpoerty, however
they were in favour of limited property, and opposed the big property
oners.
 In other words, they were not opposed to all forms of income from
investment, but only to the very wealthy people from the principle of
equality of income the sansculottes conceived that it was necessary to
restrict property rights over agricultural produce. Through a encesary
 lgical sequence, they came to critics free exercise of poreoety rights
atleast those that had been defined in the declaration of august 1789
and in that of June 1793.
 However the principle of property as such was never questioned by
sanscultoes, infact they were very attached to the idea of small
holdings.
 Secondly, they were urban consumers. They were against those who
controlled stable food supplies. They blamed the wholesalers.
Sansculottes were far more aware of their consumers interests than
their wage claims. They were concerned with the supply of food, the
sansculttoes insisted on fixed prices for food stuffs, they demanded
for a wage scale which was exceptional.
 Thirdly, they possess a hatred towards the nobility. They believed in
an aristocratic conspiracy against the revolution, and will starve them.
They wished to destroy privileges, they desired to establish equality of
rights.
 Soboul suggests that the maximum price control was fought for
persistently by the sansculottes not because they were intended to
assist the nation or national defense but to kind of guarantee their
daily bread.
 The sansculottes demanded that the tax on the rich people would not
only be levied on the money but on everything they posses. Anything
which he rich has in abundance which he doesn’t need, should be
taken away.
 They believed that education is the real way to elevate their plight in
society.
 They bought into the arena a series of coherent idea, which caused
them to appear to be the most advanced group of revolutionaries.
 November 28, 2023

Enlightenment and Revolution

4.1

Conventional scholars have identified following features of French

enlightenment -
 Enlightenment as a secular, scientific and rational response to the notions of
piety
 The French court had come to be effected powerfully by a renewed sense of
piety in the last quarter of the 17th century.
 These years also saw the publication of a number of works that were to be
widely read in the 18th century and which were to form the basis of
enlightenment or its emphasis on reason and rationality, what we call the age
of reason.
 The enlightenment writers aggressively put forward a secular view of life
and political institutions.
 They were not simplistic in their appeal to reason alone, they went beyond it
At times they balanced their rationality with the power of passion and
human emotions as well. Ex – Rousseau’s writings – political and passions
 Some of the enlightenment thinkers attacked Christianity for its antipathy to
passion and human sensuality. Reason also existed as the evocation of
passions.
 Faith in the progress and futuristic orientation of expectations.
 Idea of enlightenment is not a revivalist idea, not rooted in revival of past
glory, it is more in line with subsequent idea of liberalism where civilization
is seen as evolving to a certain stage to an advanced level in an increasing
order. Progress through certain rational processes.
 Recognition of secular and political notion of the rights of human beings. It
builds upon and yet remains distinct from the natural rights tradition of the
rights of human beings. It makes the state as a guarantor for the protection
and exercise of the rights of human being. The state is responsible for the
protection and exercise of these rights. They are supposed to uphold them.
 State itself has been created for the will of the sovereign for the purpose of
the protection and exercise of the fundamental rights.
 Freedom of thoughts and enquiry –
 It’s a phase where the state as well as church have their own system of
censoring the freedom of thought and enquiry – censorship and inquisition.
 However, it is not simply a mechanism simply to ensure that nothing is
written against the pope or the monarch. It is much more than that because
of another notion that existed in the pre-modern period- notion of distinction
b/w the two forms of article, distinction b/w the higher and the lower forms
of knowledge.
 Since God has created the world including the humans, how can the humans
posses such a greater degree of intellect which can understand the creator or
the mysteries of the God. Therefore it is not possible for the human intellect
to understand the mysteries of God.
 Therefore any research and writings on the mysteries of the Gods were
prohibited and since the king was appointed on his position because of the
divine will, therefore vagaries of the state politics were also prohibited as a
subject of research.
 Any such attempt that violated this norm was considered as heretical, or
seditious or both.
 It is in this context that the appeal of enlightenment writers or the freedom of
thought and enquiry should be understood.
 Philosophy as a an instrument for challenging the world –
 It was not simply an effective criticism or a metaphysical exercise, instead
the aim of the philosophical activities of the thinkers was, to change the
world. Rationalism was not merely a grandeur system of thoughts, rather a
perspective of action was also attached to it. Even the emphasis on reason
also implied scientific method of enquiry.
It was an appeal to acts and experiences.
 Application of the laws of nature to human society – they sought to explain
the laws of society and laws of nature and very often applied the nature laws
on human society. Through this the philosophers realized that the
contemporary society was not based on scientific values, that it had a lot of
fanaticism, and oppression as well.
 Popular sovereignty – in the course of the 8th century, the principle of
popular sovereignty was gaining importance. Accordingly, now the
relationship b/w the subjects and the ruler was understood to be based upon
the concept of social contract. This concept of the social contract reduced the
scope of the powers of the emperor because his mandate to rule was no
longer thoughts to have been based on divine right. This was reflected in the
debates on the question of taxation which became important during this
period in the struggle b/w the King and the Nobility.
 These issues and the move towards election for estates general intensified
political activities where clearly we can see the influence of enlightenment
writings.
 Religious tolerance – Edict of nantez – triggered a lot of discourse about the
rights of religious minorities, therefore the emphasis of various
enlightenment writers on religious freedom should be seen in context of the
relationship b/w the state and the church and the struggles around the edict
of nantez and its subsequent revocation.
 Comparison of societies – The writings of the thinkers were marked with
comparisons with existing societies – this trend was facilitated by various
factors like – the prohibited censorships which were not available in their
country of origin, but in other countries, very often many French thinkers of
enlightenment were sent into exile, where they read/experienced about other
countries, therefore wrote in a comparative manner, many writers also
decided to travel for the sake of acquiring knowledge about world.
 This comparitive thing did not sto only at comparing societies of Frnace
only wehre they travlled, it provided them a style of writing, and then they
also produced fictitious writings.
 Shadow of censorship – writers of enlightenment often called for the
freedom of expression, this is in itself an evidence of the fact that their work
was done in an atmosphere of censorship. Therefore they often published
their writings either anonymously or under pseudo names. This hints to the
kind of intellectual suppression in society in which they were living. They
used metaphoric language in their writings either as satire a mechanism to
escape suppression.
 Importance of education – writers thought that education can prove to be an
important instrument to promote their modernist project of kind of values
they wanted to inculcate in societies. However, for this, they felt that this
responsibility of function should be transferred from religious to secular
authorities. Still there are differences of opinion with regard to the degree or
extent of the involvement of the state as a secular agency in the sphere of
education.
 Enlightenment as a transnational phenomenon – from the late 17th century
and early 18th century itself, France had become the centre of the literary
culture of enlightenment, yet it was not confined to France alone. It was a
transnational phenomenon. Newton’s idea of the world held together by the
opposing forces of Gravity, or John Locke’s teachings about liberty in civil
societies or similar ideas came to be regarded as very important during the
course of the 18th century in France as well as other countries like England
and America. Still relationship b/w the enlightenment and politics, became
most clearly evident in France than any other country.
 Moreover, France also produced its own scientists and political theorists in
this period. These intellectuals challenged the wisdom of past ages. Like in
other part of Europe enlightenment in France had been preceded by the
publication of a number of works that were critical of the Roman catholic
Church, traditional Christianity and received wisdom in general.
 French parlement were involved in the struggle against the royal absolutists
since the 1760s. They evoked Monstequie’s belief in the intermediary
bodies.
 Limited enlightenment advocacy for limited transformation. They did not
generally suggest the overthrow of the government or launching of the
revolution. Most of the writers of enlightenment did not believe in direct
democracy. They respected the existing social order. However, they wanted
it to be based on property or wealth, not on privileges derived through perks.
 Enlightenment as a foundation of modernist discourse – the conventional
scholarship has built upon these features a certain kind of progress narrative
of human history into the modern period. It is generally called the modernist
discourse or narrative. However there has been a lot of resentment against
these characteristic features of enlightenment from 1970s onwards within
 what maybe called a revisionist point of view, pre-dominantly inspired by
post modernist historiographical traditions. These post modernist historians
criticized enlightenment primarily because they saw in these, the
foundations of a modernist discourse. This discourse is seen by these
scholars as the foundational cause of all that has been negative in the modern
period.
 Enlightenment as a heterogeneous social movement – because for quite
sometime scholars portrayed enlightenment to be the project of a newly
emerging middle classes or bourgeoisie. They portrayed it as an instrument
of the new hands of the newly emerging bourgeoisie which was fighting
against the nobility or clergy. However, as we see while discussing the
major thinkers of enlightenment, they came from nobility as well as from
middle class background and some even from lower middle class
backgrounds of French societies. Further, as per the revisionist
historiography, it not included the actual writers and philosophers but also
the readers, the debaters of these texts, and artists or anybody who
interpreted and transmitted these texts, then how can it simply be a
bourgeoisie instrument. Then it may be an important additional question,
that we need to look at the basic thrust of the enlightenment.

Major Thinkers of French Enlightenment

 Fontenelle – 1657-1757
 Pierre Bailey – 1667-1706
 Their ideas formed foundation of the enlightenment in France as it gathered
momentum in the subsequent years in the course of the 18th century
particularly in context of the policies of Louis XIV.
 Fontenelle was a writer and a scientist, who tried to make the implications of
the latest scientific experiments available to a more general readership,
wrote on a wide range of topics ranging from topics like political theory,
classic and science.
 Eventually he secured a place for himself in the French academy.
 His most influential work was, “A plurality of Worlds”. It was published in
1688. In this book he promoted the notion of Copernican Heliocentric
Universe.
 It is also true that Copernicus had advanced this notion as early as 1543, and
Galileo had elaborated upon the theory in the early 17th century.
Nonetheless, the Catholic Church’s condemnation of the theory of sun-
centered universe had obstructed its rise to prominence even among the
French intellectuals even in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
 It is this intervention made by Fontenelle which played an important role.
 Peter Bailey – Singled out the entire edifice in Roman catholism for his
vigorous attacks.
 Focusing on the edict of Nantez, which had provided previously a degree of
toleration to France’s protestant population. Important for Bailey because he
was a protestant, and he was compelled to migrate from France, as a result
of the decision of Louis XIV, to revoke the edict of Nantez.
 He left France. Since he had to leave the country, he moved into exile, and
then he was the one who started this tradition of publishing in exile. And this
tradition played an important role in the 18th century enlightenment, and this
we see in the writings of a lot of thinkers that we’re going to talk about.
 Bailey’s successor relied immensely upon this tradition and Bailey’s work
often printed in London, Amsterdam or in Switzerland and then they were
smuggled in France, and there they found avid readers.
 Publication of enlightenment had become a very successful business by this
time, these publication houses devised innovative ways of circumventing
these censorships. (Robert Darnton)
 In Bailey’s works, he attacked the fanaticism of the traditional Catholic
Church in the first instance. At the same time, he was also critical of the
developments of certain rationalistic strains that were founded in many
European countries at that point of time. One of his important works was the
“Historical and Critical dictionary” which he published in 1697. It is not
simply about the meaning of the word, but a historical and critical dictionary
of words.
 His works celebrated toleration and championed a society of pluralistic
views. His vision was not realized in late 17th or early 18th century.
 However, subsequent thinkers of the enlightenment championed many of the
same causes which were dear to Peir Bailey.
 Montesquieu – The concern that Bailey and had expressed was taken up
by other thinkers of French enlightenment, and one them was Montesquieu.
 Born in 1689 and died in 1750.
 He is regarded to be the first great thinkers of French Enlightenment. He was
principally a political philosopher.
 He belonged to an old military family in France which was granted a noble
title, in the 16th century for its loyalty to the crown. His father had relatively
small fortune, although his mother brought a great deal of wealth to the
family.
 Like many nobles families, Montesquieu also received his initial education
at home. Thereafter he was sent to attend a school at the age of 11. When he
was 14, he was enrolled at the University of Bordeaux. He became a lawyer
at the age of 19.
 Thereafter, he married the daughter of a wealthy local protestant, and she
brought a great deal of wealth in her dowry for Montesquieu and he needed
that to sustain his private studies. He continued to practice his profession as
a lawyer for sometime, thereafter he turned over the management of his
financial concerns to his wife. His wife proved to be a very skilled
businesswoman.
 Then in 1760, Montesquieu’s uncle died and he didn’t have any legitimate
heir, so Montesquieu inherited all his wealth. Now, he resorted to undertake
major studies of Roman Law, as well as started engaging himself in
understanding science. In order to enhance his understanding of Geography,
Psychology and biology etc, he enrolled himself in the academy of
Bordeaux, which was a local body of scientific thinkers.
 The influence of these studies became evident in his later works, particularly
his works on political philosophy.
 His first work is, “Persian Letters”. Published in1771, and it soon prompted
a considerable degree of debate amongst French intellectuals
 This work was styled as a series of letters b/w two Persian travelers during a
visit to France. In these letters he mocked the French civilizations and
customs, for that he used the lens of a supposed outsider. In these letters, we
can clearly notice a penetrating wave of Montesquieu attacking the
absolutist system of governemtn set up by Louis XIV, the Catholic Church
 and different social classes of France. In its allegorical portrayal of ways of
trockledyte, he initiates a coherent discussion of Thomas Hobbes’ 17 century
notion of state of nature.
 Observing the manner in which his works got huge success and prompted
intellectual discussion, Montesquieu soon left his provincial home, in
Bordeaux and made his way to Paris. In these years in Paris, he came into
contact with several English aristocrats who were living in Paris at that time.
From his discussion s with these people, he developed a kind of liking for
the figures of British enlightenment and came to admire the flexibility and
the greater freedom of English political system. Eventually, he traveled to
England in order to witness firsthand the country’s government at work.
 Following his return to France in 1731, Montesquieu decided to pursue
writing as a fulltime career. He published in 1734, a book, “Reflections on
the causes of the grandeur and decline of the Romans”. His interest in this
kind of theory increased further. He now embarked on a detailed programme
of study to explain the reason for the greatness of some states and the
relative weakness of others.
 Not only he read widely, he also kept as many as 6 private secretaries, whom
he dictated his notes and used them to conduct his preliminary research.
Much of the work of his project, Montesquieu completed at his country
home In Bordeaux, yet he continued to visit Paris in 30s, and 40s, where
participated in the world of salons, he continued reading in the King’s
library in Paris, and he attended the meetings of the French academy. He
was elected as the member of French Academy in 1788.
 By 1740 the outline of Montesquieu’s massive work on political theory, that
is the “spirit of laws” had become clear. Now he sat down to write it. He had
completed this work by 1743, however, he did not publish it until 1748.
During these years he deliberated over his arguments and considerably
refined them. It was a wok that eventually totaled 1000 printed pages.
 “The Spirit of Laws”, demonstrated a through comprehension of the range of
political philosophy that had been written by Montesquieu’s time, yet it did
not identify itself with any particular set of assumptions. The originality of
Montesquieu’s spirit of laws, and his vision as a political theorist can be
seen in the ways I which he took up the subjects that were common among
 the political writers during the time and accorded to it a completely different
treatment, which is a mark of his originality.
 Theorists had previously maintained that government’s should be divided
for the purposes of examination, first aristocracies, then monarchies and then
democracies. However, Montesquieu dealt with the spirit that he believed
produced each kind of these political systems. He argued that republics arose
from a spirit of human virtues, monarchies from a spirit of honor, while
despotism was the product of fear.
 Another feature of the spirit of laws, which proved to be quite important in
the later period of France, the US, and many other countries, was
Montesquieu’s principal of the separation of powers. He argued that it was
not enough for government, merely to separate functions, the legislative, the
executive and the judicial duties should be confined to completely separate
group that acted autonomously of each other. In this way, his political theory
anticipated the political innovation of the US constitution and the French
constitution.
 Although Montesquieu tried to avoid controversies, the implications of his
work were widely recognized and attacked at various levels at that point of
time. His ideas were condemned at Sorborne, the French clergy also widely
attacked his conclusions, his “Spirit of Laws” was placed on the catholic
index of prohibited books in 1751.
 Even though he continued to write in his later years, these works did not
capture the imagination of his times the way spirit of laws did.
 In the last years of his life, he continued to remain in contact with Parisian
intellectuals, he corresponded with philosophers and political thinkers in
England and in continental Europe.
 Voltaire – Born in 1694 and died in 1774. Voltaire is his pen name, real
name being Francais Mary Arouet.
 He was born in a wealthy upper middle class family, but he lost his mother
at the age of seven.
 He was sent to study at the Jesuit school, and college Louis Grande. After
completing his school and college, began his career as a secretary with some
private firm at Hague. The French ambassador sent Voltaire back from to
 Paris because Voltaire had developed an affair with the daughter of a rich
count in Hague.
 Voltaire joined a group of aristocrats in Paris who valued the young writer’s
wit. He wrote and circulated verses criticizing the regent of Duke and for
this Voltaire had to pay a huge price, as he was imprisoned in Bastille for 3
years, in 1717. However, here in Bastille, he began writing an epic entitled
“The Henriaed”. It was about France’s King, Henry the Fourth who ruled
from 1553-1610. In this work, he severely criticized religious fanaticism and
praised toleration. This was written in the background of Louis XIV’s
religious persecution of 1709. This work proved to quite controversial.
Eventually such arguments led to a lot of debate and struggles and strive
with another member of French academy, who came from a powerful
aristocratic family. This conflict result in Voltaire’s imprisonment in
Bastille, and subsequently he was sent into England in 1726.
 Voltaire’s early place was chiefly tragedies, and these were composed in the
tradition of Pier Cornell and Jean Russen. Therefore, he was seen as a great
successor to the 17th century classicism, However, during the years of
Voltaire’s first exile, he lived in London, and began admiring the greater
liberty of English life. When he returned to France, he published his
memoirs of his time spent among English people. These memoirs are titled
as “The Political Letters”. This work was published in 1734. In this work,
Voltaire provided key insights and underlined ironies of the differences b/w
French and English societies. So Voltaire’s writings are marked with
admiration for English life. Particularly the respect they supposedly gave to
merchants, scientists and literary men. He suggested the basis of English
society were different from the of French. He argued that British society is
not feudal like that of France, therefore the English society reflected the
freedom of thought and religious toleration. Even with regard to religious
matters, Voltaire professed to be animist. This trend was popular among
some intellectual in England at the end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th
century.
 Diderot
 Did not enjoy such an enlightened reputation, as was bestowed n other
thinker in France.
 Nevertheless, he became to exert a lot of significant influence on literary and
artistic sphere in the second half of the 18th century, primarily through his
role as one of the editors of Encyclopedie.
 Diderot came from a relatively lower class background of a craftsman’s
family, and he was sent to Paris university to study law or to make his career
in Church but he did not pursue any of these two vocations of profession, he
instead decided to be a writer.
 He ws the most versatile figures of French enlightenment because his
writings include a wide range of themes and this was finally epitomized in
his edited volume of encyclopedie.
 Like Montesquieu, he had a profound interest in Science, infact he
foreshadowed the 19th century organic theory.
 He also moved away from the neo-classic writing of French theatre. His
essays on art laid the foundation of modern art criticism.
 Diderot died in 1774. His last works are very important as they are reflective
of the spirit o enlightenment.
 “The first step towards philosophy is skepticism” – Diderot
 Encyclopedie was attacked by traditionalists of various kinds, as they were
expressing doubt. It was even subjected to censorship by Jesuits. It
represented completely in some countries as a very dangerous philosophy
and therefore it was repressed or suppressed or disallowed for circulation.
 Diderot was advised to leave France but he stayed there to edit the
encyclopedie.
 The first volume of encyclopedie appeared in 1751 and the project finished
in 1772.
 A revised edition appeared in 1782. The work of expanding and revising the
encyclopedie continue throughout the French Revolution, even after his
death.
 Diderot’s publisher originally wanted this project on French enlightenment
in the form of encyclopedie to be merely a translation of the English
 encyclopedie which was written by Chambers, and was published in 1728 as
a universal dictionary of arts and sciences.
 However, Diderot along with his co-editor, carried the idea of encyclopedie
beyond the original wish of the publishe to simply make it a translation.
 They undertook a massive work of compilation.
 The radical character of some of the articles of encyclopedie became
possible because the essays were solicited from like-minded people, this
soon led the government to censor parts of the publication.
 The French encyclopedie proved to be a significant work for many of the
new teachings like arts, literature and sciences among the readers of France
and Europe
 The men who wrote the encylopedie used to meet at madame Jefferson’s
house, and this is important for linking saloons and enlightenment.
 This great project of encyclopedie which summoned science and arts etc,
and whatever wisdom that existed in a single set of volumes, and therefore it
is considered as one of the greatest achievements of the French
enlightenment.
 Encyclopedic compendium were certainly not new in the 18th century,
 P.A. Bailey’s massive critical dictionary was already published, can be
treated as French precursor to the encyclopedie.
 Diderot’s work stands out because – it was not written by experts of
subjects, but philosophers. Philosophers talk about the fundamentals.
 The finished project of encyclopedie contained 28 volumes, as well as
several supplements.
 In 1789, about 25000 sets of this massive work were in circulation in
Europe, thus the encyclopedie had become one of the enlightenment’s great
publishing success story.
 It was sold on a subscription basis.
 It was an almost immediate success, not only in terms of critical acclaim but
also commercially.
 The print run of 4000 copies was sold out immediately despite its high cost.
 Although such a large work did not present a single point of view, the
editors mostly chose like-minded people.
  Therefore, the tone of much of the writing in the encyclopedie often by and
large is in sync with opposition, if it was not anti-religion, it was anti-
clerical.
 It advocated reform along certain lines.
 The encyclopedie was not for the specialists but aimed at the general
readership, thus enyclopedie had a great impact in fashioning the taste in late
18th century Europe.
 It was not just famous and influential in France, but whole of Europe.
 It signified a particular way of thinking and knowledge in the curriculum.
Very important when we look at the relation b/w enlightenment and
education.
 The word encyclopediaism is derived from a Greek word, which means a
whole system of learning.
 Diderot’s objective was to provide a definitive knowledge on all known
scientific and technical knowledge which would provide a basis for further
enquiries and discoveries by the leaner. It also became a collection of
enlightened opinions on politics, economics, philosophy and religion.
 It was not anti-religion but anti-clerical.
 New way of thinking about education emerged, and the manner in which
they shaped the modern education system through the revolution.
 Another thinker which facilitated this connection b/w enlightenment,
revolution and education was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a champion of
romanticism.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

 Born in 1712, died in 1778. Born in an independent Calvinist city state of

Geneva. He was the son of a watchmaker. His mother died early in his life,
raised by his father.
 Rousseau travelled to Twering, where he was converted into Catholicism in
1728. He spent some time also working as a domestic servant.
 He also acquired training to become a catholic priest.
 Thereafter, he worked as a musician, composer and teacher of music. After
this, Rousseau moved to Leon in 1740 to take up a position as a tutor.
 Rousseau travelled to Paris in 1742. Here, he devised a plan for a numeric
system or notations of music, presented this to the French academy of
Sciences, which rejected it.
 During this visit to Paris in 1742, met Diderot, he did not stay in Paris at this
time.
 For a shot period, he moved to Venice where he worked as secretary to the
French ambassador. Then he moved back to Paris on a more permanent
basis. He continued to work mainly on music and also began to write
contributions to the encyclopedie of Diderot.
 In 1749, Rousseau came across the advertisement of an essay competition,
organized by the academy of Digon. The academy sought submission on the
theme of, whether the development of arts and sciences have improved or
corrupted public morals. Thus, Rousseau entered writing his Discourse on
the sciences and arts, which is conventionally known as the First Discourse.
 For this, Rousseau got the first prize. It is here that Rousseau first presented
his contractarion thesis - the social development including of the arts and
sciences is corrosive of both, civic virtues, and individual morals.
 This essay was published in 1750. It is mainly important because Rousseau
used to introduce themes that he then developed in his later writings. This
discourse made Rousseau famous and provoked a series of responses to
which he in turn responded or replied.
 Major writings of Rousseau include the following – The Discourse of
Science and Arts, a discourse on the origin of inequality – 1755, essay on the
origin of languages – 1753-1761, a discourse on the political economy –
1755, letter on French music, letter to D’Alambert on theatre- 1758, Julie
Oulanouvelle – 1761, Emile or on education -1762, the social contract –
1762, project for a constitution for Corsica, the confessions(published after
death), considerations on the government of Poland, Rousseau – judge of
Jean Jacques -1772-76, reveries of the solitary walker – 1776.
 Although Rousseau wrote articles for the encyclopedie, he subsequently
became critical of Encyclopedie and of the various activities of the
academies and societies.
 Writings of Rousseau reflect a kind of romantic reaction to the atmosphere
or social life of Paris or such other big cities marked by their artificiality and
 cultural differences from a state of nature that is at the fore of these writings.
His discourse on the origins of the inequality of mankind and his work
called Emile on education are conventionally seen by historians as marking
the commencement of romanticism in France.
 However, as we will later, revisionists historians have drawn our attention to
those writings which evoke passion.
 Similarly, many popular slogans of revolutionary discourse have been traced
into the writings of Rousseau, particularly the contractarion thesis and the
notion o popular sovereignty, and the idea of general will of people.
However, as we will see in various subsequent topics and also historical
interpretation of their impact varies significantly depending upon the general
orientation of the historian concern.
 Some historians underline a contradiction in the thoughts of Rousseau, that
while he laid emphasis on the social contract, popular sovereignty and
general will, he did not present a system of direct or indirect democracy.
 Although he was an admirer of Plato’s republic, in Emile, he dismissed it as
an impossible contemporary model.
 He thought that no such community as envisaged by Plato, existed in the 18th
century France or Europe. It has been replaced by corrupt civilizations of
18th century France. Yet in his later writings, as is evident in the advice to
Poland, Rousseau returned to a set of recommendations much like that of
Plato’s republic than his own Emile. In this recommendation, Rousseau
underlines the need for state intervention. Because, in order to cultivate
republican ethos and values state can make intervention through education in
the lives of people with whom or through whose contract it has come into
being.
 His work Emile is a book on education. It was a remarkable and sensational
publication. But, Emile was banned by the catholic church, partly because
Rousseau made some explicit critical references to the Catholic doctrine but
also because it was regarded as dangerously subversive, it meant a lot of
Church. Emile was seen as immoral, as well as potentially revolutionary. It
was also debated and condemned by the Paris Parlement, therefore,
Rousseau left France and returned to his native place, Geneva.
  However, here too, the council of the Catholic Church signaled its
disapproval of the book.
 Therefore, Rousseau also left Geneva, and went to England where he was
held by David Hume and other English sympathizers until quarreled with
them as well, and returned back to France in 1770.

Enlightenment, Education and Revolution in France

 How enlightenment is generally perceived to be.

 Enlightenment was quite instrumental in bringing about change in the
institutional beliefs about knowledge.
 It challenged the idea that education was primarily concerned with
memorizing sacred texts or any other kind of books for that matter, so the
‘age of reason’ demanded that education should be concerned with the
development of the powers of the mind to criticize or to critically engage
with the status quo and to think rationally about the social division.
 It was thought that improved education can lead to greater progress and
rationality. This would eventually eliminate ignorance, superstition and
in society.
 Apart from advocating a more human aspect, the philosophers of
enlightenment encouraged a more scientific approach towards education.
 These philosophers also hoped that if they look at education scientifically,
then in turn education will promote scientific attitude in learners and it will
create an enlightened society.
 Science was seen as a way of understanding how nature works. Nature
included the human mind. Investigating the human mind, what later known
to be known as psychological stages of development or child psychology
was no longer a prohibited territory for investigation. Instead human mind
now became a legitimate subject for enquiry. Thus enlightenment has been
equated with a certain understanding of modernity and modern education.
 A particular set of liberal assumptions about modernity has been quite
central in the earlier historiographical approaches on the history of education
which were based on the readings of enlightenment as progressive or
emanicipatory doctrine marked by secularism, reason, sciences,
contractrianism and the futuristic horizon of progress.
 Scholars conventionally identify 5 major features of enlightenment.
 The earlier scholars also believed that education creates and sustains social
change. It is capable of redressing social inequalities. It can overcome the
unfair distribution of life chances through equalization of educational
opportunity and by facilitation a rational attitude to existing social order.
Thus the liberal discourse on education implied an essentially progressive
nature of the project of modern education. It hereby also meant that only the
real problem is regarding its limited spread. However, in the last few
decades, the nature, function and outcomes of modern education have been
very differently conceptualized by scholars. While some believe that modern
education has proved to be an emancipatory project, others believe that it has
been an instrument of subjugation.
Enlightenment discourse on education was not a monolithic discourse. There
were differences among various thinkers on particular issues. The exact
nature of education and its controlling agency were contentious issues.
While most intellectuals wanted educational institutions to be removed from
the control of the church, not all of them agreed that state should take over
that responsibility entirely upon its shoulders.
 Further, a careful study also reveals that there were internal contradictions
within the writings of a particular thinker as well. Perhaps it was the
overemphasis on the reason which also produced reaction in the form of
romanticism in the field of art, music, literature and education.
 A key figure of this romanticism and the ideas on education was Rousseau.
 He began writing as a supporter of the rationalist approach of Diderot. He
wrote an article on political economy for the encyclopedie in 1755 and
several items on music in the 1750s. However, Rousseau soon became
critical of both, the encyclopedie and the various activities of academies and
societies. Important to see Rousseau’s writings on education in context of
his own experiences and his own social and political ideas.
 Emile represents an attempt of Rousseau to express emotional reaction
against the harsh and repressive treatment of children during 18th century. In
it, Rousseau avoided the challenge of presenting a logical philosophical
argument by putting forward his ideas in the form a narrative. It is the story
of an orphan girl named Emile, who is cared for by an ideal tutor, who
 decides according to his own understanding of his own experiences of
human mind, of what is to be taught, when it is to be taught, and how it is
going to be taught, as well as thinking about the outcomes of what will be
taught.
 Emile is divided into certain sections which are called books. Each book
deals with a particular stage of human development. Book 1 is infancy, from
birth to two years, book 2 is boyhood, 2-12 years, book 3 is relevant to
adolescence, from 12-15 years, book 4 – later adolescent period – 15-20
years, book 5 is adulthood and marriage, which is 20+.
 Some of the terms use by Rousseau has become very important in
subsequent educational discourse, for ex, discovery, experience, readiness,
child-centered, natural etc. They had also become the sources of conflict b/w
traditional and progressional educationalists of the 20th century.
 Rousseau’s main concern was how to provide a good education for the
innocent child and protect him from the evils of a corrupting society.
 This child-centric principle of Rousseau has given rise to two kinds of
recognition about the education of young children amongst the scholars of
education. First is the recognition that children are not miniature adults but
develop by going through a sequence of stages of developments. This was
ofcoruse not a new idea in education, Quantiliniun and Irasmus had already
put forward similar ideas much before Rousseau.
 However, Rousseau took the idea of stage in different directions than them.
 Second recognition was provoked by Rousseau’s idea of children’s need. In
emile, he advocated a child centered approach to education rather than a
teacher centered or curriculum centered or society centered approach. The
teacher’s task was to observe the child, identify the needs and provide the
experiences to meet those needs. Scholars discovered a tension on
Rousseau’s view on education and for this he contextualize his thoughts as
expressed in Emile and novel Novel Hallowee on one hand, and his other
writings, particularly the social contract on the other hand. For instance,
Rousseau’s emile and hallowee represented his belief in the innate goodness
of children and essentially corrupting influence of society, unless
appropriate measures are not taken. However, at this point, a tension exists
b/w Rousseau’s desire for children to be free from the evils of society while
 accepting the notion of a contract b/w people and society wherein
individuals give away some of their liberties in return for protection of state.
 In one of Rousseau’s later publication, ‘government of Poland’, he argued
for the state system of education on grounds that state had the right to form
the character of its citizens so that their tastes and morals would be different
from those of the other nations.
 Rousseau was an admirer of Plato’s republic but in Emile dismiss it as
political contemporary model, because no such community existed in 18th
century France as it has been replaced by a corrupt civilization. Yet his alter
advice to Poland, Rousseau return to his set of recommendations which were
quite similar to Republic.
 Scholars have identified a limitation of Rousseau’s interpretation of needs.
Because there is inevitably a social dimension to needs. Question of needs is
not simply about individual differences alone, needs are also social and are
also driven by the social.
 Rousseau preached the doctrine of natural freedom for children, however his
own writings are full of commands of what children must not allow to do.
He described the adolescent emile as having grown up in just the way
Rousseau predicted.
 Thus we can say that Rousseau had some remarkable insights into some
aspects of the process of educating the young. These include ideas of stages
of human development, learning from discovery and personal experience,
the danger of formal instruction, the idea of readiness including reading
readiness and teacher pupil contact. At the same time, absolutism,
reformation and existing modern industrial development were creating a
class of people which would have to be educated and tamed, this was a big
challenge to the blossoming of Rousseau’s idea of education. These people
would have to be literate, numerate and obedient. These requirements would
in turn present further difficulties for the 19th century educationists.
 Otherwise, France was roughly 21% literate in 1686-90, during the reign of
Louis XIV, and 37% literate in 1760-90 on the eve of the revolution. The
literacy rates reflect the efforts of two centuries of reformation and counter-
reformation schooling. Protestant movement after 1530 and the catholic
reformation in the 17th century formed the principle stimulus for catechizing
 the rural population, which was taught to read books of catechism and bible
almanac, chapbooks/bluebooks, the enlightenment by contrast had a
negligible impact on popular literacy. The enlightenment affected the elites
of the old regime society, such as the clergy, army, office holders, rentiers in
Paris. In the south-east and similar other places were workers and peasants
could not afford even the cheapest editions of the encyclopedie let alone
read it. The closest they could come to the new philosophy was through
conversation and hearsay. National literacy figures however, conceal the
tremendous regional variations while the male rates in the Northern France
was 80% in 1786-90, in south west region, it didn’t surpass 29%. Further in
areas in which protestantism and Catholicism conflicted or competed, the
net effect on literacy was positive. This seems particularly true of Alsace, an
area with large Lutheran Jewish and catholic population. There also existed
tremendous difference b/w male and female literacy rates. However, the
century before the revolution was the period when female growth in literacy
exceeded the male growth. What it then shows is that women now signed
more documents than what they were able to do in the past. What it also
shows is that even notwithstanding the differences b/w literacy rates, more
women were become literate. The benefit of this enhanced literacy was
reaching out to more and more members of the family. This creates an
environment of discussion and debate in the family.
 They(Enlightenment thinkers) advocated free public education for peasants
and workers. They however intended to make French education public and
national if not universal and compulsory.
 Although clerics were frequently appointed as teachers and bishops as new
posts, the precedence was set for public stage and largely the state control
over education shifting it away from the premises of the Church. This was
the precedence that parallels demand of the philosopher,
 De’Alembert wrote an article called, “The colleges” in the encyclopedia, and
this captures and even inspired much of the criticism of the enlightenment
and revolution in some kind of classical caricature of the kind of education
system that was prevalent. He complained that rhetoric consisted of flooding
two pages of Latin, but the knowledge of Latin acquired was imperfect. And
it was not simply about the grasp of Latin as a language, it was the lack of
 grasp of the philosophy and religion that was contained in whatever
literature that was contained in the classical texts. Alembert found this Latin
education useless.
 For him, the education of the old regime was dying of oblisence. The
original impulse of the members of the constituent assembly was not to
interrupt the schooling of the young before new national institutions were
created.
 But three of the most famous authors, Mirabo, Telerum and Condorcet, they
had published plans for educational reform before the reign of terror. They
intended to create a new system independent of the old regime. Mirabo
stated that in order to reconstruct everything, it was necessary to destroy
everything. Even though their intent might have been different, the net effect
of most of the legislations of the early 1790s was that these prevented the
old educational institutions from functioning normally and many of them
even disappeared by 1793. Yet it was not a period of complete disruption.
For ex – the tithe were suppressed on the night of 4th august 1989, still a
certain although undetermined proportion of revenue of school and colleges
was derived from tithe and from clerical properties.
 Educational property was originally to remain exempt from sale of Church
property. The material losses of schools and colleges can be measured by a
nation-wide survey of educational resources, a survey that was conducted by
the first committee of public instruction during 1791-1792. This survey
covered only 217 of the total 527 districts. Roughly 6 districts per
department. Fewer than half a secondary and higher educational institutions
reported loss of income. Most schools presumably continued to enjoy their
property incomes, endowments and other privileges. Even the tithe
continued to be collected long after their suppression. In some context, the
levying of tithes continued till 20th century. Petite equals and elementary
schools, run by the religious congregations were in fact affected the least by
the legislation of 1789-91, because most of these institutions functioned on
student fees and municipal subsidies rather than entirely on endowments.
The overall picture given by this survey of primary education is one of
continuity with the old regime inspite of certain local anti-clerical
administration.
 Secondary schools also continued to function but they suffered greater
financial loss than primary schools. Most of them continued to enjoy their
rental endowment incomes, tithes, revenues or substitute indemnification.
But some lost large amounts of their income. The Paris colleges, according
to this survey, experienced no losses. Significant student radicalism did not
attend the revolution of 1789 as it did later revolutions.
 Students did become involved as soldiers after 1792, but the revolution had
a greater impact on them than vice-versa. However the impact of the
revolution was visible in some or other kind on student activities as well. For
ex – philosophy students of Paris university, petitioned the rector of the
university. They protested the practice of taking dictation in the notebooks.
They argue that it was written almost always without being understood. It
was preserved without being read and it was signed by the professors
without even reading. Another petition called for the exclusion of ministers
of catholic religion from the university faculty.
 Demonstrations on this issue involved around 200 students. Similarly, one
petition demanded a holiday to commemorate the storming of Bastille.
Many professors were leaving to avoid taking the oath, which was expected
also of educators. The directory of the department of Paris grew more hostile
to old regime educational establishments.
 In statement of November 1791, this directory termed these colleges as
Gothic institutions. It complained of the expense of maintaining them, it
even talked of initiating an action against the professors who refused to take
the oath of allegiance to the revolution. This directory closed down the
theology faculty. These were the first faculties everywhere to be closed
down or suppressed at Souborne etc. When the Terror set in, the library of
Louis La Grande college, was also confiscated. The curriculum, students and
faculty of this college were denounced for anti-revolutioary and corruption.
 Police commissioners inspected colleges of the university of Paris in 1793.
 Many plans for educational restructuring were proposed during the
revolution.
 A few of them were only approved. And out of them, only few were
implemented. However, before we examine the two plans that were
implemented, let us talk of the one that was not implemented – because it
 reflects many significant aspects of republican pedagogy. It was called
Lapelier plan. It was presented by Robespierre on 13th July 1793 to the
convention. It was never implemented. It concerned the total child - about
controlling the child totally. Under this plan – children were to be separated
by law from their parents at the age of 5, and were to be placed in one of
20,000 boarding schools that were to be established, and remain there until
the age of 12. This plan sought to regenerate an entire generation under the
yoke of a precise rule regulating every minute of the day in industrious and
useful tasks, continuing under the eye and the hand of the active
surveillance. Within this plan, each hour was to be marked for sleep, meals,
work, exercise and relaxing.
 The whole regime of living was to be invariably regulated. Gradual and
repeated tests were to be fixed. The genres of philosophical activities were to
be designated. Gymnastic exercises were to be indicated. A salutary and
uniform regulation was being prescribed for all these meetings. A constant
and smooth execution was to guarantee every good effort. A universal but no
particular religion. In their private free time, however, student could go to a
particular religious institutions, and take the education.
 Education was to be given without any charge, the rich were supposed to
pay for the poor. But the children were also expected to help support the
school. Within this plan, some students were expected to attain secondary
and higher education. However, this was to be their exclusive possession of
a small member of society, because there were differences of occupation and
talents.
 Education nationale, on the primary level was to be obligatory for all. All
children would wear the same clothes and have the same instruction and
schools would become the seats of republican citizens. Within this plan,
reoublican education was to be achieved less by moral lessons than by
sparking physical and practical training.
 Lapelier wanted to seize hold of the coming generation. He wanted to wrest
it from the tutelage of parents. And through a regimental discipline he
wanted to make this generation thoroughly republican.
 Education was expected to combat the lassitude nature and delinquency of
the public.
 A far less coercive plan of public education was proposed by the playwright,
painter and deputy of the legislature Gabriel Bouquier. Presented right after
the dechristianiation campaign in 1793 December. The law of 19th December
1793, is believed to be based on his proposal. The law of 19t December,
1793 was passed a week after Bouquier’s proposal. It provided for a national
primary education that proclaimed education open to all. Everyone was
permitted who wanted to open a school, thus it allowed clergy to continue
taching, contrary to an earlier lw f 7th Brumaire that had exclused clergy.
 Bouquier although endorsed Condorcet proposal five levels of education,
which included the idea of academic corpus, scientific society, pedagogic
hierarchy, subsidized upper tiers of institutions. He nonetheless allowed
higher education systems to exists freely without public subsidy.
 The intermediary level of secondary education was to be provided for by
popular societies, military evolutions and national and local festivals.
 Similar to Lapeleir in objective if not in method, bouquier plan sought to
turn out good soldiers, robust labourers and loyal republicans, with the help
of state paid teachers and state approved textbooks.
 Like Lapelier’s plan the law of provided for supervision but by the
municipality of sanction. The teacher could be denounced if he teachers
maxims which are contrary to the laws or republican morals. The Bouquier
law which was passed on the 19th December, 1793 established free public
education. They talked on the liberty of teachers, it meant that it envisaged
those great monopolies, teachers were nonetheless obliged to produce a
certificate of civicism and good morals it was to be signed by local
authorities. They were subjected to supervision of municipal officials
Teachers were to be salaried by the govrnemnt.
 December 13th, 2023

 Revolutionary regime maybe credited for establishing for the first time in the
history of France hundreds of public primary schools, with the right of
inspection by the state and even the appointment of the teachers by the state.
 They may be also credited with attempting to impose a secular morality in
the schools.
 State monopoly of education thus had begun to emerge at least in principle
and then universality, gratuity and secularity of course could not be fully
achieved. But these emerged as important principles. However we also that
the secondary level of schooling more closely met the objectives of the
educational plan.
 Religious houses and colleges in each department were converted into
central schools. The teachers at these central schools were salaried and
appointed by the state, however, nearly half of the teachers at these central
schools had previously taught in the old regime colleges and one third had
served as priests, as now the two systems were quite different from each
other.
 Admission was open at the central schools, there were no financial or
scholastic entrance requirements. Students could enter at the age of 12, and
unlike the colleges, the central school had no classes. Courses were divided
into three groupings, each with the theoretical age minimum, that were often
waived if required. No maximum age was set, some of the students were
even in their 40s and were still enrolled. Teachers had to divide their
students into groups within their courses of study.
 However, it was ironical that the social origins of the students at these
central schools was still considerably higher. For instance, 40-50% students
were sons of office-holders and professionals. 20-30% students were form
the families of business or commerce background. Children of laborers,
shopkeepers and artisans were scarcely represented. The students of these
central schools tended to come from republican families or at least families
with a strong republican tradition or membership of such class. Further I
proportion to the emphasis, the central school pedagogy on the discipline of
science, fewer students actually enrolled in natural science. For ex – only
 1156 pupils studied physics in 1799, this is lower if compared with 5000
students that were studying science during old regime.
 Students did not live at the school. Efforts to establish boarding facilities
connected with the schools were generally unsuccessful, therefore what we
may also deduce is that perhaps the students did not identify themselves with
their institutions of education as perhaps their ancient regime counterpart
would have done.
 Moreover, on average, students did not study at the school for more than 2
years. Religion was not taught at the central schools. Education was to be
entirely secular, although not atheistic. This did not equal with religious and
theological education that was imparted in the old regime.
 Nonetheless, many catholic parents were disturbed by the prospect of their
children, growing up without learning anything about their religion. They
often refused to let their children attend these schools for this very reason.
This may also be one of the reasons why the social origins of students at
these schools were from high society. Criticism of these institutions that they
lack religious teachings and also lacking in coherent structure were the
major reasons for their failure of the scheme by the year 1802.
 Napolean restored religious education in all but higher educational
institutions. He granted a large role to the religious congregations in primary
and private secondary education. He allowed private and religious schools to
continue. He did not simply call back the colleges o the old regime, but he
reestablished the authority of the teachers including that of the teachers of
the state run schools of primary and secondary education. He laid emphasis
on a military model of discipline wherein teacher had an important role to
play. He also promoted the scientific tendencies of French enlightenment
and revolution through the 23 state lycees that he founded in 1806. He
systematized these lycees within a paramedical two track system. Under this
system state had a monopoly on universities. It was a system of a broad
primary system and a restricted secondary and higher education. The
paramount objective of the French revolutionary pedagogy was not only to
instruct people in the elements of reading, writing and arithmetic but to
educate the citizens of the nation in the principles of republicanism.
 The term instruction in French is quite indicative of this educational focus.
In the report and educational plans that were submitted to the convention by
its members, used only a little more of the term education, means they also
frequently used the term instruction.
 While instruction is more about instilling a certain values, programmatic
vision, education is about a process that facilitates the blossoming of the
potentials of the child.
 These plans were also not uniform, but were divided over a number of
questions. For ex – whether national education should be entirely common,
minimum, mixing all classes together, shoulder it have a system separating
children with different abilities with social background, questions of
secularly, obligatory, gratuity, and state monopoly were also very very
frequently debated, the role of private and religious sector, and to what
extent should these be allowed, was hotly debated.
 Nonetheless, the change from the system of the ancient regime was
unmistakable. The greatest factor is the role of state. The elementary books
of knowledge under the Bouquier law, were to be approved by the
committee of public instruction. These would consist of the rights of the
man, the constitution, and the tabular of heroic and virtuous deeds of
citizens. The idea of the state textbooks was also put forward in former
report o education, by thinkers like Talleyrind, and Condorcet. The lapelier
plan of 1793 incorporated this idea. On 25th September 1793, the convention
declared that it would publish each day a sheet which would present to the
nation the heroic traits of the French who are in uniforms of the liberty and
the moral virtues which serve as the basis of a truly democratic republic. It
was not as such a textbook, but an instrument for the moral and civic
instruction of the armies, the municipalities, the popular societies and the
school.
 80,000 copies were printed of the first issue of such a sheet. The third issue
had 150,000 copies. The fifth and the final issue, appeared on 1st July 1794,
the issue narrated the early events of the revolution, highlighting civic
heroism. The convention intended to substitute this books or series of sheets
in schools for catechism or livers blue(blue book). The objective was to
instill within the students the desire to imitate the virtues of the founders of
 the republic amongst students. Thereafter the committee of public
instruction announced in 1794 a new plan. Under this plan, anyone could
compete for writing the best elementary books. The committee was not
wholly satisfied with the submissions, and therefore it identified scientists
and men of letters to compete, but on 26th October, 1795, at the beginning of
the directory prices were awarded to a number of original contestants. All
these works, strove not only to abridge adult knowledge for children but to
simplify it as well. The objectives do not seem revolutionary if we examine
it from the point of view of the revolution, nonetheless, the authors of this
book definitely felt that they were bridging the gap b/w the generations and
the classes of citizens. They were bringing the latest knowledge and the
methods of learning to those who were accustomed to the liveres blue.
 Then the almanacs, and the catholic catechism were in a way replaced by
these materials. The republican textbooks for elementary education were
quite popular because from these the most popular was a textbook called,
“La Chabeaussiers”, this book was republished eight times by 1800 and 40
times by the end of the 19th century. This books was written for children in
question answer format. It provided somewhat skeptical Rousseauist
spiritualist answers to such questions as who are you, what is God and what
is the soul?
 These question answers were substituted for these earlier tenets that were
dedicate to the Christian missionaries. Sacrifice for the patrons, replaced the
sacrifice for the mass. Service to humanity replaced individual relationship
of man with the God. It emphasized human virtues such as courage,
friendship, study, and work, it hardly left space for the discussion and
elaboration of Christian theological virtue and faith.
 Some of the republican textbooks were silent on dogma but they claimed
that law of nature is found in the bible and the gospel as well. Moses and
Jesus were also as good sans-culottes as our Montagnard deputies. Virtually
every tenet of enlightenment morality could be found in this reading material
such as the Rousseauist attempt to find the heart of moral inspiration. The
phrase of the bourgeoisie virtue of propriety was also laid upon, and also
upon conjugal love, study and work, it was also marked by condemnation of
drunkenness, gambling, superstition, swearing and fortune telling.
 There were teachers who refused to accept this education. Similarly in 21
communes of Doctor Burg, the schools masters continued teaching religion
and arithmetic only in German. The five departments, including 43 public
schools use the textbooks that were approved by the convention whereas 28
were reported as not using them. They refuse to use them or continue using
the books of the old regime, in fact, contrasting this, a civic republican spirit
was often evident in the private schools, those who did adopt republican
textbooks.
 According to E Kennedy, what peasants read would have reinforced
traditional values and in no way favored revolution. The enlightenments’
influence can be detected, however it was woven in the thread of tradition.
Reading did not essentially foster critical thinking in rural France and may
not even in the cities, much if not most of the reading of the privileged order
and the bourgeoisie were similar, this included almanacs, fairy tales,
pastorals and novels, much of what has been considered strictly peasant
reading in the 18th century, was actually first sold in the cities in the 17th
century. This included the chapbooks, bluebooks, manuals, almanacs, etc. It
was rare among both, urban and popular. Much of this was passing
literature. Nonetheless, mass popular reading culture had been created by the
18th century. Education had an important role in creating that mass reading
culture. They sometimes underplay to role of education. There may be some
older elements, some continuity in the textbooks, but textbook culture in
itself was a new phenomenon, essentially related to education, and helped
create a mass reading culture.

Print Culture(Role of it in terms of connection b/w Enlightenment and

Revolution)

 This excited the attention of somebody called Daniel Mornet in a

systematic manner. In his book that he published in 1933, and then in
1937, in it, Mornet explored the intellectual origins of French Revolution.
For this he studies the manner in which enlightenment ideas were
disseminated during 1715-1787, he studied the connection b/w the
 circulation of new ideas and the revolution of 1789. He mentioned three
methodological requirements which guided his own approach as well.
1. The need to grasp the literary production of an epoch in its totality
rather than limiting it to the study of great authors and great texts of
the literary canon.
2. There is a need to investigate not only the texts but also the literary
institutions, the circulation of works and their audience or readers.
3. The importance of using counts and percentages to measure
circulation of texts and ideas.
 Mornet presented accordingly three laws for the penetration of new ideas
in the general public.
1. The ideas descended the social scale from the highly cultivated classes
towards to bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie and the ordinary people.
2. This spread also had a pattern from the centre, capital city of Paris
towards the periphery or the provinces. It is the belief in the
diffusionary law.
3. The process of the development of these ideas accelerated during the
course of the 18th century. The process started with a minority, that
projected the new ideas before 1750, this continued in the decisive
and mobilizing conflicts of the mid century. These ideas witnessed a
universal diffusion after 1770.
 He examined how far the work of philosophes was responsible for the
outbreak of revolution. What was the respective role of interests and
ideas in preparing for the revolution? Were the political ideas of the
philosophers absurd, utopian or tailored to fit in an unreal situation?
What was the part of free masonry in brining bout the revolution? Mornet
thus compiled the auction catalogues of the 18th century private libraries,
as these catalogues gave him the list of the books that were in circulation.
This list comprised of 20,000 titles in total, after accumulating a large
number of index cards, he decided to count the inventories and the copies
of the great books like that of social contract. He found only one copy in
a mass of 20,000 works of Social Contract. However, he was convinced
that without the extraordinary penetration of the ideas of philosophers
into all classes of the French society, the estate general in 1789 would not
have been such a radical body, therefore he attempted to discern the
 dynamics of diffusion of enlightenment ideas after 1750. He also went
beyond the titles, and examined the forms of intellectual social ability in
newspaper circulation, school curriculum, free masonry, club network
and then he argued that the kind of political ideas that were in circulation
in the crowd before 1789 were far from utopian or abstract. They
reflected real grievance and assumed real men, but, he denied any
planned participation and conspiracy of Masonic bodies in the
propagation of new bodies.
 Nonetheless, circulation of new ideas was a necessary precondition for
the final crisis of the old regime as it moved toward revolution.
 26th December, 2023

Enlightenment political culture in the 18th century France and its role in
shaping the mentality of people – Royal provincial academy, salons, theatres,
revolutionary festivals and paintings.

 The Royal provincial academies provided an important platform for the

intellectuals, for their social ability in the old regime - where all three orders,
the clergy, the nobility and the third estate, interacted with each other but
they also maintained their social hierarchy.
 Daniel Roche in his work the enlightenment in provinces: provincial
academies and academics, covers the period from 1680-1789, in French
language in 1978, in this he provided the demographic and sociological
characteristic of more than 6000 academicians, who were elected to the
academies. For the purposes of comparison, Roche also provides details
pertaining to the social composition of the membership of academies,
societies, and the methodologists. He demonstrated that the majority of the
academies took root, in those cities which had a population of 20000-40000.
And which were the spiritual, administrative and judicial centers of the old
regime. Therefore, the membership of these academies reflects the local
dominance of the elites engaged in these functions. The academies taken as a
whole 20% of the clergy, 37% nobility, and 43% came from the third estate.
Roche’s analysis suggests that the growth of academic movement
represented the rallying of local elites to the program of enlightened
absolutism. At the same time the provincial academies expressed the
growing social cohesion and cultural values of a new dominant class which
was being fostered by the absolutist monarchy. It was a class made up of a
nobility of wealth and power and a bourgeoisie of office administration and
talent. Academies constituted for this group a domain of sociability, which
was not exclusively defined either in terms of the old principles of privilege
and particularism or in terms of the newer principles of equality and
universalism. But it was founded on both that is, it combined and inflicted in
common language of enlightenment, it had both elements.
 Roche argues that the provincial academies under the patronage of the
French monarch, both protected and weakened French state. The relationship

b/w ancient regime and enlightenment was complex, as opposed to the
strictly oppositional character, we see trends of social cohesion in the
academies. The French enlightenment was a complicated movement in so far
as the relationship b/w the state and academies is concerned. The academic
movement displayed as well as mediated the tension that existed b/w the
already established as well as the emerging class, b/w tradition and
innovation and b/w ideology and criticism.
 However, for Emmet Kennedy, the destruction of the academies in 1793 was
an inevitable consequence of the anti-corporate thrust of the revolution and
its wars against the privileges. To have tolerated academies, and distinctions
when those based on birth were being suppressed would have been an
entirely inconsistent with the general raving of the old regime. At the same
time it is also true that provincial academies were already facing competition
from newer forms of cultural and social associations. These newer forms of
intellectual socialability have emerged in the last 2-3 decades of the old
regime. Not only the academies and individuals, but also the academies and
amateur societies had conflicts amongst them. Each academy acted as a
corporation with a monopoly in its field. Royal organization, for example,
the agricultural, medical and scientific societies, appeared after 1750. Some
of them were eventually recognized as royal like the remarkable royal
society for medicine. Other unofficial societies for learning also existed.
 Masonic Lodges offered an associative bond to the reader, which was
different in its relationship to power and to the political socialability. It was
the largest of the new groups, providing intellectual socialability was also
their objective. In 1789, members of these lodegs numbered atleast 50,000 in
France.Those classes of the urban population likely to have been the
administrative into the Masonic lodges – first, Masonic lodges were founded
in Paris in 1725 by a group of English immigrants, subsequently Masonic
lodge or free masonry spread rapidly in different parts of France. Although
Masonic lodges were an exclusively urban cultural phenomenon, it reached
cities and towns of all varieties and sizes – small or bigger as early as 1750.
There were some 50 Masonic lodges in France by 1750. This number
increased to 300 by 1777 and further doubled in next 20 years, by 1797, b/w
1777 and 1785 the growth of the number of Masonic lodges was particularly
rapid. Masonic lodges appeared and disappeared with rapidity. Quarrels over
the obedience, loyalty and rituals fostered tension and schism amongst and
within Masonic lodges. Denunciations and divisions fed and were fed by the
efforts to establish unity and uniformity. In comparison with the provincial
academies, where out of 57% of the academics of nobility and clergy, in the
Masonic lodges their share was far lesser. Amongst the nobility within the
Masonic lodges, military officials were heavily represented. Perhaps this
was so because of the kind of milieu that was provided by the Masonic
lodges which was better suited or adapted to the greater mobility for military
officials and less intense for intellectual aspirations. The officers and
administrative servants played a considerably less important part in the
Masonic lodges as opposed to their role in the academies. The participation
of lawyers, judicial officials and lower level administrators was more or less
equal in both Masonic lodges and royal provincial academies. The most
dramatic difference in the social position or composition of the Masonic
lodges if compared with academies lies in the greater participation of the
third estate as a group and particularly in the greater representation of the
world of trade and commerce. Members of the third estate formed the great
majority comprising 74% of the total membership of cities like Paris and
80% amongst the members of lodges in the 32 city capitals of the provinces,
which also had the academies. The Masonic lodges also welcomed members
from the social categories that were generally not represented in literary
societies of any kind or in any domain, such as merchants, shopkeepers and
craftsmen. In comparison with the academics, the Masonic lodges
represented a very different type of intellectual socialability and exhibited a
very different mode of political socialiabilty. Their legitimacy rested on
universalistic principles of association such as the principles of liberty,
equality and fraternity. Electoral conflicts, and factional rivalries, schisms
and divisions, exclusions and re-integrations, purification and
reconstitutions, were part of the political mechanism by which these internal
principles of associations were pursued. The world of Masonic lodges and
freemasonry was of course much more open to membership than other
institutions. Nonetheless, there were people who were not granted
membership of Masonic lodges either. Firstly – all those people whose “vile
 and mechanical traits” deprived them of the leisure indispensable for entry
and the means required for contribution to the work of charity that were
amongst the objectives of the lodges, were excluded from the membership.
Secondly, there was also a kind of exclusion on educational grounds.
Ofcourse, before assigning Masonic lodges, any radical role in revolution,
we need to recognize that all the hierarchy of orders of ancient regime
disappeared for the time, when members worked together in their Masonic
lodges, but that does not mean that freemasonry occasioned any profound
social mixing. At the entry, each member will deposit at the reception
counter, the symbol of his specific status, but will collect it while going
back. Despite this fact, the lodges undermined the monarchical order by
proposing a new system of values, this newer system of values was founded
on ethics that was necessarily a negative judgement of the principles of
absolutism. Therefore, the world of lodges already represented the
ideological and structural aspects of its internal politics, that of the
revolutionary clubs and societies. According to E. Kennedy, the
multiplication of these societies and clubs, in the seconds half of the 18 th
century, testified to the public’s desire for knowledge and intellectual
socialiability and its refusal to be controlled by privileged bodies.
 Another important institution was Salons. Salons were often the sources of
academic foundations, but they were unprofessional, non-corporate and
unprivileged institutions. Salons were free-gatherings of men of letters,
philosophers, musicians and artists as well as the members of the court, the
clergy, and others. Women with some social position and financial means
generally organized or were the host. They organized these salons in hotels
or at home where people gathered regularly for dinner or supper of music
performances, art exhibitions, and to participate in intellectual conversation.
Salons. The conversational style of many of the enlightenment works, such a
Diderot, was inspired by the salon milieu in which they were conceived.
This style was generally light, witty, and irrelevant. However, this style did
not prevent participants from broaching deep and serious subjects like
freedom of will, nature of matter, and the existence of God. This should not
be done in too ponderous a manner, in this sense, salons represented an anti
eradite literary humanism. Salons flourished in Paris during mid 18th
century, there were salons for philosophers, for anti-philosophers, for artists,
 for cardinals and for princes. But only 4-5 of them were really famous. It
was not a simply passive arena, instead a fierce rivalry of the highest
distinction reigned amongst salons, the chief conflicts seem to have been
amongst hostesses, vying for the same clientele, or those who patronized
clientele that were mutually antagonistic. Salons assured writers and entry
into the world of powerful, because holders of high official positions often
participated in their activities. For example, the salon of D’Alembert
included aristocrats of ancient families, nobles of more recent date,
foreigners settles in Paris, sons of good bourgeoisie families from Paris and
provinces, and intellectuals of more humble origins. Participation in salon
was thus a necessity for anyone who wanted to explore mobility, thus salons
in no sense planned the revolution, there analytical spirit and freedom
allowed the participants to imagine, how things might be in circumstances
could be altered. Salons were banned along women’s clubs during 1793. In
fact, it is this incident of banning the salons that have been used by feminist
scholars, like Landes, how revolution closed down, rather than giving
anything additional, whatever limited access to power for available to
women in the pre-revolutionary France.
 World of Theatre – hierarchy of old regional privileges marked a distinction
b/w old and new regions
For example – comedy Francais theatre, had a monopoly on classical French
tragedy and comedy. Similarly, the Opera theatre had the license of all
operas and ballets. Now, the crown also allowed some smaller theatres to
entertain people whenever he occasionally granted permission to them, after
1759, several important popular theatres were established and different
literary genres were adapted for different social groups. Tragedy for nobles,
farce for the people, and comedy for the bourgeoisie, this also caused many
problems – some entrepreneurs wanted to perform privileged plays, which
the privileged theatres opposed. This invoked a lot of legal action/litigation,
in the domain of the small theatres. Nevertheless, privileges of the theatres
began to erode before the revolution, because the audience was also
becoming much more mixed, emerging from both kinds of testimonies.
Anybody could buy a ticket and go to any kind of play. On the other hand,
even the high-ranking nobles, courtiers and bourgeoisie were found visiting
the popular theatre, and they found the curiosities of these popular theatres
 as quite exotic. The decrees for August 1789 abolished feudalism, and
substituted it in French life and thought with the principle of equality. This
eventually included the abolition of corporate monopoly on theatre as well.
Accordingly, the chapelier law of 13th January 1791, revolutionized the
entertainment world, by granting theatrical liberties. Now, anybody had right
to open theatre and perform any and every genre. No longer did the works
belong in perpetuity to certain theatre. They came to public domain after five
years, from the date of the death of the author. The chapelier law established
a regime of free competition in conscious contrast to the old system of
privileges and protection. The Chapelier law equalized theatres. The law on
the civil states made actors citizens of the nations.
 Approximately 2/3 of the plays that were performed during the revolution,
were made at that time. However, this does not mean exactly so either, as
these plays were also based on the texts that have been there in existence.
Moreover, most frequently performed plays during this decade of the
revolution were generally those that were composed during the old regime,
the plays that were most numerously performed, or were very popular, they
were also composed during the old regime. Similarly, if we examine the
titles of the plays of this period, we can classify them as favorable,
unfavorable, or neutral titles to the revolutionary themes. It followed the
rhythm of the revolution itself. A growth of revolutionary titles in relation to
the non-revolutionary titles peaked in 1794. 2000 titles out of total 4900
titles, in 1794 could be called as revolutionary. However, this ratio dropped
below 1790 levels by 1799. We find that in the world of theatre, that in
terms of the thematic areas, the religious themes declined from 17.7% to an
even smaller number 3.5% by 1795. Classical themes as opposed to neo
classical works, nearly tripled b/w 1789 and 1793. Representations of
contemporary political events, political caricatures and allegories, or the
portrayals of politicians, generals and philosophers, that accounted for only
5.9% of the total. Most theatres changed names at least once during the
period of revolution, which reflects political change. For ex – Comedy
Francaise to Comedy La Nation, but what we also need to recognize is that
sometimes this changing of names could be also due to other factors that
cause instability in the world of theatre, which may also include financial
factors. Besides this, the opening of the new theatre, also became possible
because of the chapelier law, and this was happening alongside with the
phenomenon of closing of some already existing prominent theatres. And the
closing of the theatres sometimes also happened because of the ideological
reasons, For ex- closing of comedy Francaise in September 1793, due to
ideological and political difficulties, as it had become an important arena of
political focus during the revolution, and this episode of closing started in
November 1789, with the premier of Mary-Joseph Cheinier, an explosive
play, which was called Charles IX. Chenier’s play criticized the monarchy
and the Church for a conspiracy of despotism and their finances. The
character of Charles 9 was played by Talma, and through this he had become
a very popular theatre actor, and once it said that it was in 1790 that in
comedy Francaise, some other play was being performed. However, Mirabo
shouted from the audience for performing Charles 9 and under the popular
pressure, Talma had to agree to perform this play. Eventually, on 28th
September 1790, Chenier withdrew this play in order to press on the national
assembly, to legislate author’s right on his/her piece of art. Still comedy
Francaise survived for another 2 more years. When the reign of terror
gripped France in 1793, Comedy Francaise was performing a play written by
Neufchateau. However, his play was deemed suspect by the ruling regime
because in this play a servant was shown to marry a former noble. Moreover
certain lines in his play were found to be composed with aristocratic
overtones, however, we need to remember, that he was far from having any
aristocratic sympathies. In fact, he had written this play before the revolution
in 1788. Still comedy Francaise was closed down on 9th performance of
Neufchateau’s play in September 1793. He was locked in Luxemberg for the
duration of the terror, and the actors of the play were imprisoned at other
places. Thus we find that in spite of the chapeleir law, the French theatre
could not establish any repertoire at will. The revolutionaries wishes had to
be accommodates far more than those of the old regime censor. Still,
theatrical disruptions were considerably less than that of the church, colleges
and academies, which disappeared temporarily as institutions as such. In
December 1802, the counselor government of Napolean imposed a fairly
tight surveillance on the Opera Cominque, which had to submit its report,
every Saturday to the counselor government. Napolean passed a
comprehensive law on 8th June 1806, this intended to govern the operation of
 theatres, and this imposed censorship on the reportiers of the newly restored
theatres. Each theatre had an assigned genre that it had to perform. Thus the
two victories of the revolution, namely, the liberty to establish a theatre at
will, and the right to adopt any repoterie at will, these were now lost.
Censorship became official, thorough and regular. Of course, the right of
author to contract with the dictators and the use of their plays was
recognized and protected. The French theatre world in short returned to a
regime of state protection and control, which was more rigorous than that of
the ancient regime. However, when Napolean created a new theatre
monopoly, he did not restore the old regime corporate entities, but their
endowments and privileges, now necessitated creation of a new system of
state theatres, under which private management of theatres became possible.
That in the world of theatre, the state’s role increased manifold.
 Revolutionary Festivals – One important revolutionary festival was the
commemoration of the storming of Bastille, 17th July 1790. The beginning of
the festivals were provincial and somewhat natural and sporadic. However,
the final celebrations in Paris on 14th July, 1790 were both organized as well
as spontaneous. It included national guards from all the departments,
together with more than 25,000 citizens in Paris. Participations of 1000s of
men and women, and children, and often the scenes of working classes
engaged in their work during the nighttime. This all has captured a lot of
attention and a lot o attraction towards these festivals. On the day of the
festival the cavalry, the national guardsmen, they all stood in rows
surrounding the amphitheatre, where the event of the storming of Bastille
was being celebrated. The leader of the revolution, Talleyrand, celebrated
mass with some 60 Chaplains of the national guard. But the mass was set at
the altar of the nation and not on the altar of the church to give the
impression that sovereignty of the man and nation rather than of God was
being celebrated. The height of the seat of the King in the centre of the
amphitheatre was at the same level as that of the President of the national
assembly.
 The festival of 10th August 1793 – it was the anniversary of the overthrow of
monarchy, it was commemorated for honoring the unity and indivisibility of
the republic. It envisaged a vast procession involving representative of the
primary assemblies of 86 departments, along with the president of the
 convention, popular societies, and the mass of citizenry was also involved.
The procession began from Bastille, and proceeded through 4 stations in the
city of Paris. A Goddess of French, a statue of liberty was also constructed.
The statue contained 3000 doves which by way of implications as they flew
off signified the message, “We are free”. It was written in the banners that
were attached to the feet of the convention, “Imitate us”. This symbolized
the free ascent of the soul. Festival of revolution were half secular, half
pagan counterparts of the Christian ceremonies of the mass baptism and
burial. Their basic thrust was to focus on the nation and its great men rather
than on Christ and his mystical body. The festivals of classical antiquity,
such as foot and boat races, disc throwing, dancing frescos etc, they inspired
the planners of the French revolutionary festivals at least in the way in which
they laid emphasis against orthodox athletics.
 Conventionally, historians of festivals have often interpreted them as though
each ceremonial was a response to a specific historical need. These festivals
then seem to enjoy very little autonomy if we examine them in relation to
the unfolding of these revolutionaries even. Everything then seems to belong
to this rapidly changing period alone, that they were born in exceptional
circumstances and died when those circumstances got over. Their content is
made to serve the triumph of some particular historical interpretation over its
rivals, For ex – Aulard put forward this kind of political explanation for the
rise of festivals of French Revolution, in his view the commemorative
celebration served as an expedient for patriotism. As such, festivals
prospered when patriotism was in distress. Hence in such a framework, the
rise and decline of particular ceremonies was interpreted in terms of the
circumstances causing the creation of patriotic sentiments. Even Jean Jaures
accepted this circumstancial assessment of the revolutionary festival. Albert
Mathiaz however tried to negate this interpretation by considering all the
festivals as a whole and by emphasizing an unbroken change that was
formed by different cult which arose during the revolution. He argued that
these various cults were inspired by a common determination to replace the
catholic form of worship with a new one, which offer its adherence, new
satisfactions in an era of change. This point of view also encouraged a host
of systematic analogies b/w the old catholic and the new civic cults.
However, the thesis put forward by Albert Mathiaz suffers from a weakness,
 the determination to substitute one cult from another depended upon
political motives. Consequently, Mathiaz fails to avoid the very flaw in his
interpretation he himself denounced.
 Mona Ozouf – there is a need to free these commemorative festivals from
the political interpretation, because such interpretations ignore the role of
collective need. Secondly, there is a need to stress the recurrent elements
over the unusual elements. Thirdly, instead of focusing on the avowed
intentions of the organizers, there is a need to capture the staging and the
structuring of these festivals. Therefore, according to Ozouf,
commemoration of festivals is to show no concern at all for quickening or
fortifying historical consciousness. On the contrary, she argues the repetition
of past serves above all, to dull the disturbing shock to efface the newness of
the event. Ozouf therefore underlines the impulse of the festivals to bring the
revolutionary ethos to a close by affirming the principles of the new order
and by inculcating sentiments to sustain it. She suggests that the concern of
the authorities was essentially conservative, the authorities wanted to bring
an era of agitation to a close rather than to stimulate new enthusiasm. They
wanted to parade the forces of order before the people, rather than to unite
them in a exaltation. Ozouf maintains that symbolically the revolution was
brought to a close in the revolutionary festivals before it was declared to be
over by Napolean. In order to close the revolution it had to be disengaged
from its own history. It is clearly visible in the itineraries that were followed
by the festival procession. The festival organizers tried to avoid as far as
possible, the old itineraries and the newer itineraries of the revolutionary
uprising. In order to prove this point, she firstly examines the itinerary of
different processions of revolutionary festivals. Secondly, she examines the
aspect of the space of these festivals. Usually, those places are treated as
sacred where some event as taken place in the past, or where an image has
appeared or where an object has been discovered. However, it is quite
surprising that the role of the Bastille in the festival of the revolution was
pretty marginal. The procession in Paris started from the Bastille but the true
centre of the event was Champdemars. It was a deserted spot, barely touched
by urbanization. Similarly, in the provinces, planes, hatches and moors were
preferred over village square. The organizers preferred the wild motos or the
plains outside the town to the safety of the village square and certainly to the
 shadow of the Church. These are the places without limits. These are
therefore marked by open air which symbolizes the principle of liberty,
where political and social differences were abolished. The hatred of
fragmentation also determined the spatial arrangements of the festival.
Height was also condemned because it suggested Gothic haughtiness. This
space allowed the simultaneity of actions and unanimity of hearts. Hence,
some of the revolutionaries even thought about imposing prohibition of
banquets that were organized in the sections of Paris because they did not fit
well with these notions of space. Third, Ozouf argued that nowhere in
France do we find dramatic representation of historical events in the festivals
of the federation. The organizers never felt ay needs for the relics or sacred
images. Fourthly, according to Ozouf, in the festivals commemorating the
King’s punishment there was no representation of the gallows. The speeches
that were delivered at this festivals marked consistent absence of two themes
- the specific punishment meted out to the King and the royal personage
himself, to whom the punishment has been awarded. The orator’s favorite
theme was that France has “punished in the last of its Kings the excesses of
his predecessors. No less culpable than he himself has been.” Thi historical
indifference allowed a distancing from the images that would evoke too
personal a punishment or the horror of that kind of a punishment. She
suggests that one can read these speeches as the neutralization of the
inaccessible and without knowing who has punished who.
 On the other hand Daniel Guerin has highlighted those other kind of
festivals in which order and harmony seem to have given way to
transgression and aggression. Those kinds of festivals where burlesque
figures are subjected to parodic violence. Guerin thinks that these are the
real true revolutionary festivals. These represent the authentic assertion of
popular invention against the colorless regimentation of bourgeoisie
ceremony. Ozouf does not deny the existence of these elements, but she
insist on contextualizing the existence of such festivals in their time and
space. Then she points, these festivals appear most frequently in the areas
with a strong carbonesque tradition, but she denies that they represent the
practice of a distinct social class or clear political identity. Rather she says
that similar elements appear on occasions even in the royalist festivals as
well. By the spring of 1794, the parodic elements has largely disappeared
 from the revolutionary festivals and the impulse towards order reigned
supreme. It was even evident for example in Robespeirre’s plan for the
festival of Supreme Being. It is given its most systematic fulfillment in the
regular cycle of festivals organized by the post Thermidorian convention and
institutionalized by the directory.
 Aspect of Paintings – In the old regime the art of painting was marked by
the “Frivolous decorative cluttered Rococo”, pattern of 18th century before
the old regime. The term Rococo is derived from the artificial grateus of
Versailles and it implied freedom and irregularity. During the 18th century,
this style was substituted by neo classicism which emphasized on order,
balance and proportion. Neo classicism is an art of ideals, art of principles
rather than that of circumstances. It is peculiar or accidental. The neo
classical artist prefers the mythological to the real, because the mythological
represent archetypes. In such artistic representation, time is either classical,
or mythological or it is non-existent. Since the day of Frances I, young
French artist looked towards Italy. After 1666, 12 of the artist students of the
academy of painting and sculpture were sent to the French academy in Rome
to receive instruction to copy the great masters of antiquity and renaissance
and to prepare a work of their own. Joseph Mary Vine – 1716-1809 – was a
student at the French Academy in Rome. B/w 1744 to 1750, he stayed there.
Vine became its director in Rome, from 1775 to 1781, his pupils at this
academy included Jacque Louis David. Here, Vine influenced David to paint
from live models as well as to copy the works of art from great masters.
Further, Vien himelf was the first important revivalist of historical canvass
paintings. Another important figure was John Wilkinson who upheld the
classical standard of the beauty in his letters on Herculleneum, and his
history of ancient art was published in 1764. He saw direct connection b/w
political freedom of Greeks and the noble elevated sentiments as reflected in
their art. He also embraced Greek notions of geometric proportionalism.
Jean Jacques Barthelemy pubished in 1788 a 7 volume work titles as
“Travels of Anacharsis the younger in Greece”, where he traced an
imaginary voyage of a young man in the days before Alexandar. This ran
through 12 editions by the end of revolution. It was a mine of information,
and fascinated the French people with Greek rationality and sensuality.
Hence the neo-classical school of painting existed in France even before
 David with the above mentioned forms of art. David was born in Paris
within a wealthy family. His merchant father died in a pistol duel when
David was only 9 years old, subsequently reared by 2 uncles. They wanted
David to pursue either an architect or a lawyer. In 1766, David enrolled
himself at the royal academy of painting and sculpture. He was determined
to win a prestigious prize to fund his residency. He was initially
unsuccessful, yet continued, and finally won the competition after losing for
5 times. Received his first commission to make a painting, and made, “Saint
Roche”. “Lictor returning to Brutus the bodies of his son” painted in 1789.
“Intervention of Sabine Women”, and “Bonaparte crossing the grand sain”
 Hubert Robert, known as Robert des Ruins. – known as painter of ruins.