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CONDORCET (1743–94) Bernard Jolibert1

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CONDORCET (1743–94) Bernard Jolibert1 The following text was originally published in Prospects: the quarterly review of comparative education (Paris, UNESCO: International Bureau of Education), vol. XXIII, no. 1/2, 1993, p. 197-209. ©UNESCO: International Bureau of Education, 2000 This document may be reproduced free of charge as long as acknowledgement is made of the source. CONDORCET (1743–94) Bernard Jolibert1 In the discussions of ideas that constitute our daily intellectual environment there are certain words that reek of cordite and certain writers who give us a sense of peace. The term ‘secular’ is in the first category, and Condorcet in the second. A person who speaks of secular or non-religious education or schools, or of educational ‘neutrality’, immediately lays himself or herself open to being regarded either as a supporter of the ‘independent school’, that is private, clerical, religious, ‘right-wing’ and, needless to say, reactionary, or as a champion of public, secular, positivist, ‘left-wing’ and, needless to say, anti-clerical education. Simplistic images are powerful, and ingrained mental habits so reassuring. And yet the divisions are not always where one would like them to be. I may be that one of the first people to notice the caricatural exaggeration of this Manichaean representation of the school was in fact Condorcet, at a time when the present-day French noun denoting the principle of non-religious education did not yet exist. Rather than bludgeon the reader with an encyclopedic account of the educational writings and thought of Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, it seemed more useful to accompany this writer, insufficiently known in spite of media excitement over the bicentenary of the French Revolution, along the path that led him to discover the secular ideal. His approach is highly instructive for us who are not all that far removed from the conflicts of his own day.2 An all-around man Condorcet was a writer, polemicist, scholar and politician,3 but it would be somewhat rash to class him, strictly speaking, as an educator. Never did he have a school in his charge to test his ideas, and he left us no psychological, sociological or pedagogical analysis of the child. He showed little interest in the techniques of teaching. But to say that he was not a practicing teacher and that the whole of his work was directed primarily towards philosophy, chiefly political philosophy, could not discredit the relevance or rightness of his ideas. The depth and coherence of Condorcet’s thinking about education make him a philosopher and educator in his own right. Condorcet achieved precocious distinction as a mathematician, entered the Academy of Sciences at the age of 26 and became its Permanent Secretary in 1776 and a member of the French Academy in 1782. When the French Revolution broke out he was one of the last authentic survivors of the spirit of the Enlightenment that had permeated Voltaire and the compilers of the Encyclopédie. In September 1791 he was elected to the Legislative Assembly to represent Paris and became a member of the Public Instruction Committee, which was responsible for the reform of schools. In truth, the question of reorganizing education in France had long been exercising 1 people’s minds. Everyone remembered the Essai d’éducation nationale et plan d’études pour la jeunesse (Essay on National Education) (1763) by La Chalotais, a fiery attack on the religious monopoly over education. Condorcet, moreover, had already given considerable thought to the question. In 1790 he published in the periodical La bibliothèque de l’homme public four ‘memoirs’ on educational issues: Nature et objet de l’instruction publique (Nature and Purpose of State Instruction); De l’instruction commune aux enfants (Universal Instruction for Children); De l’instruction commune pour les hommes (Universal Instruction for Adults); and Sur l’instruction relative aux professions (Vocational Instruction). A fifth memoir, not published during his lifetime was devoted to L’instruction relative aux sciences (Instruction in the Sciences).4 In view of the urgent political situation, however, it was no longer the moment for purely theoretical reflection. A group of five members of the committee was asked to prepare a general plan for education. Together with Lacépède, Arbogast, Pastoret and Romme, Condorcet set to work and presented his report and draft decree (Rapport et projet de décret sur l’organisation générale de l’instruction publique)5 in 1792, but, for political reasons, it failed to receive the attention the subject required, and discussion of the report was postponed. The idea of education that was free of charge, compulsory, non-religious and universal contained in that report was not to become reality until a century later. Let us take a closer look at Condorcet’s ideal and at the fundamental principles on which it is based. Caught up in the revolutionary turmoil, Condorcet was faced with a problem not very different from that encountered by any educational theory or school that attempts to carry its principles to the logical conclusion. How can the unity of the school be reconciled with the social diversity of children? How can a minimum of knowledge and moral sentiments be uniformly inculcated in all the members of a republic —identical basic knowledge for all— in a national environment that is socially and culturally diverse and is also nondenominational? How can one prevent the knowledge acquired by a few from being transformed into absolute power over the others? It was no doubt a political and a religious issue, but it was above all an educational issue. In concrete terms, the aim was nothing less than to group together peacefully in the same school children with different religious beliefs, from different backgrounds, with different languages and destined for different occupations. This was done to produce at least the minimum of universal feeling and knowledge needed to secure the unity of the republic and, beyond the republic, the unity of the human race. Let us try to trace the genesis of this vision through Condorcet’s writings. Three essential stages stand out as landmarks on his journey from a convinced and militant anti- clericalism6 to a more serene conception of the necessary cohabitation between religious diversity and secular unity. They lead to the idea of human universality based on the ideal of knowledge and instruction for all, without which both intellectual progress and independent citizenship would be impossible. The Protestant question Even before the Revolution Condorcet came up against the question of a secular education in connection with the educational status of children and teachers who were Protestants. Following Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes in October 1685, the children of Protestant families were sent to Catholic schools, and adult Protestants were forbidden to teach. Teachers were appointed by the congregations, which inspected them and denied the 2 curricula. This allowed the Roman Catholic clergy to keep education and teachers in their grip. In such a situation the main function of the school is not so much to instruct as to maintain above all the orthodoxy of the Catholic faith where that faith is firmly established and to proselytize in regions where it encounters resistance from other faiths. La Chalotais (1701– 85), in his ‘Essay on National Education’ (1763), had already denounced this explicit shift from instruction to indoctrination. It was from La Chalotais, the fiery Procureur Général in the Breton Parlement, that Condorcet borrowed the principle that it is not the most important function of the school to deal with denominational issues: its object should be the greatest public utility. The teaching of political laws and the sciences is a matter for the state, the teaching of divine laws one for the Church. Condorcet distilled from this the essential principle that the first job of the school is to instruct. As a man of science and a mathematician he concluded that the school’s most important task must be to transmit knowledge that is useful to everyone. Hence his condemnation of what we could call, using Bernard Charlot’s expression, the ‘pedagogical mystification’7 of the eighteenth-century school. That school was expected to instruct children, but instruction was impeded by the fact that the children were placed in the exclusive grip of religious congregations and the fact that the school institution was assigned the role of ideological indoctrination. Teachers were recruited for their moral profile, not for their knowledge or skill; education was neglected in favor of the catechism; knowledge was presented dogmatically; the voice of authority overrode individual critical thought; and hatred between social groups was fuelled and legitimized—as evidenced by the Callas affair and the Chevalier de la Barre affair. All these traits were violently attacked by Condorcet in his Fragments sur l’éducation des enfants (Fragments concerning the Education of Children), Petits résumés sur l’histoire de l’éducation (Notes on the History of Education) and Sur l’instruction (On the Subject of Instruction), which have been published by Manuela Albertone under the general title Réflexions et notes sur l’éducation (Thoughts and Notes on Education).8 Faced with this religious monopoly over education, Condorcet directed his attack at two levels —the political level and the school level—without drawing a clear distinction between them. During the period that he wrote several Écrits sur les protestants (Writings on the Protestants)9 (1775-81) his line of argument was essentially political. His enemy was the monopoly held by the religious congregations. It was thus necessary to start by breaking the hold of the Catholic clergy over school education and remove the school from the temptation of indoctrination. Teachers must be selected, curricula developed and buildings used that were independent of the Church.
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