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How Five Centuries of Educational Philanthropy Disappeared in the French Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

R. R. Palmer
R. R. Palmer*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

Endowments for charitable purposes, including schools, have existed for centuries, usually in former times associated with religion, as in the Christian and Islamic worlds, in Jewish communities, and doubtless elsewhere. Most often under older conditions they consisted in the right to receive income from land, or from land and buildings, under whatever provisions for tenure and ownership might prevail from one place to another. They have generally been “perpetual,” that is, intended to pass unchanged from one generation to the next. Much has been written on the origins of such endowments or foundations. Less attention has been given to how they may end.

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Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , Summer 1986 , pp. 181 - 197
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Archives parlementaires, 1st ser., vol. 9, p. 649. See also the speeches of de Nemours, Dupont and Talleyrand proposing and explaining the legislation, pp. 152–58 and 398–404.Google Scholar

2 Ibid., vol. 42, pp. 79–103. See also Palmer, R. R., Improvement of Humanity: Education and the French Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1985), 114–15. The present paper is largely derived from this book, in which many points it makes are developed at more length. Further references in this paper will be mainly to this book, in which indications of the actual sources may be found.Google Scholar

Note that here and later the word franc is used, although until 1796 the unit was the livre. The renaming of the unit had no effect on its value.Google Scholar

3 Palmer, , Improvement, 119; and for more detail see idem, “Le Prytanée français et les écoles de Paris, 1798–1799,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 243 (Jan.–Mar. 1981): 133–34.Google Scholar

4 Palmer, , Improvement, 118; and for more detail, see Charléty, Sébastien C. G., ed., Département du Rhône: Documents relatifs à la vente des biens nationaux (Lyon, 1906), xviii, 22–23.Google Scholar

5 None of the Revolutionary assemblies ever repudiated the old royal debt, which they in fact enlarged by plans to make reimbursement for abolished offices, pensions, and privileges. It was left for the more “reactionary” Directory not only to stop the paper money inflation but to reduce the national debt to a Consolidated Third, which in turn was not paid in full. All this is surely a sign of “bourgeois revolution” in contrast to the repudiations effected by Marxist revolutions of later times.Google Scholar

6 Great Britain, Schools Enquiry [Taunton] Commission, Report of the Commissioners, 21 vols., London, 1868–69, vol. 1, pp. 150–51 (second pagination) shows a summary from which the figures in the present paragraph are derived. The schools studied by the Taunton Commission numbered 820, but they defined 198 as purely elementary and 50 as “in abeyance.” I have considered the remaining 572 as analogous to the French collèges in the age of their pupils and the kind of education provided. Since the population of England and Wales in 1864 was about 21,000,000, and of France in 1789 about 25,000,000, about the same proportion of teenage boys was in the endowed grammar schools and the French colleges respectively, about 2 in 1,000 of the general population. In both cases there were several thousand more in private schools. The Taunton Commission excluded the nine great Public Schools (Eton, Harrow, Rugby, etc.), which were separately studied by the Clarendon Commission, and which were so richly endowed as to be hardly comparable with the French colleges. The great Nine about 1860 had about £65,000 (about 1,300,000 francs) of annual endowed income for 2,956 students. The colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, where the studies resembled those of the last two years at the best French colleges, were also excluded by the Taunton Commission. They were also investigated by another commission in the 1850s. So far as comparison of England and France is concerned, the findings and opinions expressed in this paper seem not inconsistent with those of Lawrence Stone in his “Literacy and Education in England, 1640–1900,” Past and Present No. 42 (Feb. 1969): 69–139.Google Scholar

7 Sears, Jesse B., Philanthropy in the History of American Higher Education, which is U.S. Department of the Interior, Office of Education, Bulletin No. 26, 1922. See pp. 23, 25.Google Scholar

8 A minority of these bourses would be called fellowships in Anglo-American usage, since they were used to support older students who, while living in the college, pursued higher studies, either in the college or outside it.Google Scholar

9 Gontard, Maurice, L'enseignement secondaire en France de la fin de l'Ancien Régime à la loi Falloux, 1750–1850 (Paris, 1984), 12. Gontard's figures are all taken from the Villemain report of 1842, whose retrospective accuracy has been seriously questioned; see the notes in my Improvement of Humanity, 114 and 304.Google Scholar

10 Palmer, , Improvement, 117. Fouché's speech and the ensuing legislation are translated in idem, School of the French Revolution: A Documentary History of the College of Louis-le-Grand… (Princeton, N.J., 1975), 129–31.Google Scholar

11 Palmer, , Improvement, 115, and more fully, Faure, Claude, Recherches sur l'histoire du collège de Vienne en Dauphiné (Vienne, 1932), 227, 230, 276, 278.Google Scholar

12 Charléty, , as in note 4 above, or his Histoire de l'enseignement secondaire dans le Rhône de 1789 à 1900 (Paris, 1901).Google Scholar

13 As in note 3 above.Google Scholar

14 Palmer, , Improvement, passim (see index), derived largely from the superb work of Guillaume, James, Procès-Verbaux du Comité de l'Instruction publique de la Convention Nationale, 6 vols. (Paris 1891–1907), plus 2 vols. of index, undated but later.Google Scholar

15 See, besides the plans themselves (readily available) the less noticed work of Condorcet, , Aperçu des frais que coutera le nouveau plan d'instruction publique (Paris, 1792).Google Scholar

16 Palmer, , Improvement, passim, and see index under “centralization,” “national education,” “Jacobins,” etc.Google Scholar

17 Ibid., 170.Google Scholar

18 Ibid., 132.Google Scholar

19 Ibid., 170.Google Scholar

20 Ibid., 136.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., 179–81.Google Scholar

22 Ibid., 230–57.Google Scholar

23 Ibid., 267. I think that this is the only place in documents of the French Revolution where I have seen the phrase laissez-faire, which seems not to have occurred in discussion of economic matters.Google Scholar

24 Ibid., 285–87.Google Scholar

25 Ibid., 314; and Palmer, , School of the French Revolution, 231.Google Scholar

26 For this paragraph see Archives parlementaires, 2nd ser., vol. 11, p. 245; vol. 106, pp. 561–95; [Villemain] France, Ministère de l'Instruction publique, Rapport au Roi sur l'instruction secondaire (Paris, 1843); [Duruy] Ministère de l'Instruction publique, Statistique de l'enseignement secondaire en 1865 (Paris, 1868). The long prefaces by the two ministers are as illuminating as their many statistical tables.Google Scholar

27 de Tocqueville, Alexis, The Old Regime and the Revolution, in most editions Book III, chapter 6, or in some, Book II, chapter 18.Google Scholar

28 The edict of 1780 referred to by Tocqueville was published in Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises depuis l'an 420 jusqu'à la Revolution de 1789…, 29 vols. (Paris, 1822–33), 26:257–62.Google Scholar

29 Encyclopédie, 7:75.Google Scholar

30 Smith, Adam, Wealth of Nations, ed. Carman, Edwin, 2 vols. (London, 1904), 2:249–73.Google Scholar

31 Recueil (as in note 28), 22:226–35.Google Scholar

32 For this and the following paragraphs see Palmer, , Improvement, 59–65; and idem, School of the French Revolution, 43–52; also Bailey, Charles R., French Secondary Education, 1763–1790: The Secularization of the French Ex-Jesuit Colleges (Philadelphia, 1978).Google Scholar