The History of Education / Educational Practice and Progress Considered as a Phase of the Development and Spread of Western Civilization

by Ellwood Patterson Cubberley

V. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION SWEEPS AWAY ANCIENT ABUSES

NEW DEMANDS FOR REFORM THAT COULD NOT BE RESISTED. More than in any other continental European country France had, by 1783, become a united nation, conscious of a modern national feeling. Yet in France mediaeval abuses in both State and Church had survived, as we have seen, to as great an extent almost as in any European nation. So determined were the clergy and nobility to retain their old powers, not only in France but throughout the continent of Europe as well, that progressive reform seemed well-nigh impossible. The work of the benevolent despots had, after all, been superficial. By the last quarter of the eighteenth, though, a progressive change was under way which was certain to produce either evolution or revolution. The influence of the American experiment in nation-building now became pronounced. In 1779 Franklin took a copy of the new Pennsylvania Constitution with him to Paris, and in 1780 John Adams did the same with the Massachusetts Constitution. Frenchmen instantly recognized here, in concrete form, the ideas with which their own heads were filled. In 1783 Franklin published in France a French translation of all the American Constitutions, and the National Constitution of 1787 was as eagerly read and discussed in Paris as in New York or Philadelphia or Boston. America appeared to the French of that stormy period as an ideal land; where the dreams of Rousseau about the social contract had been transformed into realities. Two years later the cahiers of the Third Estate demanded a written constitution for France. The French, too, had aided the American Colonies in their struggle for liberty, and French soldiers returning home carried back new political ideas drawn from the remarkable political progress of the new American Nation. By 1788 the demand for reform in France had become so insistent, and the condition of the treasury of the State was so bad, that it was finally felt necessary to summon a meeting of the States-General—a sort of national parliament consisting of representatives of the three great Estates: clergy, nobility, and commons—which had not met in France since 1614.

[Illustration: FIG. 153. THE STATES-GENERAL IN SESSION AT VERSAILLES
(After a contemporary drawing by Monnet)]

Besides electing its representatives, each locality and order was allowed to draw up a series of instructions, or cahiers (+R. 252+), for the guidance of its delegates. These cahiers are a mine of information as to the demands and hopes and interests of the French people, [33] and it is interesting to know that the cahiers of nobility, clergy, and commons alike included, among their demands, the organization of a comprehensive plan of education for France. [34]

FRANCE ESTABLISHES CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT. The States-General met May 5, 1789, and soon (June 20) resolved itself into the National or Constituent Assembly. Terrified by the uprisings and burnings of châteaux throughout France, on the night of August fourth, in a few hours, it adopted a series of decrees which virtually abolished the Ancien Régime of privileges for France. The nobility gave up most of their old rights, the serfs [35] were freed, and the special privileges of towns were surrendered. Later the Assembly adopted a "Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen" (R. 253), much like the American Declaration of Independence. This declared, among other things, that all men were born free and have equal rights, that taxes should be proportional to wealth, that all citizens were equal before the law and have a right to help make the laws, and that the people of the nation were sovereign. These principles struck at the very foundations of the old system.

Soon a Constitution for France, the first ever promulgated in modern Europe, was prepared and adopted (1791). This abolished the ancient privileges and reorganized France as a self-governing nation, much after the American plan. Local government was created, and the absolute monarchy was changed to a limited constitutional one. Next the property of the Church was taken over by the State, the monasteries were suppressed, and the priests and bishops were made state officials and paid a fixed state salary. The Jesuits had been expelled from France in 1764; and in 1792 the Brothers of the Christian Schools were not allowed longer to teach. Among other important matters, the Constitution of 1791 declared that:

There shall be created and organized a system of public instruction common to all citizens, and gratuitous, with respect to those branches of instruction which are indispensable for all men.

Up to this point the Revolution in France had proceeded relatively peacefully, considering the nature of the long-standing abuses which were to be remedied. In August, 1792, the King was imprisoned, and in January, 1793, he was executed and a Republic proclaimed. [36] Then followed a reign of terror, which we do not need to follow, and which ended only when Napoleon became master of France.

BENEFICENT RESULTS OF THE REVOLUTION. The French Revolution was not an accident or a product of chance, but rather the inevitable result of an attempt to dam up the stream of human progress and prevent its orderly onward flow. The Protestant Revolts were the first great revolutionary wave, the Puritan revolution in England was another, the formation of the American Republic and the institution of constitutional government and religious freedom another, while the French Revolution brought the rising movement to a head and swept away, in a deluge of blood, the very foundations of the mediaeval system. Along with much that was disastrous, the French Revolution accomplished after all much that was of greatest importance for human progress. The world at times seems to be in need of such a great catharsis. Progress was made in a decade that could hardly have been made in a century by peaceful evolution. The old order of privilege came to an end, mediaevalism was swept away, and the serf was evolved into the free farmer and citizen. One fifth of the soil of France was restored to the use of the people from the monasteries, and an additional one third from the Church and nobility. The new principles of citizenship—Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity—were for France revolutionary in the extreme, while the assertion that the sovereignty of a nation rests with the people rather than with the king, here successfully promulgated, ended for all time the "divine-right-of-kings" idea for France. After political theory had for a time run mad, the organizing genius of Napoleon consolidated the gains, gave France a strong government, a uniform code of laws, [37] and began that organization of schools for the nation which ultimately meant the taking over of education from the Church and its provision at the expense of and in the interests of the nation.

THE NATIONAL IDEA EXTENDS TO OTHER LANDS. The reform work in France, together with the examples of English and American liberty, soon began to have their influence in other lands as well. People everywhere began to see that the old régime of privilege and misgovernment ought to be replaced. Other countries abolished serfdom, introduced better laws, and made reforms in the abuses of both Church and State. French armies and rulers carried the best of French ideas to other lands, and, where the French rule continued long enough, these ideas became fixed. In particular was the Code Napoléon copied in the Netherlands, the Italian States, and the States of southern and western Germany. The national spirit of Italy was awakened, and the Italian liberals began to look forward to the day when the small Italian States might be reunited into an Italian Nation, with Rome as its capital. This became the work of nineteenth-century Italian statesmen. For the first time in Spanish history, too, the people became conscious, under French occupation, of a feeling of national unity, and similarly the national spirit of German lands was stirred by the conquests of Napoleon.

A constitution was obtained in Spain, in 1812, and between 1815 and 1821 all of Spain's South American colonies—Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela—revolted, became independent, and set up republics with constitutional governments, some of the larger ones based on the federal principle, as in the United States. Brazil similarly freed itself from Portugal and set up a constitutional and federated monarchy, in 1822. The Kingdom of Naples obtained constitutional government in 1820, and Sardinia in 1821. In 1823, when Spain with Austria's aid prepared to reconquer the Spanish South American Republics, President Monroe transmitted to the American Congress his message in which he declared that any attempt on the part of European nations to suppress republicanism on the American continent would be considered by the United States as an unfriendly act. This has since been known as the Monroe Doctrine. In 1829 Greece obtained her independence from Turkey, and in 1843 a constitutional form of government was obtained.

IMPORTANT CONSEQUENCES OF THE DEMOCRATIC MOVEMENT. Since the closing decades of the eighteenth century, when democratic government and written constitutions began, the sweep of democratic government has become almost world wide. Nation after nation has changed to democratic and constitutional forms of government, the latest additions being Portugal (1911), China (1912), Russia (1917), and Germany (1918). New English colonies, too, have carried English self-government into almost every continent. The World War of 1914-18 gave a new emphasis to democracy, and there is good reason to believe that government of and by and for the people is ultimately destined to prevail among all the intelligent nations and races of the earth.

With the development of democratic government there has everywhere been a softening of old laws, the growth of humanitarianism, the wider and wider extension of the suffrage, important legislation as to labor, a previously unknown attention to the poor and the dependents of society, a vast extension of educational advantages, and the taking over of education from the Church by the State and the erection of the school into an important institution for the preservation and advancement of the national welfare. These consequences of the onward sweep of new-world ideas we shall trace more in detail in the chapters which follow.