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

by Ellwood Patterson Cubberley

3. Suppression of the greater part of the monasteries.

4. Amelioration of the condition of the minor clergy.

5. Equalization of the burdens of taxation.

6. Liberty of conscience, and the recall of the Protestants to France.

7. A uniform system of weights and measures.

8. Freedom for commerce and industry.

9. A single and uniform code of laws.

10. A vast plan for the organization of a system of public instruction throughout France.

This list is indicative of the reform philosophy in the light of which he worked. Arousing the natural hostility of the nobility and higher clergy, he was soon dismissed, and the reforms he had proposed were abandoned by the King.

Voltaire. The keenest and most unsparing critic of the old order was Voltaire. In clear and forceful French he exposed existing conditions in society and government, and particularly the control of affairs exercised by the most ancient and most powerful organization of his day—the Church. For this he was execrated and hated by the clergy, and in return he made it the chief task of his life to destroy the reign of the priest. Having lived for a time in England, he appreciated the vast difference between the English and French forms of government. With a keen and unsparing pen he exposed the scholasticism, despotism, dogmatism, superstition, hypocrisy, servility, and deep injustice of his age, and poured out the vials of his scorn upon the grubbing pedantry of the Academicians who doted upon the past because ignorant of the present. In particular he stood for the abolition of that relic of feudalism—serfdom—which still seriously oppressed the peasantry of France; for liberty in thought and action for the individual; for curbing the powers and privileges of both State and Church; for an equalization of the burdens of taxation between the different classes in French society; and for the organization of a system of public education throughout the nation. He died before the outbreak of the Revolution he had done so much to bring about, but by the time he died the "Ancient Régime" of privilege and corruption and oppression was already tottering to its fall. His conception of the relations that should exist between Church and State are well set forth in a short article from his pen on the subject (R. 248) reprinted from the Encyclopaedia of Diderot.