“The purpose of education,” wrote Madame Campan to the Emperor, “ought to be directed: 1. towards the domestic virtues; 2. towards instruction, to such a degree of perfection in the knowledge of language, computation, history, writing, and geography, that all pupils shall be assured of the happiness of being able to instruct their own daughters.”
Madame Campan desired, moreover, to extend her work. She demanded of the Emperor the creation of several public establishments “for educating the daughters of certain classes of the servants of the State.” She desired that the government should take under its supervision private institutions, and contemplated for women as for men a sort of university “which might replace the convents and the colleges.” But Napoleon was not the man to enter into these schemes. The schools of “women-logicians” were scarcely to his taste, and the teaching congregations, which he restored to their privileges, the better served his purpose.
572. Interest in Popular Education.—One might believe that Madame Campan, who had begun by being the teacher of the three daughters of Louis XV., and who associated with scarcely any save the wealthy or the titled, had never had the taste or the leisure to think of popular instruction. It is nothing of the sort, as is proved by her Counsels to Young Girls, a work intended for Elementary Schools.
“There is no ground for fearing that the daughters of the rich will ever be in want of books to instruct them or of governesses to direct them. It is not at all so with the children who belong to the less fortunate classes.... I have seen with my own eyes how incomplete and neglected is the education of the daughters of country people.... It is for them that I have penned this little work.”
The work itself has not perhaps the tone that could be desired, nor all the simplicity that the author would have wished to give it; but we must thank Madame Campan for her intentions, and we count among her highest claims to the esteem of posterity the effort which she made in her old age to become, at least in her writings, a simple school-mistress and a village teacher.
573. Madame de Rémusat (1780-1821).—Madame de Rémusat has written only for women of the world. Herself a woman of the world, lady of the palace of the Empress Josephine, she had no personal experience in the way of teaching. She had nothing to do with the practice of education save in supervising the studies of her two sons, one of whom became a philosopher and an illustrious statesman, Charles de Rémusat. The noble book of Madame de Rémusat, her Essay on the Education of Women, does not commend itself by reason of its detailed precepts and scholastic methods, but by its lofty reflections and general principles.[243]
574. Sketch of Feminine Psychology.—Let us first notice different passages in which the author sketches by a few touches the psychology of woman, and determines her sphere in life:—
“Woman is the companion of man upon the earth, but yet she exists on her own account; she is inferior, but not subordinate.”