History of the Peninsular War, Volume 1 (of 6)

by Robert Southey

♦Education in the hands of the clergy before the revolution.♦

Education had been chiefly in the hands of the Jesuits till the extinction of that famous company, the most active, the most intriguing, but in later times the most useful and the most calumniated of the monastic orders. After their dissolution, the system was continued upon the same plan, though perhaps with inferior ability, and the colleges were every where conducted by the clergy, either secular or regular. The massacre of St. Bartholomew’s day, and the dragonades of Louis XIV., are crimes always to be remembered with unabating and unqualified detestation. Even at a later time it was evinced, in the shocking tragedies at Rouen and Thoulouse, that the same spirit existed in the French church, and was ready to blaze out. These execrable things were known over Europe; but it was not so generally known, that in the service of that same church which had dishonoured itself, and outraged human nature, by these actions, many thousand ministers were continually employed in training the young, visiting the sick, relieving the poor, consoling the penitent, and reclaiming the sinner; uninfluenced by love of gain, hope of applause or of advancement, or any worldly motive; but patiently and dutifully devoting themselves in obscurity to the service of their fellow-creatures and their God. The knowledge of their virtues was confined to the little sphere wherein their painful and meritorious lives were passed; and the world knew them not, till they were hunted out by the atheistical persecution, and were found to endure wrongs, insults, outrages, exiles, and death, with the meekness of Christians, and the heroism of martyrs.

♦Generally diffused in France.♦

Under these teachers, the doctrines of Christianity, according to the Romish church, and the duties of Christianity, wherein all churches are agreed, were the first things inculcated, as being the first things needful. Errors of doctrine, though of tremendous importance when men are actuated by blind zeal, are, among the quiet and humble-minded part of mankind, latent principles which produce no evil, unless some unhappy circumstance calls them into action: but the moral influence of religion is felt in the whole tenour of public and of private life. There were endowed schools and colleges, before the revolution, in every part of France, chiefly under the direction of persons who acted from motives of duty and conscience, rather than of worldly interest. The French court, in the midst of its own licentiousness, understood the importance of training up the people in a faith which tended to make them good subjects, and therefore it had provided[5] for this great object from a sense of policy, if from no better impulse. ♦The whole system of education destroyed by the revolution.♦ The reformers, in the natural course of political insanity, plundered the church before the revolutionists overthrew the throne. The Constituent Assembly followed up this act of iniquity by requiring from the clergy an oath, which they knew the greater part must conscientiously refuse to take. The whole system of education throughout France was thus subverted, before the work of proscription and massacre began; and, to complete the wreck, the National Convention, by one sweeping decree, suppressed all colleges and faculties of theology, medicine, arts, and jurisprudence, throughout the republic.

♦Public instruction promised by the revolutionists.♦

Public instruction, however, had been one of the first blessings which were promised under the new order of things; and accordingly plan after plan was pompously announced, as short-lived constitutions and short-sighted legislators succeeded one another. ♦Talleyrand’s scheme.♦ The Constituent Assembly promised an establishment of primary schools in the chief place of every canton; secondary ones in the capital of every district; department schools in the capitals of these larger divisions; and, finally, an Institute in the metropolis: the whole under a Commission of Public Instruction. Public tuition was not to begin before the age of six; till which time, it was said, mothers might be trusted to put in practice the immortal lessons of the author of Emilius: and girls were left wholly to their parents. ♦Religion omitted.♦ Religion made no part of the scheme[6]; and instead of teaching children faith, hope, and charity, their duties toward God and man, the Declaration of Rights was to be cast into a catechism for their use. This plan, which was the work of Talleyrand, was thrown aside when the Constituent Assembly, having completed, as they supposed, the work of demolition, made way for the Legislative Assembly, which was to erect a new edifice from the ruins. ♦Condorcet’s scheme.♦ A second project was then presented by Condorcet. ♦Religion proscribed.♦ Revealed religion was, of course, proscribed from his scheme; and the miserable sophist said that this proscription ought to be extended to what is called natural religion also, because the theistic philosophers were no better agreed than the theologians in their notions of God, and of his moral relations to mankind. All prejudices, he said, ought now to disappear; and therefore it must now be affirmed that the study of the ancient languages would be more injurious than useful. The physical sciences were the basis of his plan; and he advised that scientific lessons should be given in public weekly lectures, and that the miracles of Elijah and St. Januarius should be exhibited, in order to cure the people of superstition. A time, he said, undoubtedly would come, when all establishments for instruction would be useless: however, as they were necessary at present, girls as well as boys were to be received in the public schools. ♦Scheme of the National Convention.♦ The orators of the National Convention went farther: they maintained, that domestic education was incompatible with liberty; that the holy doctrine of equality would have been proclaimed in vain if there were any difference of education between the rich and the poor; that, of all inequalities, the inequality of knowledge was the most fatal; and that every thing which elevated one man above another in the scale of intellect was studiously to be destroyed. All children, therefore, of both sexes, ... the boys from the age of five till that of twelve, the girls from five to eleven, ... ought to be educated in common at the expense of the republic; there was room enough for lodging them all in the palaces and castles of the emigrants; the boys should be employed in tilling the earth, in manufactures, or in picking stones upon the highways; hospitals were to be annexed to the schools, where the children were in rotation to wait upon the sick and the aged; and they were never to hear of religion. One democratic legislator proposed, that those parents who chose to have their children educated at home should be vigilantly observed; and if it were discovered that they brought them up in principles contrary to liberty, that a process should be instituted, and the children taken from them, and sent to the houses of equality. This implied some choice on the part of the parents, though it would have made the choice a cruel mockery: but it was contended that liberty could not exist if domestic education were tolerated; ♦Domestic education proscribed.♦ and when the clause was proposed that parents might send their children to these schools, it was carried as an amendment that they must send them, because it was time to establish the great principle, that children belong to the republic more than to their parents. This, said one of their blasphemous declaimers, would complete the Gospel of Equality! It was even maintained, that education ought to commence before birth; and the philosophical statesmen of regenerated France were called upon to form rules for women during the time of gestation, and to enact laws for midwives and for nurses[7]!

♦None of these schemes attempted in practice.♦

Follies and schemes like these were discussed by the National Convention in the intervals between their acts of confiscation and blood; and to this intolerable tyranny the fanatics of liberty and equality designed to subject the people in the dearest and holiest relations of domestic life! But proscriptions and executions succeeded so rapidly, that the various projectors were swept off before their projects could be attempted in practice; till at length, when the remaining members of that nefarious assembly, after the death of Robespierre, had acquired some feeling of personal safety, the Normal Schools were established, in which the art of teaching was to be taught. ♦Normal Schools.♦ And now, it was proclaimed, the regeneration of the human mind would be effected; now, for the first time upon earth, Nature, Truth, Reason, and Philosophy would have their seminary! The most eminent men in talents and science were to be professors in this institution; from all parts of the republic the most promising subjects were to be selected by the constituted authorities, and sent to the metropolis as pupils: and when they should have completed the course of human knowledge, the disciples of these great masters, thoroughly imbued with the lessons which they had received, were to return to their respective places of abode, and repeat them throughout the land, which would thus, in its remotest parts, receive light from Paris, as from the focus of intellectual illumination. Fourteen hundred young men were in fact brought from the country; and, that nothing might be lost to mankind, the conferences in which universal instruction was to be communicated were minuted in short-hand. So notable a plan excited great enthusiasm in Paris; it soon excited as much ridicule: in the course of three months both pupils and professors discovered in how absurd a situation they were placed; it was acknowledged in the National Convention that the scheme had altogether failed; and thus ended what was properly called the organized quackery of the Normal Schools[8].

♦Consequences of these visionary schemes.♦

Meantime the irrecoverable years were passing on, and the rising generation was sacrificed to the crude theories and ridiculous experiments of sophists in power; men whose ignorance might deserve compassion, if their absurdity did not provoke indignation as well as contempt, and their presumptuous wickedness call for unmingled abhorrence. When the subject was renewed under the consular government, the frightful consequences had become too plain to be dissembled. A view of the moral and religious state of France was drawn up from official reports which were sent in from every department, and it was acknowledged that the children throughout the republic had been left to run wild in idleness during the whole preceding course of the revolution. ♦Analyse des Pròces Vérbaux, quoted by Portalis. L. Goldsmith, Recueil, T. i. p. 282.♦ “They are without the idea of a God,” said the Report, “without a notion of right and wrong. The barbarous manners which have thus arisen have produced a ferocious people, and we cannot but groan over the evils which threaten the present generation and the future.”