In pursuit of politics : education and revolution in eighteenth-century France / Adrian O'Connor.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

O'Connor, Adrian, author.

Series:

Studies in modern French history

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Education--France--History--18th century.

Education.

Education--Political aspects.

History.

France.

Education--Political aspects--France--History--18th century.

France--History--Revolution, 1789-1799.

France--Politics and government--1789-1799.

Politics and government.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

viii, 262 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2017.

Summary:

In Pursuit of Politics Offers A New Interpretation of debates over education and politics in the early years of the French Revolution. Following these debates from the 1760s to the Terror (1793-94), and putting well-known works in dialogue with previously neglected sources, it situates education at the center of revolutionary contests over citizenship, participatory politics, and representative government. Education was central to how people thought about what was possible, desirable, and achievable in eighteenth-century France. With that in mind, In pursuit of politics uses the debates over education as a window into one of history's most dramatic periods of political uncertainty and upheaval, anxiety and ambition. It weaves together debates taking place among Enlightenment writers and philosophes, royal administrators and, later, revolutionary legislators, among private citizens, political clubs, and provincial schoolmasters. This book finds in the pre-revolutionary debates a symptom of a deep crisis in the French political imagination, one that ran aground on competing visions of French society, the French nation, and the workings of the Ancien Régime state. It highlights the emergence of "public instruction" as a revolutionary pedagogy, one that transcended pre-revolutionary expectations and underwrote efforts to establish a participatory and representative politics in France. It allows us to think in new ways about how the citizens and statesmen of eighteenth-century France tried to navigate modem politics at their tumultuous start. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Education and an ambivalent Enlightenment 26

2 National education: promise and paralysis 48

3 Public instruction: a new pedagogy for a new politics 70

4 Constitutional principles and concrete proposals: reconsidering Talleyrand and Condorcet on public instruction 97

5 Revolutionary politics à la plume: the public on education and politics 126

6 New wine in old bottles? Ancien Régime schools imagine the future 160

7 Republican instruction: an elusive ideal 199.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 240-255) and index.

ISBN:

9781526120564

1526120569

OCLC:

992432856