[by Charles Coutel]
The French republican and revolutionary tradition constantly links the demand for social justice and the reduction of economic inequalities to the need for genuine public instruction, popular education and access to culture for all. Better still, knowledge constitutes the alphabet of the emancipation of the people. This is the meaning of the fight that unites the Enlightenment, Condorcet, Jules Ferry, Jean Macé, Ferdinand Buisson, Jean Jaurès, Jean Zay and Antonio Gramsci.
The people need to learn the precise words and master the knowledge that will enable them to appoint the causes of his suffering and the oppressions he endures. To do this, let us return to the emancipatory message of the Enlightenment, translated into the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
Thus, the fight against socio-economic inequalities will be amplified and justified through the dissemination of instruction, education and culture. This shows the relevance of the initial project of public education at work in the Enlightenment and translated, notably by Condorcet, in the Revolution of 1789. Mobilization and not nostalgia… The republican school must be revived, because depriving children of instruction is as serious as depriving them of bread.
In the necessary work of republican, humanist and universalist reconquest, reading Condorcet can prove very valuable. Better still, it is because the political and philosophical synthesis that he represents is little known that the generation gap noted by the authors of a recent work, The divide[1], could begin to fill, by inviting our fellow citizens to better understand our republican tradition. If this gap were to widen, the entire transmission of our republican principles would be weakened. This is where the Condorcet synthesis comes in, which republicans regularly rediscover, particularly through the re-edition and rereading of its texts devoted to public education. This was the case in 1804, 1848, 1882, 1929, 1944 and again in 1989, 1995 and … 2021[2].
To move forward, it may be very useful to insist on the Condorcetian conception of the republican school, the heart of the secular, working-class and republican struggle. This philosopher inscribes his theory of the school and the Republic in a meliorist hope[3].
Originality of Condorcet, translator of the Enlightenment
The originality of Condorcet, actor and thinker of French republicanism, is to send back to back the abstract optimists and the bitter cynics. This originality of Condorcet is expressed in article 33 of the Bill of Rights which inaugurates the Draft Constitution of February 1793: "A people always has the right to review, reform and change its Constitution. A generation does not have the right to subject future generations to its laws and any heredity in functions is absurd and tyrannical." This article is an extension of article 23: "Elementary education is the need of all, and society owes it equally to all its members."
It is in public education, both as a theory and as an institution, that Condorcet's meliorism intends to fulfill humanist hope in history.
Our working hypothesis is that the study of the philosophy of the Enlightenment could protect us against current misunderstandings concerning the aims of the republican school, but even more, facilitate the establishment of an emancipatory methodology that could allow us to overcome the difficulties that school and university institutions are currently experiencing.[4]. These difficulties reflect those of all republican institutions. It is therefore a whole republican reconquest that must be accomplished. This reconquest presupposes a critical re-examination of the epistemological and philosophical project inherited from the Enlightenment which was translated and applied during the Revolution of 1789, notably by Condorcet.
The republican reconquest of universalism requires a concrete reappropriation of the central themes of the Enlightenment but also of the methodology of self-critical emancipation that it managed to implement.[5].
Rationalism
The Enlightenment is first rationalists, that is to say, they affirm that there is, in each man, an autonomous and self-critical intellectual faculty worthy of respect capable of criticizing his own statements and representations, but on one condition: that each can benefit from an initial education and a solid, progressive and reasoned elementary instruction. This rationalism inspires the entire republican project of public education and also the attachment of the Republic to scientific research. Elementary knowledge, organized into disciplines, constitutes the alphabet of this emancipation. On this point, the men of the Enlightenment take up and amplify the classic thesis at work in Descartes and especially Spinoza: it is in the interest of truth to be sought by the greatest possible number of free and enlightened minds. This thesis has the double consequence of compulsory schooling in a secular framework but also the guarantee by the Republic of the independence of teachers and researchers. It is this freedom that the proponents of the wokism abuse, especially at university and in teacher training. Condorcet, Lavoisier, Monge, help!
Meliorism
This rationalism of the Enlightenment is further strengthened by another thesis coming in particular from Condorcet's reading of Rousseau's idea of the perfectibility of man; it is his meliorist approach to man.
For rationalism to remain emancipatory, it is necessary to constantly remember the errors, regressions and past failures of humanity. This is the meliorist approach to the world and to history that is currently totally ignored by the self-proclaimed experts who invade the media. This is because meliorism cures us of the danger ofholism : we rely on vague entities that postpone the critical analysis of past mistakes and prevent us from transforming them into lessons. Rationalist meliorism cures us in advance of any holistic essentialism. The "Red Guards" of wokism are both victims and actors of essentialism and holism, hence their headlong flight where intimidation competes with victimization. The temptation to settle on the same ground as them is great, which all representative secular associations are careful not to do; it is because since Voltaire, Beccaria, Diderot and Condorcet, in particular, we know that we must respond non-fanatically to fanaticism.
Recently, Antoine Lilti very pertinently summarized this emancipatory power of Enlightenment meliorism: "The Enlightenment does not serve to justify modernity but to problematize it." And he comments: "How can we use the power of reason to improve the conditions of human life, to ensure collective and individual happiness?[6] » (emphasis added)
When this rationalism is attentive to scientific and philosophical work, universalism is strengthened and gives strength and vigor to the third component of the philosophy of Enlightenment.
Fraternal and universal hospitality
Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, Kant and Condorcet value the main ethical translation of rationalism. Voltaire summarizes this new thesis: "May all men remember that they are brothers." The merit of this humanism is to broaden intellectual universalism towards an ethical universalism that the French republicans were able to translate into the solidarist and mutualist ideal. Thus, rationalist and meliorist universalism opens up to all men and all nations; something that the xenophobic discourse of certain identity-based charlatans currently does not understand. The ethical horizon of French republicanism broadens in a praise of universal hospitality.
It is therefore together that we must uphold the demands of rationality, meliorism and hospitable fraternity. But to achieve this, we would need to have the courage to return to the texts with new questions and a renewed curiosity, both humble and grateful. The Enlightenment is not a frozen heritage but rather our living republican memory. These efforts may prove rewarding because, thanks to the Enlightenment, we are one step ahead of the obscurantists; it is even possible to make concrete proposals geared towards the future. We owe to Condorcet, not only for having assumed this emancipatory heritage of the Enlightenment, but also for having translated it into his constitutional and scholastic work. We will insist on this second aspect, while keeping in mind the role of this thinker in the establishment of the republic; let us keep in mind this synthetic formula taken from In Praise of Benjamin Franklin from 1790, already cited: “Even under the freest constitution, an ignorant people is a slave.”
The organization of public education according to Condorcet
Let us clarify, with two short quotes, the unity of the Condorcet approach developed between 1791 and 1794: "The aim of education is not to make men admire ready-made legislation, but to make them capable of appreciating and correcting it" (Five Memoirs, Garnier-Flammarion, p. 93); "Exhaust all combinations to ensure freedom, if it does not embrace a means of enlightening the mass of citizens, all your efforts will be in vain" (Five Memoirs, Garnier-Flammarion, p. 235).
Public education is the soul of the political institution: the present generation makes the coming generation capable in advance of exercising citizenship and improving the Republic. Condorcet's constitutional work is based on a conception of the majority wish as a provisional figure of truth; this affirmation supposes that the laws conceived and desired by the people are both respected and debated. Another supposition: that the school educates citizens better and better.
Thus, the republic projects itself into the future without breaking with the present. Condorcet makes a future who would be a to become, that is, a future responsible for itself, but on one condition: that teachers are well trained and that elementary knowledge is effectively taught. Let us examine the precise processes by which Condorcet combines the means to continuously improve public education.
Academician and scholar, Condorcet will think about the diffusion of knowledge based on network exchanges of the scientific community of the Europe of the Enlightenment.[7]. This epistemological gesture was partly forgotten by Daunou, Lakanal, Jules Ferry. These republicans had only a partial perception of the four philosophical devices of Condorcet's meliorism. These devices constitute a unit: the theory of the republican school.
The first device, of a legal nature, comes down to preventing any governmental power from seeking to determine what should be taught in the schools of the Republic. In 1835, Auguste Comte would call this the ministerialist danger ; in January 1793, Condorcet returned to it in a little-known but essential text On the need for public education[8]
The second device is linked to the previous one: Condorcet recommends founding a National Society of Sciences and Arts, totally independent of the executive power, whose missions can be summarized as follows: to monitor and direct instruction, to work on the elementaryization of school knowledge, to promote science and the arts, and finally, to stay in contact with foreign learned societies to "enrich France with the discoveries of other nations" (ed. cit., p. 162-163). This National Society was only partially realized in the National Institute of Daunou or by the creation of the École Normale Supérieure (Report From the outset, the École normale supérieure was called upon to justify its existence by an effort to disseminate scientific knowledge[8] Is this mission not being forgotten today, particularly by the master's program that delivers future teachers to the sometimes militant and non-scientific "theses" of certain teacher-researchers, within institutes dedicated to teacher training? Refer to the websites of the Comité Laïcité République and the Observatoire du décolonialisme.
The third mechanism consists of promoting, through the work of Academies and Learned Societies, the requirement for the elementaryization of scientific knowledge. This is the role played by the generation of Encyclopedists. The elementary nature of school knowledge, understandable by each and everyone, prepares a fraternal and more just society. In this sense, elementary knowledge constitutes a real alphabet of emancipation : to say that we do not agree, we still have to be able to express ourselves clearly!
Lastly, Condorcet, as a good reader of Rousseau but also of Voltaire, asks us to make the continuous genesis of past errors which accompanied periods of despotism, fanaticism, even clerical drift. Public education can and must cure us of the superstitious spirit and allow us never to make a pact with ignorance.
Condorcet's public education therefore keeps as close as possible to scientific and academic work; but this philosopher is always concerned with simplifying the results to make them accessible to all, as he himself shows in his Elementary Arithmetic Manual, written in secret in 1794. Concerned about the transmission and continuous improvement of the quality of teachers and the rigor of the knowledge taught, Condorcet makes possible a continuous improvement of both political debate and the rational argumentation of future citizens.
Conclusion: relevance of the Condorcet approach to public education
The consequence is clear: let us rediscover the emancipatory power of the Enlightenment: reason, progress and universal fraternity. Let us remember the warning of a Condorcet: "Even under the freest constitution, an ignorant people is a slave."
Republican and secular universalism, thanks to the education of the people, extends our fight for social and economic justice, because today: the global has become the universal without the human. Republican reconquest requires the reinstitution of public instruction, popular education and access for all to universal culture, against capitalist and globalist predation. This is the best way to respond non-fanatically to fanaticism. In this, the study of the Enlightenment and the study of Condorcet, in particular, is a real emergency.
Condorcet's public education can help us judge the current future of the republican school, the public university and teacher training.
- Any executive power, despite the warning of the Five Memoirs de Condorcet, still too often intends to govern the school by a rhetoric of permanent reform or by untimely intrusion into the design of school programs and teacher training. Today, everything needs to be reviewed. A proposal: it is becoming urgent to challenge the mastering teaching professions, by affirming the disciplinary content of programs and recruitment competitions. This implies respecting the prerogatives of the university, as well as of the General Inspectorate.
- On the institutional level, our republican school and teacher training still do not have an equivalent of the National Society of Sciences and Arts, an independent institution designed by Condorcet and based on the scientific skills of scientists. Its members are recruited by election and not by co-optation of self-proclaimed experts too close to the executive power.
- As for the elementary nature of the knowledge to be taught, it is increasingly obscured by the term fundamental, never really defined. Worse still, the term skills increasingly tends to supplant the concept of basic knowledge. Through the study of Condorcet, the reconquest of the elementary nature of teaching is possible and urgent. This involves the critical re-establishment of our lexicon and the break with a ambient lexical clericalism which particularly affects discourses on school, care or even social work: there is a cheerful mix of religious vocabulary based on testimony and secular vocabulary based on the transmission of knowledge, because, warns Alain: "To rock is not to instruct."
- Finally, it is by rereading Condorcet and the texts of the republican tradition ever more closely that we could support the civic and moral education of the future citizen with a transmission of scientific rationality and republican principles, first and foremost, that of secularism. To this end, the Education Code must be supplemented by a series of new articles guaranteeing the scientific content of research projects within centers that truly serve the search for truth and critical objectivity.
It would thus become possible once again to respond non-fanatically to all fanaticisms, especially religious ones, by recalling that the main enemy of the Republic is ignorance. This effort is necessary to give meaning to the very idea of legacy of the republican and academic tradition which demands at the same time humility, demand and rigor[9].
In this sense, the Condorcet theory of public education, heir to the Enlightenment and linked to academic work and the theory of the Republic, constitutes the condition for a republican reconquest of the educational institution, in the service of the people.
Let us meditate on this formula from the late Jacques Muglioni: “A republic is worth exactly what its school is worth.”
