Enlightenment in Practice , livre ebook

For Hannah And in memory of Montana

C ONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Note on Abbreviations and Translation
Map of France
Introduction
1. The Rebirth of the Concours Académique : Cultural Politics and the Domestication of Letters in the Age of Louis XIV
2. À la Recherche du Concours Académique
3. The Participatory Enlightenment
4. Dijon Revisited: Rousseau’s First Discourse from the Perspective of the Concours Académique
5. The Concours Académique, Political Culture, and the Critical Public Sphere
6. The Practical Enlightenment: The Concours Académique, the State, and the Pursuit of Expertise
7. Prize Contests in the Revolutionary Crucible: Decline and Regeneration
Conclusion: The Enlightenment in Question
Appendixes
A. Academies and Societies in France That Held Public Prize Contests from the Fourteenth Century to 1794
B. Female Laureates of the Concours Académique, 1671–1790
C. Contests founded by the Abbé Raynal
D. Contests on Poverty, Begging, and Poor Relief
E. Contests Related to Urban Drinking Water
F. List of Prize Contests Offered by Academies, Scholarly Societies, and Agricultural Societies in Continental France from 1670 to 1794
Notes
Works Cited

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book could not have been written without the generous support of granting agencies, institutions, colleagues, friends, and family. On the material side, I wish to acknowledge the support I received from The Johns Hopkins University, which provided me with several travel and research grants, including the J. Brien Key Fellowship. I am particularly indebted to the Fulbright Foundation, which financed my main archival expeditions in 2005 and 2006. I also received a useful SAS grant from the University of Alberta in 2008.
On the professional side, I benefited from the good conversation and feedback of Mary Ashburn-Miller, Nick Barr, Paul Friedland, David Garrioch, Eric Hall, Carla Hesse, John Iverson, Ken Loiselle, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, and Elena Russo. Antoine Lilti shepherded me through the maze of French academia and kindly invited me to present my preliminary archival discoveries in his seminar at the École normale supérieure. Lilti also supported my efforts to publish a summary of my work (in French translation) in the Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales in 2009. Over the years, I tested out some of the arguments for this book at conferences organized by the Society for French Historical Studies (Urbana-Champaign, 2006; Rutgers, 2008), the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (Atlanta, 2007), and seminars at the University of Alberta. The eminent Daniel Roche generously agreed to meet with me at the outset of my research, and his tips and suggestions proved invaluable once I set out for the provinces. My colleagues in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta, in particular Andrew Gow and the participants in our colloquium, provided invaluable support and encouragement as I finished the manuscript. Ken Loiselle, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, and Andrew Gow read complete drafts of the manuscript, and their insightful critiques were crucial in the initial revisions of my work. Sean Gouglas graciously offered to create the map. Finally, I wish to thank my editor at Cornell University Press, John G. Ackerman, and the two anonymous reviewers who provided excellent feedback on the manuscript.
I would also like to express my gratitude to the countless archivists in both Paris and the provinces who assisted in my researches. The staff at the Hôtel d’Assézat in Toulouse, the Bibliothèque Municipale de Bordeaux, the Archives de l’Institut (Paris), and the Bibliothèque de l’Institut (Paris) deserve special recognition. In Dijon, Nancy, and Marseilles, I had the opportunity to consult privately owned academic archives.
My debt to David A. Bell remains profound. I feel privileged to have worked with such an exemplary mentor, and this book could not have been written without his tireless support. My growth as a scholar is largely due to his highly individualized approach to teaching. He remains a valued friend and colleague.
On the personal side, I wish to acknowledge the untiring encouragement of my family and friends, who have never questioned my sometimes questionable career path. I wish also to thank the Teboul family of Meudon, France, who housed me on virtually every trip I made across the Atlantic. The Tebouls have taught me more about French culture and the French language than any book ever could. They remain my beloved “second” family.
The debt of gratitude owed to my wife, Hannah, is even more difficult to express. I could not imagine a more loving and supportive partner. I am eternally grateful for her wisdom, her good cheer, her companionship, and her love. Finally, I wish to thank our two beautiful daughters, Stella and Mia, who remind me every day why it’s all worth it.

N OTE ON A BBREVIATIONS AND T RANSLATION AD Archives départementales AM Archives municipales BM Bibliothèque municipale
All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.
Introduction
In a sense, the story of prize contests in France begins on a balmy afternoon in October of 1749, on a dusty road connecting Paris to the nearby royal dungeons at Vincennes. On that day, a thirty-seven-year-old music teacher named Jean-Jacques Rousseau set out on foot to visit his friend Denis Diderot in prison. The crown had incarcerated the luckless philosopher a few months earlier for publishing two highly scandalous books, Lettre sur les aveugles and Les bijoux indiscrets. After several kilometers of dehydration and fatigue, Rousseau, who usually tramped with a literary magazine under his arm, sat down beneath some trees and began to read. He cracked open his copy of the Mercure de France and spotted an announcement for an essay competition sponsored by the Academy of Dijon. This is what he read: “The Academy founded by monsieur Hector Bernard Pouffier, most senior member of the Parlement of Burgundy, announces to all interested savants that the prize for morality for the year 1750, consisting of a gold medal worth 30 pistoles [300 livres ], will be awarded to he who can best solve the following problem: whether the reestablishment of the sciences and the arts has contributed to the purification of morals.” 1
Reading the advertisement had a profound effect on Rousseau. For some time, he had harbored a deep-seated conviction that the objective progress of the arts and sciences had led directly to the moral decline of mankind. Until that very moment, though, the budding savant had lacked an outlet for his ideas. The prospects of participating in the contest, combined with the blistering heat, caused Rousseau to slip into a self-described euphoric hallucination. “At the instant I read this [passage],” he recounts in his Confessions, “I saw another universe, and I became another man. Although I have a vivid memory of the impression I received, the details have since escaped me. . . . What I remember distinctly about this moment is that when I arrived at Vincennes, I was in a sort of agitation that accompanies delirium. Diderot noticed. I told him the cause of it . . . and he urged me to sort out my ideas and work toward the prize.” 2 When Rousseau finally calmed down, he began drafting his essay. A year later, on 9 July 1750, the academicians at Dijon awarded Rousseau the top prize in moral literature. The subsequent publication of the essay catapulted Rousseau to literary stardom and permanently inscribed the concours académique in the annals of Western history.
It is something of a problem, however, that the story of academic prize competitions so often begins and ends with the highly fictionalized legend of Rousseau. 3 Today, the term essay contest, when applied to French history, is virtually synonymous with the fabled road to Vincennes and the enduring triumph of the “Discourse of the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences.” This book is an attempt to broaden our understanding of the concours académique and, in a way, to reveal Rousseau’s relatively unexceptional literary beginnings. There were, after all, many other shining lights in the Enlightenment who climbed the literary ladder with a victory in an academic prize competition: Fontenelle, the Bernouilli family, the Euler family, Bertholon, the abbé Grégoire, Barère, Fabre d’Églantine, the abbé Talbert, Boissy d’Anglas, Brissot, Marat, La Harpe, Lavoisier, Carnot, Robespierre, Garat, Daunou, and Necker represent but a fraction of the luminaries and future revolutionaries who found success in the concours académique. Voltaire, much to his chagrin, lost a competition on “the nature and propagation of fire” at the Royal Academy of Sciences in 1738. 4 Napoléon Bonaparte famously competed in an essay contest on the theme of happiness in 1791. Academic prize competitions, which stretched back to medieval Jeux floraux (floral games) and beyond, involved an estimated fifteen thousand total competitors between 1670, when the French Academy revived the practice, and August of 1793, when the revolutionary government abolished the academies as relics of the previous regime. Involving more than forty-five scholarly institutions and more than two thousand discrete competitions, the concours académique ranks as one of the most extensive intellectual practices of the French Enlightenment. To be blunt, we need to move beyond Rousseau.
We also need to move beyond the stalled social history of the French academies. From the 1960s through the 1980s, the study of the academies, and especially provincial academies, constituted a significant portion of the historiography on the French Republic of Letters. Social historians of the Annales tradition unearthed a gold mine of meticulously well-preserved manuscripts languishing away in provincial libraries, and a string of young researchers abandoned the cozy reading rooms of the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Archives National