Virtuous Competition among Citizens: Emulation in Politics and

Pedagogy during the French Revolution

Kaplan, Nira.

Eighteenth-Century Studies, Volume 36, Number 2, Winter 2003, pp.

241-248 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/ecs.2003.0015

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ecs/summary/v036/36.2kaplan.html

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241

NIRA KAPLAN

VIRTUOUS COMPETITION AMONG CITIZENS: EMULATION IN

POLITICS AND PEDAGOGY DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Shortly after the demise of the Directory and the First French Republic,
the National Institute sponsored a prize contest on the question, Is emulation a
good means of education? The contest, as historian Martin Staum has noted, was
one of several means by which the academy hoped to help reconstruct a democratic society no longer based on legal inequality. Emulation, as a means of encouraging the instruction of future citizens, was considered essential to this regeneration.1 Reflecting the broad significance of this concept, the respondents
hardly limited their commentary to emulation in the schoolhouse. Rather, they
described emulation more broadly as a type of virtuous competitiveness natural
to all men. The sentiment of emulation, wrote Georges-Marie Raymond in his
contest essay, is a law of human nature, which is stamped on the heart of man by
the same hand that formed him; and in fact, this sentiment has become the principal motive for human action.2
I would like to suggest that this view of emulation was an essential quality of the free citizen developed during the French Revolution, at a time when the
destruction of corps and privilege promised a liberating but also frightening transformation of social relations. With the demise of Old Regime structures, individuals were freed from oppressive institutions, but their social identity was threatened either by dissolution in a sea of anonymity or by the prospect that distinction
would be gained solely through ambition and avarice, passions that undermined
the civic culture of democratic society. One method for resolving this tension
between individual and social needs was to reshape the concept of emulation. As
a pedagogical tool under the Old Regime, emulation molded the mind and morals
of the child, encouraging individual effort and engendering the values necessary
for correct social comportment. After 1789, legislative debates over educational
and professional reforms granted this process of moral development greater scope,
expanding its goal beyond the scholastic setting to make emulation an inherent
character trait of the male citizen. By reconciling civic virtue and individual effort, emulation relieved anxieties about the social implications of the Revolution
and helped shape the character of the emerging liberal society.
During the eighteenth century, emulation was a concept in flux, shifting
from imitation to competition in both the pedagogical domain and in broader
social contexts. Emulation as imitation was a key precept in the early-seventeenthcentury Jesuit collge, where copying exemplary models made classical studies an
essential component in the development of moral character. Young boys were
expected not simply to memorize, translate, or copy Latin and Greek texts, but
also to imitate or emulate the heroic characters and principles described therein.
One of the key lessons that the ancients provided was that civic virtue, the ability
to act disinterestedly for the common good, was an essential component of public
life. Once he passed the threshold of adulthood, the young man was supposed to
be devout and docile in matters of religion. In society at large, he was also ex-

Nira Kaplan is an independent scholar living in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently working on a project investigating the concept of merit and meritocracy during the French Revolution.

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pected to behave with the virtuous self-sacrifice of Brutus and Cato and the justice and disinterestedness of Solon. The role of examples in both scholastic and
virtuous emulation meant that the teacher himself became an exemplary model.
Success in maintaining discipline came as much from his ability to inspire admiration and attempts at imitation as from the threat of punishment. Indeed, for the
Jesuits, emulation was attractive precisely because it reduced the need for punishment. The Old Regime teacher, therefore, was expected to be gentle, honest,
obedient and, of course, pious, as well as knowledgeable. 3
By the end of the Old Regime, this emphasis on imitation had become
more competitive, more public, and more focused on encouraging competence
and social productivity rather than the inculcation of virtue. In the collge experience of emulation after 1700, simple imitation of text and teacher was superseded by the increasingly prevalent weekly, monthly, and year-end contests that
tested scholarly ability. Students paired off against each other in jousts of composition and verse or sought through scholastic exercises to win the praise of the
principal, who made monthly rounds of the classes. The ultimate competition
was the prize contest, or concours, at the end of the year. Parents, teachers, and
sometimes local parlementaires, or municipal dignitaries, were invited to public
ceremonies, where the top students were awarded books, silver crosses, or other
little rewards for the best Latin composition, the most eloquent oratory, or the
best translation of a classical text into French. According to the description in one
provincial newspaper, the benefits of these constant competitions and the public
acclaim that accompanied them extended far beyond the encouragement of virtue. They answered social needs by animating new-born talents, augmenting
the taste for hard work and the esteem for belles lettres in the souls of youths who
in time will fill the most important functions in society.4
During the second half of the eighteenth century, as the popularity of
these prize contests permeated the world outside the school and assumed the form
of frequent academic concours, emulation played an even more extensive role in
fostering productive competition as well as personal virtue. Contemporaries viewed
those who participated in the growing numbers of scientific and agricultural
concours as exhibiting a new type of public virtue in which the emphasis on
heroism and self-sacrifice was replaced by an ideal of social utility. Spurring emulation to increase competence also became the raison dtre for a series of professional reforms, generally in the form of competitive recruitment examinations in,
for example, the military officer corps, the Paris surgical corps, and the faculty of
arts at the University of Paris. Emulations use in competition, while not effacing
its influence on moral development, nevertheless tended to lead to a relative neglect of personal character by linking public virtue more explicitly to the ability
or capacit to produce more concrete social benefits.5
Old Regime society accepted the potentially disruptive connotations of
competitive merit because the concept of emulation implicitly circumscribed the
types of individuals who could compete. It was widely believed that emulation
was a noble sentiment available only to those who possessed the type of magnanimity and disinterestedness gained either through wealth or a sense of service.
Emulators, according to the Dictionnaire de Trvoux, was a term that applied
to great men, to commanders (capitaines), to men of letters.6 Within this privileged circle, supposedly unsullied by ambition or envy, the battle for positions
and openings supposedly took place among equals. And in this sense, emulation
could foster cooperation and fellowship as well as competition. The term was

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consistently defined as a desire to equal or surpass a rival, and its initial Latin
derivation, aemulatio, meant the desire to equal.7
Not everyone looked on the use of emulation to foster elite competition
as beneficial. Although Rousseau incorporated emulation in his legislative plans
and in the competitions staged by Julie and Wolmar at Clarens, he was generally
suspicious of a society that preferred talent to virtue. Ironically, it was in the very
essay that won the concours at the Dijon Academy that Rousseau attacked societys
emphasis on competitive merit. In his Discours sur les sciences et les arts, he
noted that society no longer asks if a man has probity but if he has talent . . . the
rewards are prodigious for one with a sharp wit, and virtue receives no honor. In
accordance with this line of argumentation, Rousseaus Emile is carefully sheltered from the public jousting of the scholastic concours, learning by experience
rather than books, socially isolated, away from the emulation that forces us to
compare ourselves to others; because these comparisons are never made without
leaving some impression of hatred against those who would compete with us for
preference.8
In the last decades of the Old Regime, less erudite and more practical
treatises from the prefects and rectors of the collge system itself also argued for a
retreat from emulations public, competitive tendencies. The emulation spurred
by scholastic concours was sharply criticized for favoring a few brilliant students
and for fostering ambition and hatred among competitors. For this reason, many
Old Regime pedagogues proposed alternative methods of spurring emulation,
such as having the professor comment privately on students work rather than
subjecting them to public critiques. Borrowing from Enlightenment epistemological theories, reformers urged teachers to gain an intimate understanding of each
childs sentiments and impressions in order to mold his moral and scholastic development. From the very first day, argued A. H. Wandelaincourt, the prefect
of the collge in Verdun and a future member of the Convention, teachers must
study the character of their students to guide them. They must work to know
their moods, tendencies, talents, passions, and dominant inclinations.9 As emulation became associated with a more general social competition, pedagogy was
moving in the opposite direction, delving deeper into the mind of the individual
student.
In 1789, the Revolutions destruction of the corps and privileges that
accorded social status brought these two movements of social competition and
individualized pedagogy into tandem. According to the principles enunciated in
the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the rights and liberties of the citizen would
replace the corporate structures that had characterized Old Regime society. This
reliance on the individual raised anxieties about personal behavior and its social
effects, however. Would greater freedom for citizens create a harmonious society
or one in which the need to distinguish oneself led to fratricidal ambitions and
envy? In petitions to the Constituent Assembly and in legislative debates from
1789 to 1791, many citizens and deputies denied the problems raised by individual liberty, arguing that a broad competition for careers and public offices
would in fact create an ideal polity because emulation would encourage both the
merit necessary for progress and the civic virtue essential to democratic society.
According to this view, the destruction of Old Regime institutions also extinguished the hateful sentiments of rivalry and ambition that might arise in a competitive atmosphere, allowing the individual to operate rationally and disinterestedly in the public arena.10

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This idealism particularly came to light during debates over professional

reforms, in areas formerly limited by noble birth or venal office. One petition for
abolishing venal offices for notaries argued that the emulation excited by competition makes men suitable to serve their country. The clash of opinions helps to
distinguish the just and unjust, the good from the bad. If this transparent method
of selection is neglected, the letter continued, isolated men will always be stupid,
bad citizens; they will soon become slaves.11
Those who did not share this optimistic outlook were quick to point out
that conflicts might result from open access to careers. In a debate over the promotion of naval officers, another commentator warned that a broad competition
would create disorder rather than a society neatly divided by function: A first
mate or a ships pilot will leave his position to become an officer; all officers will
want to be captains and this crowd of ignorant pretenders . . . will result in a glut
destructive of all emulation.12 Relying on the inherent rationality of individual
behavior was simply not sufficient for some members of the public and the Constituent Assembly, some of whom even suggested limiting individual rights to
ensure social order.13
To counter such fears, legislators brought renewed attention to developing the moral character of future generations of citizens through early instructionand here emulation, in the sense of imitation, was revived and became an
important pedagogical tool. In national education projects presented to the Constituent Assembly, such imitative emulation eliminated both the Old Regime system of concours and prizes and the classical curriculum that had provided students with textual models. The focus of instruction was to be civic and useful,
rather than esoteric and competitive, following Enlightenment emphasis on the
value of direct observation and experience. Denouncing the captivit classique in
which students became rivals in useless competitions, one eager citizen presented
a plan to the Constituent Assembly that argued for a new, more egalitarian emulation, in which each student will compete with himself and will receive encouragement, approbation but rarely praise and never blows. Emulation would
be encouraged not by scholastic concours but by exciting and stimulating students. This type of emulation centered primarily on various demonstrations by
the teacher rather than textual study, and it was a system that did not lend itself to
the study of abstractions.14 Another educational reformer wrote to the Constituent Assembly to explain how this emulation through observation could be used in
music, dance, and sculpture but did not discuss how it would work in more intellectually demanding courses. Perhaps the lack of precision in this curriculum sprang
from the fact that emulation of the teacher was more clearly focused on directing
the child toward civic virtue through manipulation of the sentiments rather than
on pushing him to study. On the potential impression that a good teacher could
make, the author painted a sickeningly sweet scene of a professor providing final
words to his pupil: Continue, my friend; happy the child who resembles you!
He will be the glory of his country, the happiness of his family; adieu (in shaking
his hand), adieu my friend! . . . The little heart beats faster, joy sparkles in the
childs eyes; he turns to let loose a torrent of delicious tears. . . . That is how we
make young people caring, loving, thankful and docile. . . .15 Emulation in this
passage becomes a more complex, psychological process than it was when the
student used the distant heroes of Greek and Roman texts as models. Instead, the
teacher, by encouraging virtue through his own upright behavior and warm affection, becomes the hero whose benediction should carry such authority that the
child will make his approval the first goal of all his efforts. Gradually, as he en-

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tered society, the child would work for the happiness of others and the glory of
the nation. The child would move from being an emulator to becoming a model
for emulation, and his awareness of being in this position would continue to
stimulate his efforts to be a useful and good citizen. While initially imitative,
emulation would thus become an internal mechanism that would allow each citizen to operate virtuously in a society regulated by competition rather than corps.
The transformation of the teacher from scholar to virtuous model for
emulation was most pronounced after the fall of the monarchy in 1792. The
formation of the Republic actualized the concerns that every educated Frenchman had imbibed from classical writings and from the political works of
Montesquieu about the importance of virtue and the dangers of vice, luxury, and
ambition in a republic. Indeed, the need for virtue gained in urgency as the Republic began tearing apart at the seams. The State was not only facing a five-front
war with Europe, but rebellions against Montagnard politics had arisen in Lille
and in towns in the south, while the west was in full counterrevolution. Professional reforms fell by the wayside, and educational debates in the Convention
shifted toward the construction of a unified civic society. Reliance on the childs
imitation of the teacher and concern with public virtue led some deputies to describe a pedagogy that was increasingly equated with social experience, excluding
almost all formal training. During the most radical phase of the Revolution, one
deputy proposed that instruction in primary school teaching might be reduced to
the simple observation of daily tasks. A solider will teach exercises to our children, and that will cost nothing, he declared. In the communes where there are
rivers, a sailor will hold a school for swimming.16 For the Montagnard Jean Bon
St. Andr, teaching virtue became a sort of bucolic idyll, with familiar conversations in the presence of nature . . . long walks in the woods, in the mountains and
along the banks of rivers.17
As the curriculum became more generalized, so too did the definition of
emulation and its beneficial effects. No longer confined to the classroom, emulation was the key to spreading civic virtue throughout society to ensure that passions destructive of republican harmony were extirpated from the adult population. Emulation, as in earlier plans for the moral instruction of the child, was to
be stimulated by exciting sentiments of ardor and enthusiasm for civic actions.
During debates over national education in 1793, deputy Gabriel Bouquier noted
that [m]an, as a sensitive being, is guided less by rigorous principles . . . than by
impressive figures, striking images, great spectacles, and profound emotions . . . It
is not enough to show him the truth; the main point is to get him impassioned for
it.18 Festivals, therefore, with their symbols, parades, and public participation,
were particularly important in encouraging the correct social behavior for republican citizens. Of the festivals, the Montagnard Joseph Lakanal declared, Nothing is more apt than this institution to foster morality in men, to watch over them
more closely in their social relations, and to inspire in them, individually and as a
group, a strong emulation for esteem and glory, the mother of progress.19 The
emulation seen as so important in nurturing virtue in the individual child was
now attached to the participation in a public ceremony where icons of liberty and
reason were paraded before the spectators, where the most patriotic and virtuous
citizens of the community were honored, and where speeches urging citizens to
serve their republic were seemingly interminable. The models and tableaux vivants provided by the festival became a mass educationassuming of course,
that all citizens were willing to observe and be inspired by the ceremonies provided for them.20 Nevertheless, public as these occasions were, the effect of the

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festival was supposed to be assimilated individually, teaching each male citizen to

participate in public life through emulation, while female citizens were relegated
to the domestic sphere. In Jacques-Louis Davids description of the festival of
heroism, for example, men in the community were exhorted to emulate the hero,
while women and girls had to content themselves with being objects of male affections: Let the father accompanied by his sons tell them: Here are the rewards
that the grateful Fatherland accords to those who died in defending it. . . . O my
children, by their example, may you be the terror of kings and the honor of my
white hair! Let mothers say to their daughters: . . . Make yourself a worthy object
of his [the heros] admiration . . . learn that true wealth is to have many
children . . . who will someday be defenders of the Fatherland.21
Such festivals became an essential component of plans for public instruction. In a bill P. C. F. Daunou presented to the Convention in the summer of 1793,
prizes were to be given in a number of national festivals to worthy citizens, and
whole communities would be honored for best executing military maneuvers or,
in a bizarre type of beauty contest, for having the most attractive population.22
Daunou viewed such general emulation as crucial to the development of republican virtues. Let us believe that emulation is a sentiment given by nature, he
argued in his defense of the plan, and that it is as beneficial as all the good
qualities it inspires, as long as it is not corrupted by social institutions . . . I cannot conceive of a great republic without emulation.23 Indeed, emulation became
an excuse for establishing a drastically reduced skeleton of public instruction,
because so many aspects of revolutionary society would now implicitly educate
citizens in civic values. Bouquier argued in December 1793 that the very existence
of a society free of despotic institutions encouraged emulation and civic instruction: The Revolution has, in truth by itself, organized public education and placed
everywhere inexhaustible sources of instruction. Do not replace this organization, simple and sublime like the people that created it, with a fractious and derivative one.24 In another speech from the same period, a deputy noted that
private schooling was far preferable to state education: Never does a great and
free nation need a decree to possess all that human industry, all that a universal
emulation can offer naturally to civilized men . . . Education should circulate like
any other merchandise.25 Emulation here emerges as an essential component of
a free, republican society, a quality intrinsic to citizenship that encourages civic
virtue rather than the talents and social productivity of the Old Regime.
The image of a self-educating republic was a product of radical rhetoric
from which the Revolution quickly retreated. Instead, state centralized schools
with scholastic and recruitment concours, like those that still characterize the
modern French educational system, were established after Thermidor and during
the Directorial and Napoleonic years. However, the concept of emulation remained
central to the debate over social reconstruction in the wake of the Convention.
The 1801 prize contest essay by Raymond, mentioned earlier, is characteristic of
this trend. Raymond sharply criticized those who attacked emulation as encouraging pride and ambition. Any attempt to destroy emulation was doomed to failure, he argued, because the desire to live in the public eye, and to compare and
contrast ones own moral and intellectual development to other mens, was a
natural human sentiment essential to all societies. While Raymond admitted that
emulation could be perverted by pride or ambition when society turned away
from rational enlightened goals, he nevertheless had faith that the tabula rasa
created by the Revolution would naturally foster its development: If ever the
voice of reason is appreciated among us . . . if virtue begins to develop

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247

successfully . . . it is to emulation that we owe this initial well-being. . . . We will

see it rise soon of its own efforts and progress rapidly down the path of public
good.26
Raymonds comments suggest that emulation may be an important part
of the Revolutions legacy to nineteenth-century France. In a period of extreme
social and political divisions, revolutionaries used both the social and pedagogical connotations of emulation to cleanse the male citizens behavior of any taint
of ambition and rivalry, while making his independence essential to the operation
of a civic and free society. This idealized image created during the Revolution
could conveniently serve to mask the growing inequities of a postrevolutionary
liberal society in the throes of industrialization. Carol Harrison has examined the
ways in which emulation allowed the male bourgeois of the nineteenth century to
define himself as part of a society of independent, virtuous, and equal citizens at
the same time that he excluded from civic participation women, Protestants,
Jews, and members of the lower classes. Even as emulation reverted to an elitist
sentiment, it retained democratic connotations that allowed bourgeois men to
portray themselves as a potentially universal class that could represent the
whole of French society and displace social conflict.27 By making emulation
virtuous and intrinsic to citizenship, the Revolution ironically established the cultural foundations for the emergence of this new elite.

NOTES
1. Martin Staum, The Enlightenment Transformed: The Institute Prize Contests, EighteenthCentury Studies 19, no. 2 (1985): 15379.
2. Georges-Marie Raymond, Essai sur lmulation dans lordre social et sur son application
lducation (Geneva: J.-J. Paschoud, 1802), 277.
3. Gustave Dupont-Ferrier, Du Collge de Clermont au Lyce Louis-le-Grand (15631920) (Paris:
E. de Boccard, 1921), 233; Dominique Julia, Le Choix des professeurs en France: vocation ou
concours, 17001850, Paedagogica Historica 30, no. 1 (1994): 17580.
4. Philippe Marchand, Lmulation au Collge de Lille (17651791), Actes du 95e Congrs
national des socits savantes, Reims, 1970. Section dhistoire moderne et contemporaine (Paris:
Bibliothque Nationale, 1974), 1:152.
5. See Jean-Claude Bonnet, La Naissance du Panthon: Essai sur le culte des grands hommes
(Paris: Fayard, 1998), 3247; Daniel Roche, Le Sicle des Lumires en province: Acadmies et
acadmiciens provinciaux, 16701789 (Paris: ditions de lcole des Hautes tudes en Sciences
Sociales, 1989), 32355. For more on the general development of recruitment examinations during
the Old Regime, see Nira Kaplan, A Changing Culture of Merit: French Competitive Examinations
and the Politics of Selection, 17501820 (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1999), 26118.
6. mulateurs, in Dictionnaire universel franois et latin, vulgairement appel Dictionnaire de
Trvoux (Paris: Compagnie des Libraires Associs, 1771). John Shovlin has nonetheless indicated
that the social boundaries that restricted emulation were beginning to dissolve at the end of the
eighteenth century. See John Shovlin, Towards a Reinterpretation of Revolutionary Anti-Nobilism:
The Political Economy of Honor in the Old Regime, Journal of Modern History 72, vol. 1 (2000):
3566.
7. mulation, in Trsor de la langue franaise. Dictionnaire de la langue du XIXe sicle et du
XXe sicle, (17891960), ed. Paul Imbs (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique, 197194).
8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat social et autres uvres politiques (Paris: Garnier frres,
1975), 634; Roussseau, Emile, ou de lducation (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966), 293.

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Eighteenth-Century Studies 36 / 2

9. Dominique-Franois Rivard, Rflexions sur les prix de lUniversit et sur quelques objets trs
importants par lducation de la jeunesse (Paris, 1765); Antoine Hubert Wandelaincourt, Plan
dducation publique par le moyen duquel on rduit cinq annes le cours des tudes ordinaires
(Paris: Durand neveu, 1777), 63.
10. This attitude mirrors an idealistic belief in the citizens political behavior in 1789. Keith Baker
argues that the National Assembly was influenced by physiocratic thought when it drafted the Declaration of Rights: once a list of rights was made known, individuals would operate rationally and in
harmony on public issues, rather than according to their varying interests. Keith Baker, The Idea of
a Declaration of Rights, in The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of
Rights of 1789, ed. Dale Van Kley (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994), 15496.
11. Archives Nationales (A.N.) DXVII 4 Dossier 49, no. 7, Extrait du registre des dlibrations
de la communaut des notaires de Saumur, n.p., 9 December 1789.
12. A.N. DXVI 14, Dossier 43, no. 17, Vues gnrales relatives lorganisation militaire de la
marine, n.p., n.d.
13. On the same issue of naval officer recruitment, deputy Pierre-Victor Malouet notes, The
equality of rights can only exist between men who find themselves in circumstances of equal services,
merit and means. Indefinite liberty exists for no one, either in the social order or in nature (Archives
Parlementaires 25 [14 April 1791], 88).
14. The proposed curriculum emphasized practical mechanics. A.N. ADXVIIIc 84. Cornilleau de
Chateau de Loir, Projet de nouvelles coles (Nantes, 1790), 610, 1723.
15. A.N. ADXVIIIc.83. J.-F. Major, Tableau dun collge en activit (Bar-le-Duc: Moucheron et
Duval, [1790]), 55, 578.
16. James Guillaume, Procs-verbaux du comit dinstruction publique de la Convention Nationale,
6 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 18911907), 3:114.
17. Guillaume, Procs-verbaux, 1: 276.
18. Dominique Julia, Les Trois Couleurs du tableau noir: La Rvolution (Paris: Belin, 1981), 349.
19. A.N. ADXVIIIC 289. Lakanal ses collgues (extracts from the Journal dinstruction sociale,
29 June 1793), 3. See also, Nicolas Hentz, Sur linstruction publique (Paris: Imprimerie nationale,
1793), 4.
20. Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1988), 98105.
21. Julia, Les Trois Couleurs, 354.
22. A.N. ADXVIIIc.289. Joseph Lakanal, Projet dducation du peuple franais, prsent la
convention nationale au nom du comit dinstruction publique (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1793),
19.
23. Bronislaw Baczko, ed., Une ducation pour la dmocratie: textes et projets de lpoque
rvolutionnaire (Paris: Garnier, 1982), 320.
24. Guillaume, Procs-verbaux, 3:xxvi.
25. Guillaume, Procs-verbaux, 3:lxxixlxxx.
26. Raymond, Essai sur lmulation, 287.
27. Carol E. Harrison, The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France: Gender, Sociability
and the Uses of Emulation (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), 21. On the emergence of bourgeois
universalism, see also P. Higonnet, Class, Ideology, and the Rights of Nobles during the French
Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).