Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-24hb2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T11:03:58.002Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

MADAME GUIZOT AND MONSIEUR GUIZOT: DOMESTIC PEDAGOGY AND THE POST-REVOLUTIONARY ORDER IN FRANCE, 1807–1830*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2011

ROBIN BATES*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Chicago E-mail: rdbates@uchicago.edu

Abstract

When the husband-and-wife team of François and Pauline Guizot looked at early nineteenth-century France, they saw an institutional wasteland where the Revolution had annihilated settled habits, mentalities, and structures. Beginning with collaborative work on pedagogy, they envisioned a new order adequate to the post-Revolutionary era. In their imaginative universe, moral suasion ultimately trumps direct physical coercion. Resistance and manipulation subvert the imperious imposition of an iron will, while an abiding spiritual form of power comes from renouncing forceful commands in favor of sentimental ascendancy. They advanced this as an all-embracing social truth applicable to many different domains from domesticity to government. Their wide-ranging theory of human relations blossomed into the gouvernement des esprits (“government of minds”) which intellectually underwrote François's Doctrinaire liberalism when he entered politics. Meanwhile, Pauline pursued her reflections on post-Revolutionary society in deceptively simple children's stories which instantiate their philosophy in concrete human relationships.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Guizot in De Witt, H., Monsieur Guizot dans sa famille et avec ses amis (1787–1871) (Paris, 1884), 68Google Scholar.

2 de Broglie, G., Guizot (Paris, 1990), 36Google Scholar.

3 Annales de l'éducation, III, XII (1813), 412–24.

4 This phrase—perhaps coined by Victor Cousin but certainly adopted by François Guizot as his own—mobilizes the full semantic resources of the words gouvernement and esprit. Government connotes a state apparatus in French and English. In French, though, governance can carry subtler connotations of wisely directing something—as with the steering of a boat (gouverner le bateau) or the controlling of one's emotions (gouverner le coeur). Thus the gouvernement des esprits can apply to domains beyond government as such. By the same token, esprit would translate as “mind,” but the English version has more restricted application to the intellectual faculties alone. To be spirituel does not mean that one excels at ratiocination and cogitation so much as that one is understanding and insightful. Esprit also carries meanings proper to its English cognate “spirit,” as in a vital principle or animating character. Esprit de corps means the morale of a group and to have beaucoup d'esprit means that one is lively. The gouvernement des esprits, then, can signify an appeal not only to reason but also to moral principles like duty and affective states like love. Given the polyvalence of gouvernement and esprit, we begin to see how reflections on domesticity could apply so readily to high politics.

5 Rosanvallon, P., L'état en France, de 1789 à nos jours (Paris, 1990), 114Google Scholar.

6 Guizot, F., Washington. Fondation de la république des États-Unis d'Amérique, vol. 1 (Paris, 1851), 4Google Scholar.

7 Guizot, F., Histoire parlementaire de la France, vol. 1 (Paris, 1863), 8Google Scholar.

8 Rosanvallon explains that “in the English case, democracy took hold only very slowly and gradually, and for a long time representative government served merely to guarantee certain liberties and privileges. That is why the old corporate bodies persisted there.” Rosanvallon, P., The Demands of Liberty: Civil Society in France since the Revolution, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 73Google Scholar.

9 Like most Frenchwomen of her generation, Pauline Guizot wrote under her husband's name to retain respectability when speaking in public. This poses certain problems for posterity. DeJean, Joan, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York, 1991), 23Google Scholar, worries, “the ideological baggage transmitted along with ‘Madame de’ and ‘Mademoiselle de’ is far from negligible. In all Western traditions, great writers are known by a family name alone; dominant usage in French suggests that women writers are ladies first.” We may have trouble taking writers such as “Madame Guizot” seriously if we call them by such names. Yet, historically, in this era women writers really were often considered “ladies first.” Furthermore, as we shall see, “Madame Guizot” designates a persona that is not necessarily coextensive with the personage of Pauline de Meulan.

10 Beginning in the 1780s, Sunday schools swept England. Their massive enrollment of working-class children reached approximately 200,000 by 1800, topping 2,100,000 by 1851. France could boast nothing comparable. Nor can we well imagine an educational institution founded before the Revolution enjoying uninterrupted growth down to the 1850s. Each regime change would have imperiled its basic legitimacy. Laqueur, T. W., Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture, 1780–1850 (New Haven, 1976), xiGoogle Scholar.

11 More, H., The Sunday School (London, 1796), 78, 12Google Scholar. This tract—its hectoring prose suffused by genre conventions—figures here as a contemporary representation of English society, rather than as documentary evidence of how genteel reformers selflessly saved the poor from themselves.

12 Ibid., 13, 15.

13 Guizot, Mme, Jules ou le jeune précepteur (Paris, 1840), 1920Google Scholar.

14 Ibid., 8, 57, 119.

15 She wrote about More several times, but addressed the Englishwoman's idea that women should go around lecturing people about their Christian duty in Annales de l'éducation, II, XI (1811), 276–80.

16 Guizot, F., Des moyens de gouvernement et d'opposition dans l'état actuel de la France (Paris, 1821), 128–30Google Scholar.

17 Moretti, F., “Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History—3,” New Left Review 28 (July–August 2004), 4363Google Scholar, original emphasis.

18 F. Guizot, Moyens, 172.

19 Rosanvallon, P., Le moment Guizot (Paris, 1985), 37Google Scholar.

20 Davidson, D. Z., France after Revolution: Urban Life, Gender, and the New Social Order (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 2Google Scholar.

21 Guizot in H. De Witt, Lettres de M. Guizot à sa famille et à ses amis, recueillies par Mme De Witt, née Guizot, 2nd edn (Paris, 1884), 10–11.

22 F. Guizot, “Instruction publique,” Jan. 1815. Archives Nationales 42 ap 28.

23 F. Guizot, “Instruction publique.”

24 Rosanvallon, Moment, 44–5.

25 F. Guizot, “Instruction publique.”

26 F. Guizot, “Note sur les difficultés du gouvernement et la situation du ministère,” 1816. Archives Nationales 42 ap 28.

27 Sewell, W. H. Jr, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005), 148CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Richter, M., “Toward a Concept of Political Illegitimacy: Bonapartist Dictatorship and Democratic Legitimacy,” Political Theory 10/1 (May 1982), 185214CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Guizot, Moyens, 23.

30 Guizot in Lettres de M. Guizot, 47, 51.

31 Pauline Guizot had long since realized that she would predecease her husband. Accepting the reality of her situation, she charged her friend Albertine de Broglie with a “positive commission” to ensure that he would remarry after her death. She further confided that she hoped he would choose Elisa. Broglie in Brush, E. P., Guizot in the Early Years of the Orleanist Monarchy (Urbana, 1929), 57Google Scholar.

32 Guizot in De Witt, Monsieur Guizot dans sa famille, 96.

33 Guizot, E., “De la charité et de sa place dans la vie des femmes,” in Guizot, F., Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de mon temps, vol. 2 (Paris, 1859), 457–76Google Scholar. This 1828 essay only appeared in print as an appendix to the second volume of Guizot's memoirs.

34 Guizot, Mme, Caroline, ou l'Effet d'un malheur, suivi de Aglaé, ou Les Tracasseries. Contes dédiés à la Jeunesse (Paris, 1840), 94Google Scholar.

35 Ibid., 12.

36 Ibid., 20.

37 Ibid., 27, 34.

38 Ibid., 66.

39 “L. . . .” probably alludes to Joseph Lancaster, the English educationist whose Lancastrian System of mutual instruction seems like the model for the pedagogy that Caroline will practice.

40 Guizot, Caroline, 102.

41 Ibid., 78.

42 Ibid., 88.

43 Ibid., 147, 152–3.

44 Desan, S., The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2004), 46Google Scholar.

45 Guizot, Moyens, 161.

46 V. E. Starzinger, Middlingness: Milieu, JustePolitical Theory in France and England, 1815–48 (Charlottesville, VA, 1965), 35Google Scholar.

47 Rosanvallon, P., “François Guizot and the Sovereignty of Reason”, in Moyn, S., trans. and ed., Democracy Past and Future, (New York, 2006), 125Google Scholar.

48 Craiutu, A., Liberalism under Siege: The Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires (Lanham, 2003), 219Google Scholar.

49 Tudesq, A.-J., Les grands notables en France (1840–1849): Etude historique d'une psychologie sociale, vol. 1 (Paris, 1964), 113Google Scholar.

50 Jaume, L., L'individu effacé, ou le paradoxe du libéralisme français (Paris, 1997), 136Google Scholar.

51 Guizot in Waresquiel, E. and Yvert, B., Histoire de la Restauration, 1814–1830: Naissance de la France moderne (Paris, 2002), 209Google Scholar.

52 Guizot, F. in L'Instituteur, Journal des écoles primaires. 1er année.—janvier et février 1833. Nos. 1 et 2 (Paris, 1833), 252Google Scholar.

53 Guizot, M, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de mon temps, vol. 1 (Paris, 1858), 361Google Scholar.

54 Guizot, “De la charité,” 475.

55 Reddy, W. M., “Sentimentalism and Its Erasure: The Role of Emotions in the Era of the French Revolution,” Journal of Modern History 72 (March 2000), 109–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 Rendall, J., “‘Women That Would Plague Me with Rational Conversation’: Aspiring Women and Scottish Whigs, c.1790–1830,” in Knott, S. and Taylor, B., eds., Women, Gender and Enlightenment (Houndmills, 2005), 342Google Scholar.

57 S. Desan, “The Politics of Intimacy: Marriage and Citizenship in the French Revolution,” in Knott and Taylor, Women, Gender and Enlightenment, 644.

58 Guizot, M, De la démocratie en France (Leipzig, 1849), 66–8Google Scholar.

59 de Rémusat, C., “Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de Mme Guizot,” in Guizot, Mme, Conseils de Morale, ou Essais sur l'homme, les mœurs, les caractères, le monde, les femmes, l'éducation, etc., vol. 1 (Paris, 1828), xixGoogle Scholar.

60 Mme Guizot, “Le devoir difficile. Troisième dialogue,” in Jules ou le jeune précepteur, 186–95, 192.

61 Ibid., 195.

62 Johnson, D., Guizot: Aspects of French History, 1787–1874 (London and Toronto, 1963), 102–3Google Scholar.

63 de Genlis, Mme, Théâtre de société (Paris, 1811)Google Scholar. The term théâtre de société generically referred to closet dramas suitable for private performance among family and friends, but Genlis is clearly playing upon this term in her book.

64 Murolo, P., “History in the Fast Lane: Howard Fast and the Historical Novel,” in Benson, S. P., Brier, S. and Rosenzweig, R., eds., Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public (Philadelphia, 1986), 63Google Scholar.

65 Moretti, F., Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Fischer, S., Fischer, D. and Miller, D. (London, 1988), 32Google Scholar.

66 Eagleton, T., Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London, 1976), 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Bourdieu, P., Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Nice, R. (Cambridge, 1977), 72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 The only conte he published was “Un premier jour de collège, conte” in Annales de l'éducation, II, VII.

69 de Genlis, Mme, De l'influence des femmes sur la littérature française, vol. 1 (Paris, 1826), xxiiGoogle Scholar. I was drawn to this citation by Hesse, C., The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton, 2001)Google Scholar.

70 Rémusat, “Notice sur la vie,” i.

71 Quoted in Pouthas, C.-H., La jeunesse de Guizot (1787–1814) (Paris, 1936), 260Google Scholar.

72 Annales de l'éducation, II, X (1811), 208–17.

73 Geertz, C., The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973), 93Google Scholar.

74 Sewell, Logics of History, 191.

75 Sainte-Beuve, C.-A., Galerie de femmes célèbres. Tirée des Causeries du Lundi (Paris, 1869), 352, 347Google Scholar.

76 Hesse, The Other Enlightenment, 130, 142.

77 La Vopa, A. J., “Women, Gender, and the Enlightenment: A Historical Turn,” Journal of Modern History 80/2 (June 2008), 332–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78 Quoted in Lettres de M. Guizot, 44.