A Child of the Enlightenment

Patrice Gueniffey is the leading French historian of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic age. In Boneparte: 1769–1802, he takes up the epic narrative at the heart of this turbulent period: the life of Napoleon himself, the man who — in Madame de Staël’s words — made the rest of “the human race anonymous.” Gueniffey follows Bonaparte from his obscure boyhood in Corsica, to his meteoric rise during the Italian and Egyptian campaigns of the Revolutionary wars, to his proclamation as Consul for Life in 1802. Bonaparte is the story of how Napoleon became Napoleon. Most books approach Napoleon from an angle — the Machiavellian politician, the military genius, the life without the times, the times without the life. Gueniffey paints a full, nuanced portrait. Today, Napoleon might seem to be a hero from a bygone time. But as Gueniffey says, his life still speaks to us, the ultimate incarnation of the distinctively modern dream to will our own destiny. Here is a brief excerpt looking at Napoleon’s education.

In his memoirs, Bourrienne says that Napoleon’s education had been greatly neglected. If we take this to refer to the military education of the future officer, we can go further and say that it was not so much neglected as deliberately non-existent. Neither at Brienne nor in Paris had he acquired the slightest notion of tactics or strategy, and after reading Jomini he cried: “In our military schools, we were not taught anything like this!” He was correct. When newly fledged officers left military school to go on active duty, they still had almost everything to learn. These schools were military only in name. As in other educational institutions, Latin and ancient history were the main subjects. “From all the windows and all the doors there seemed to escape a kind of jingle of Latin declinations and conjugations, of dactyls and spondees, of Ciceronian periods.” The teaching of grammar, literature, and French history came afterward. As it was taught, history was hardly more than a chronology mixed with genealogical tables that found its counterpart in the tedious lists of names in the geography class. French literature was reduced almost entirely to the seventeenth century, Corneille and Racine, Bossuet and Fénelon, and especially Boileau. It was probably because of the weaknesses in the teaching of French that Napoleon was always a mediocre speller — to say the least. This is easy to understand if we add that French was not his mother tongue and that he learned it, probably too quickly, during his four-month stay at the school in Autun. But his brother Lucien insists that from this point of view Napoleon was in no way unique, and that he had had several schoolmates who were no better than his elder brother in this respect, even though they were French. We know that the eighteenth century was very critical of secondary education, and especially of its emphasis on Latin and the inadequate attention it accorded modern languages and modern history. The instruction given secondary school students was accused of teaching them a dead language “before they knew their own tongue” and of cluttering their minds with useless knowledge for which they would have no use later on. It was also accused of training citizens for a world that had ceased to exist a millennium and a half earlier and of inculcating in them principles and values that were in every respect contrary to those of the world in which they lived. Projects of educational reform multiplied around the middle of the century. The role granted French, history, and geography increased somewhat, but without challenging the preponderance of Latin and ancient history. The special schools served as laboratories. In them the role of Latin was reduced and teachers were allowed to use translations of classical authors rather than the original texts.

The teaching of modern languages underwent a more enviable change in the military schools than in other schools. At Brienne, Napoleon had suffered through German grammar because a minister who was a great admirer of Frederick the Great thought there was no army worthy of the name outside Prussia, and that no one ignorant of German could be a good officer. Napoleon forgot his German as soon as he left school, just as he did the English he studied in Paris. As for the sciences, although mathematics was competently taught — Napoleon had the good luck to have two excellent teachers in Father Patrault at Brienne and Louis Monge, the brother of the future member of the Convention, in Paris — the same was not true for physics, chemistry, or natural history, to which students were introduced when an itinerant technician came to present a few experiments.

Ultimately there weren’t many subjects in which Napoleon was a brilliant student. Without aptitude for Latin, he was mediocre in French, “a dolt” in German, and the arts d’agrément — drawing, dance, fencing, riding, and music — offered him no more scope for distinguishing himself. Only in mathematics did he win a reputation as a good student. It is said that he was weak in literature, but the reference is only to his work in classes. When he wasn’t working on mathematics, he would rush off to the École militaire’s well-stocked library. It was there that reading became a passion. Although he constantly returned to Plutarch, he was probably reading everything he came across, without order but not without method. He read as others did in his time, with pen in hand, copying out extracts, drawing up summaries, and writing résumés.

Napoleon received an education typical of his period, even closer to the spirit of the time than the education offered in the schools, because it combined the two pillars of the scientific and the classical spirits, whose mixture, according to Taine, was to form the “poison” that swept away the world of the Old Regime in 1789. It is true that mathematics benefited from favored treatment in the military schools, first of all for its obvious utility in branches such as artillery and engineering, but also “because it was seen as a way of exercising the mind.” Although the directors of the military schools were wary of philosophy — it was taught little or not at all — they shared the philosophers’ conception of the importance of mathematics: they saw it as the loftiest expression of the powers of reason. In the end, the education that Bonaparte got from his teachers and that he acquired on his own was not so inadequate. To be sure, he knew nothing about his future profession, but he had received from his education the best it could give him: not so much knowledge as the desire to learn. Utilitarian criticism of secondary education in the period fails to take into account the fact that education deliberately did not seek to be utilitarian. The real goal of the military schools was not to train officers but to cultivate gentlemen and loyal servants of the king. This was as much a matter of shaping the student’s behavior as of instructing him. The schools sought less to provide a solid, comprehensive grounding in knowledge or immediately usable practical know-how than to form the student’s judgment. According to Abbé Rollin, the purpose of good teaching was to “cultivate young people’s minds” the better to turn them away “from idleness, games, and debauchery,” to give them “gentler inclinations and manners,” and to allow each of them, later on, to “be able to play their part, as in a great musical orchestra, in making perfect harmony.” That is why no plan for educational reform could deprive the classical humanities of their supreme place. The objective was not to train specialists in language and ancient history; it was to make students familiar with the models of greatness and virtue that abounded in the ancient world. That is why instruction really began only after the student left school: “Your classes are over, now your studies begin,” Chancellor d’Aguesseau told his son. The education of that time has found few defenders. Refusing to believe that there was nothing good in this system, the philosopher Joubert was to regret the disappearance of the old schools:

They were in fact small, elementary universities. In them, students received a very complete primary education There were chairs of philosophy and mathematics, subjects by which so much store is set; history, geography, and other branches of knowledge about which people talk played a role, not prominently and with fanfare, as they do today, but secretly and surreptitiously, so to speak. They were fused, insinuated, and conveyed with other subjects. . . . A little of everything was taught and the chords of every disposition were sounded. Every mind was urged to know itself, and all talents to be developed. Taught rather slowly, with little ceremony and almost imperceptibly, students thought they knew little, and remained modest. . . . They left the old schools knowing they were ignorant and ignorant of what they knew. They departed eager to learn more, and full of love and respect for men they thought were learned.

It is clear that this “secret and surreptitious” education did not always achieve its goal. The proof is that it created revolutionaries instead of loyal subjects and a crowd of deists instead of devout Christians. But that was less the fault of the teaching than of the spirit of the times, against which even the reclusion of the students was powerless. Rousseau was not on the reading list, but it was his books that the students secretly read. And like many young people of his generation, Napoleon lost his faith among clerics. His first communion took place at Brienne, his confirmation in Paris. But when he left school, he was no longer the pious boy he had once been. It is true that the Minim Fathers at Brienne were not very zealous in performing their religious duties. Father Château was proud that he could celebrate the mass in less than five minutes, and even the principal, Father Berton, performed it in no more than ten. But the teachers’ lack of fervor would have had no effect had the spirit of the time not infused Brienne and the École militaire. Napoleon continued to submit to religious discipline, but as soon as he left the École militaire he stopped seeking the sacraments. He had formed his conviction. It was that of the century: religion was a support for morality, a factor in social stability, good for women and poor people, and had to be respected even when one had lost faith in its dogma, as he had. In this too, the young Corsican had received a French education. At the end of his years of study, he in no way differed from the generation that was, four years later, to plunge headlong into the Revolution.