Daily Life During the French Revolution (23 page)

Up to this time, those involved in cuisine were considered practitioners—professionals
who gave recipes and technical counsel, be it doctors who treated dietary
problems or writers who celebrated the pleasure of eating well. As a result,
some special literature was produced, and two major figures—Grimod de la
Reynière and Brillat-Savarin—began what was to be known as the art of
gastronomy. In 1803, Grimod published
l’Almanach des gourmands,
which
contained the latest culinary creations, selected by juries, making it the
ancestor of today’s food guides and cookbooks.

SAMPLE RECIPES

ECONOMICAL SOUP FOR THE POOR

Cook 2 bushels of potatoes, peel and purée
them, then put in a pot.

Add 12 pounds of bread, cut in slices

1 quarter of a bushel of onions

1/2 pound salt

1/2 pound of lard cut in small pieces (or
grease, or butter)

30 pints water*

Frozen potatoes can be used if reduced in
powder before putting them into the pot with the other ingredients

Affiches au Dauphiné. Almanach de 1789.

*In the recipe, this is written as 30
pints. The French old measure
pinte
is .93 liter, or roughly a quart.
Today, the pint is half a quart.

SAVOY CAKE

4 eggs, separated

1 tablespoon minced crystallized orange
blossom (or other flowers) (optional)

1 tablespoon flaked almonds

100 g crystallized sugar

1 tablespoon minced pistachios

1 tablespoon crystallized lemon peel,
finely chopped

200 g sieved flour

zest of a lime

Put
the eggs on one of the scales, and on the other (scale) put the powdered sugar;
the weight of the eggs should equal that of the sugar. Next, remove the sugar
leaving half the eggs which should equal the weight of the flour to be used.

Separate
the whites and yolks and beat the whites as hard as possible. Then put in the
yolks and continue beating.

Add
the sugar, followed by the flour, lime zest and a few leaves of chopped,
candied orange blossom, if available.

Butter
a mold or casserole and empty the mixture into it, sprinkling over it a few
lightly caramelized finely chopped almonds and pistachios and the glazed lemon
peel.

Cook
in a moderate oven for an hour and a half. Remove from the oven and take it out
of the mold and if it is a good color, serve it. Alternatively you can cover it
with a white icing, or glaze it with a little syrup and sprinkle small pellets
of multicolored decorating sugar over.

Serve for dessert.

Vincent La Chapelle, Le Cuisinier moderne
(1742), 2. 186–87.

EDUCATION

The church was paramount in education, especially in
elementary schools, where the stated goal was above all to produce good
Catholics, with reading, writing, and arithmetic taking second place. Indeed,
once they had mastered the alphabet, children were normally put straight to the
task of reading the catechism. Chiefly responsible for this indoctrination were
the Brothers of Christian Schools, who made certain that prayers were said
every morning and afternoon.

Up to the time of the revolution, priests—especially the Oratorians—
taught in both private and church-run schools. At this time, the church had
about 500 primary schools in Paris, many of which were free to their students,
who lived in a world controlled by priests, nuns, and monks. By the 1780s, the
Latin language had largely been replaced by French as a medium of instruction.

During the course of their preparatory education, young men
were carefully imbued with moral, political, and religious precepts that would,
it was hoped, stay with them the rest of their lives. Daily attendance at
chapel and weekly sermons, combined with spiritual exercises and political
indoctrination of the values of the establishment, led humanities students to
come away with the belief that righteousness meant obedience to the church, to
parents, and to the divinely constituted monarchy. The reward for following
these principles was salvation.

By 1789, some 48,000 students attended colleges (the
equivalent of an American junior and senior high school) run by the church,
with about one in 52 boys between the ages of 8 and 18 being admitted. Some of
these came from noble or rich bourgeois families. All members of the
professional elite began in a similar way, most spending a large part of their
adolescence preparing for the humanities or science in a
collège de plein
exercise.
Some students chose to pursue their studies in a seminary, and
those who had set their hearts on a bishopric moved to Paris with the hope of
eventual access to the highest positions in the church. After about six years of
study in the humanities, including four hours every day spent in the study of
the Latin language and literature, students emerged to take up duties or go on
to higher education.

Rousseau, who did not spend his impressionable years in one
of the sterile institutions of higher education, expounded a theory of learning
that appealed to the revolutionaries. It emphasized the importance of
expression rather than repression as a means of producing a well-balanced,
free-thinking child. The church and universities, however, were not interested
in freethinkers.

One of the first changes to come from the revolution was
the elimination of the prominent role played by the church in the educational
system. With a shortage of trained teachers, and with priests and nuns now
considered unacceptable to teach the youth of the republic, chaos reigned on
the educational scene. By 1799, the number of students attending colleges had
dropped significantly.

The constitution of 1793 declared education to be one of
the basic human rights open to everybody; but little was done to ensure that
this was actually the case. The constitution of 1795 ignored the problem and
made no such commitment. Under the Directory, each department established a
central school, and a few schools of higher learning were established in Paris.
No public funding was offered by the government for primary education.

Student Life

A student’s social position was determined by the rank of
his immediate superior and by the characteristic dress of the seminary, college,
or university he attended. The local academic establishment, with high legal
and social standing within the urban hierarchy, maintained a prominent position
among the dignitaries at ceremonies and festivals, and its members were exempt
from most municipal and royal taxation.

University recruits, especially those who wished to study
the law, were mostly the sons of professional families. These represented some
65 percent of the students entering the University of Douai in the mid-1770s
and 77 percent of those at the University of Nancy between 1782 and 1789. There
were 22 faculties of law throughout the country, and these graduated some 1,000
lawyers each year. Church prelates also began attending university, and many of
these had taken a baccalaureate in theology by 1789.

Within the institutions, there was an accepted order:
theology, law, and medicine ranked as the higher faculties, followed by the
arts. This hierarchy was evident everywhere, from the order followed in
processions to the selection of speakers for official assemblies. Just as in
corporate groups, the professor was the master and the student the apprentice.
A major difference was that the student had a good deal of relative freedom and
was under the professors’ controls only during the time he spent in the
classroom. While some students lived in seminaries or colleges, where
discipline was as strict as that for any apprentice, the majority lived at home
or took private rooms with no supervision outside the institution where they
studied.

Collegiate studies usually began at the age of 10 or 12,
and, by the time they reached their early 20s, the students were ready to start
their career. An exception was those studying for the degree of doctor of
theology at the University of Paris, which required a minimum of 16 years. Preparatory
studies in philosophy and the humanities were done in secondary schools so that
pupils would be prepared to attend university in their late teens.

University classrooms were simple, furnished with rows of
benches equipped with candleholders and facing a raised lectern. A student was
expected to provide his own candles, paper, pens, and writing table or desk.
Walls were of bare stone covered with whitewash, and it was customary to hang a
map of the world on one of them. Students spent about three to four hours a day
in the classroom. At Paris, according to the regulations of 1765, students had
to attend two classes a day, each lasting about one and a half hours.

In general, life in a classroom, especially in science, was
far from stimulating. After reading from one of his papers, the professor would
spend the next half hour or so discussing and explaining it before he ended the
class, perhaps with a question-and-answer period, after which came the roll
call. It seems that senior academics spent more time censoring heresy than
stimulating intellectual exchange. There were not many possibilities for the
students to do experiments or procedures discussed in the classroom unless they
could find a practicing scientist or surgeon to work with.

In the humanities, the diet was a little more varied: less
time was spent listening to the professor read from a text and more emphasis
was placed on literature, with exercises involving written work as well as
writing essays outside the classroom. Both oral and written examinations were
given. After the new subjects of history and geography were added to the
curriculum, more time was given to student participation and weekly debates.

Sometimes professors, who were required to teach one class
a day, were overwhelmed by the number of students, so helpers or assistants
were used fairly commonly. The class would attend the professor’s lecture,
after which it would be divided into smaller groups led by the brightest among
them, whose job it was to make sure the others had understood the lesson, done
their homework, and corrected their written work, assigned by the professor.

In both the arts and the sciences, students were expected
to be in class on time and to leave only at the sound of the bell. They had to
dress in a gown of the color appropriate to the faculty, and they were not
permitted to carry a sword or any other offensive weapon.

What was expected of them and what they actually did were
often rather different. In the eighteenth century, there were many complaints
about young men who registered each term, then paid another person to attend
the class and take notes for them. Law students, in particular, were notorious
for missing classes. Like the rest, they were forbidden to wear swords in
class, but they often defied the rule, and little was done about it. Professors
had no means of dealing with rowdy or impolite behavior, unlike professors in
the colleges, where discipline could be instilled by the whip or by other
measures for minor infractions (e.g., students could be forced to perform extra
work).

On average, students lived in idleness and boredom and
enjoyed long summer vacations. The older ones spiced up their lives dueling,
brawling, and generally making nuisances of themselves in public by
intimidating and harassing people. They were a fairly large force and as such
were considered formidable and rather frightening. A victim of their pranks had
no recourse but to appeal to the local criminal courts—a long, arduous, and
costly process. By the end of the old regime, students were still swaggering
around Paris disturbing the peace, and sometimes bodies were found on the
paving stones after they left. By 1789, many provincial capitals had theaters
where students could amuse themselves in their free time; they could also
attend lectures by itinerant experimental scientists, take fencing, riding, or
dancing lessons, join a lending library, or attend town-sponsored events or
even a public séance at the local academy of arts and sciences. Those old
enough could enroll in the rapidly spreading order of Freemasonry. Both secular
and theology students amply employed the services of prostitutes.

Since most students were studying theology or law, science
education was provided primarily for future candidates for the upper levels of
the church and the bar. During the course of the century, the number of those
interested in medicine grew, but even on the eve of the revolution, they formed
fewer than 10 percent of the total number of students. There were relatively
few doctors in the cities of France at this time compared to the number of
lawyers, judges, canons, and curates. Near the end of the century, the town of
Angers, with a population of 27,000, recorded a dozen physicians but 70 canons
and 17 curates.

Medical students in Paris usually attended the Jardin du
Roi and the Collège Royal. On the national stage, only three universities were
notable for medicine—Paris, Montpellier, and Toulouse.