Regimes of education: Pedagogy and the political reconstruction of postrevolutionary France, 1789-1848 /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Bates, Robin Duffin, author.
Imprint:2015.
Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2015
Description:1 electronic resource (376 pages)
Language:English
Format: E-Resource Dissertations
Local Note:School code: 0330
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/10773214
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Other authors / contributors:University of Chicago. degree granting institution.
ISBN:9781339079530
Notes:Advisors: Jan E. Goldstein Committee members: Paul B. Cheney; Robert J. Morrissey; William H. Sewell.
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Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 77-02(E), Section: A.
English
Summary:Following the French Revolution in 1789, educators designed and enacted models of human relations that were transposed onto relationships of power, whether between masters and slaves, men and women, or political leaders and their people. This dissertation examines a series of educational projects that promised the national reconstruction that seemed unreachable in the polarized political world. For a regime to last, citizens needed to feel direct personal connections with it. Directing the emotional investments of citizens became an urgent matter. In the 1700s, Felicite de Genlis used education to create self-enclosed worlds of sentimental relationships. The foundational sacrifice of an educator, who gives up everything for the sake of the pupil, calls forth endless reciprocal devotion. Genlis applied this dynamic to the creation of postrevolutionary sovereignty. Education could remedy the shallowness of postrevolutionary regimes by integrating the state with deeper social structures. The Napoleonic Empire (1804-1814/15), although powerful, worried that it remained so shallowly implanted that it might collapse at any moment. The school for girls run by Mme. Campan at Ecouen aimed to create a sentimental corollary to Napoleon's new state. In reaction to Napoleonic despotism, Francois and Pauline Guizot applied a logic of human relations in sentimentalist pedagogy that sought to regulate domesticity to political liberalism. Their postrevolutionary order did not take an institutional form with clear links to a regime, but seemed an aspect of humanity itself. Francois Guizot subsequently rose to power during the July Monarchy (1830-1848), spearheading a national school system as part of a "government of minds" that drew individuals into a revelation of social reason that overrode competing motivations. The government of minds was adapted to the colonial sphere to regulate the abolition of slavery, which occurred in 1848. Inside government (Remusat, Tocqueville, Broglie) and out (Schoelcher, Javouhey) programs were devised to imbue the enslaved people with the spiritual imprint of "civilization" before they should go free. As in each of the projects examined, education was meant to do the work of the future in the present, defining a new historical context that embodied a regime's politics without provoking political contention.