Introduction: A Tale of Two Histories

‘Nous allons donc encore augmenter le nombre des Ouvrages

que l’on aura un jour à compiler, touchant l’Education de la jeunesse.’

Thiébault, Nouveau plan d’éducation publique (1778)^[1]

‘La littérature, c’est ce qui s’enseigne, un point c’est tout.’

Barthes, ‘Réflexions sur un manuel’ (1969)^[2]

On the one hand, this is a book about a forgotten eighteenth-century French quarrel about how to reform literary teaching in the Ancien Régime collèges. On the other, it is a study of how the French word littérature came to mean some of the things it does today, namely, aesthetically pleasing texts; texts that are (for one reason or another) considered ‘great’; a canon often defined according to nation, as in la littérature française; and a discipline to be studied. At face value, these two histories appear unrelated. What this book sets out to show, however, is that the emergence of modern ideas of littérature in France owes much to this debate about education which, until now, has received little attention, and has not even had a name. And this story begins with an equally anonymous leather-bound volume that sits, unassumingly, in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. [p.2]

A Quarrel

On the inside cover of its eighteenth-century sheepskin binding, affixed to the marbled pastedown, is the bookplate of Joseph Xaupi (1688-1778), bearing the printed date 1765.^[3] Born in Perpignan, Xaupi was made a doctor of theology by the Sorbonne in 1705, and became archdeacon of Perpignan in the 1720s. An homme de lettres as well as an homme d’Eglise, Xaupi was known for his sermons and historical works, but also his pamphlets against the Perpignan clergy, for he was something of a querelleur.^[4] In 1762, Xaupi resigned his position in Perpignan and moved to Paris. An engraving completed the year before his move (Figure 1) shows him sitting, book open on his lap, beside well-stocked bookshelves – shelves which once held, perhaps, the volume now owned by the Bibliothèque nationale. The book’s end sheets are filled with handwritten notes dating from the second half of the eighteenth century, which introduce its contents.^[5] They begin:

Après la dissolution de la société des jesuites en france, il fut question d’établir des colléges, pour remplacer les leurs; et de former un meilleur plan d’études et d’éducation

Il parut, à cette occasion, une foule de projets. le meilleur de tous est celui de mr Rolland coner-président aux requestes du palais, dans son Compte rendu aux chambres assemblées le 13 mai 1768; il y rappelle tous les autres

Ceux, qui sont réunis dans ce volume, ont chacun une foliation particuliere; et sont:^[6]

These notes refer to the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, which took place between 1761 and 1764, catalysed by a financial scandal involving this long-mistrusted Catholic order,^[7] founded in 1540 by ex-student of the Université de Paris Ignace de Loyola (1491-1556). By [p.3 (Figure 1), p.4] ] the 1760s the Jesuits were famous for three main activities: evangelising (especially in overseas missions), quarreling, and teaching. On the eve of their expulsion, the Order ran some 106 collèges, France’s Ancien Régime public schools for boys aged from around eight to eighteen years old.^[8] This represented a third of all French collèges, the largest proportion held by any order, among which were some of the most prestigious institutions, including La Flèche and Louis-le-Grand.

The Jesuits’ standardised programme of study, codified in the Ratio studiorum (first published in 1599), was classical and religious.^[9] Classroom exercises centred on the prælectio: a lecture consisting in a commentary of a classical author or a reading from a Jesuit teaching manual. Students were expected to memorise the lecture, and to rehearse its ideas and rhetorical devices in orchestrated disputes with their peers (known as disputatio). Classes were conducted in Latin, and the authors prescribed for study were classical; Cicero, the great Roman orator, was a staple.^[10] This programme sought to turn boys into eloquent servants of God and of the Jesuit Order, but it often also produced writers. Honoré d’Urfé, Pierre Corneille, Fontenelle, Molière, Voltaire, Prévost, Diderot, Sade and many others attended a Jesuit collège.

Whatever collège one attended – Jesuit or not – the programme was similar, much to the dismay of some commentators. In his Encyclopédie article ‘Collège’ (1753), D’Alembert (an alumnus of the Université de Paris’s Collège des Quatre-Nations) alleges that a collégien wastes his formative years learning Latin grammar and a smattering of Greek, and endlessly translating from Latin into French (the exercise known as version) or from French into Latin (thème).^[11] He leaves, D’Alembert argues, with ‘la connoissance très-imparfaite d’une langue morte, [p.5] avec des préceptes de Rhétorique & des principes de Philosophie qu’il doit tâcher d’oublier’.^[12] Joining a lineage of writers who had criticised the collèges, from Montaigne to Fleury to Saint-Pierre, D’Alembert argues that collégiens should be taught via example not rule, and must acquire a better grasp of modern languages, French and France’s great writers. In sum, D’Alembert calls for a revolution in the collèges, such that they turn boys into men who will be ‘utiles à leur patrie’.^[13] And revolution was not long in coming.

The Jesuit expulsion radically changed France’s educational landscape. In a matter of months, the country lost around 1250 teachers and a third of all collèges were left without administrators, jeopardising the education of over 40,000 boys.^[14] If there was a single crisis in education in eighteenth-century France, this was it. Little wonder, then, that after the Jesuit expulsion, as the notes in Xaupi’s volume put it, ‘il fut question d’établir des colléges, pour remplacer les leurs; et de former un meilleur plan d’études et d’éducation.’

In May 1762, at the height of the Jesuit suppression, a publication appeared that compounded interest in education, and introduced a further polemical dimension to the escalating crisis. This was, of course, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s novel-cum-treatise Emile, ou De l’éducation. In Emile, Rousseau sets out the ‘natural’ education of an imagined pupil, raised away from society by a private tutor.^[15] Emile is encouraged to believe not in Revelation but in ‘natural religion’, based on listening to ‘la voix intérieure’ and observing ‘le spectacle de la nature’.^[16] Famously, he is also barred from reading books before the age of twelve, and for some time after that the only book he owns is an abridged version of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719).^[17] Emile’s education appears diametrically opposed to [p.6] the public, literary education delivered in what Rousseau brands ‘ces risibles établissements qu’on appelle collèges’.^[18] Insofar as both Emile and D’Alembert’s article ‘Collège’ contain polemical expressions of anti-collège sentiment, the two texts might be considered similar. But that is where the similarities end.

Where D’Alembert seeks to reform the collèges, Rousseau assumes they are beyond saving – an approach that baffled contemporary collège reformers. The abbé Gabriel-François Coyer (1707-1782), tutor and homme de lettres, was not alone in asking ‘pourquoi l’Auteur d’Emile, sifflant ces risibles Etablissemens qu’on appelle Collèges, […] au lieu d’appliquer ses forces à l’Education privée, ne les a-t-il pas consacrées à l’Education Publique?^[19] But collège reformers were the least of Rousseau’s worries, for almost immediately Emile was published it was condemned by a host of authorities; the Parlement de Paris swiftly issued a warrant for Rousseau’s arrest, and, by 9 September 1762, Emile was on the Index.^[20] The twin events of the Jesuit expulsion and the publication of Emile triggered an explosion of thinking about education. As the Correspondance littéraire remarked in April 1763, ‘[d]epuis la chute des jésuites et le livre inutile de Jean Jacques Rousseau, intitulé Emile, on n’a cessé d’écrire sur l’éducation.’^[21]

Some of these texts about education are compiled in Xaupi’s anthology. They include the anonymously published Mémoire de l’université sur les moyens de pourvoir à l’instruction de la jeunesse et de la perfectionner (1762), by François de Paule Combalusier (1714-1762), chaire de pharmacie at the Université de Paris. Claiming to represent the Université, Combalusier proposes a university-run concours to recruit new collège teachers. However, on 2 April 1762 an arrêt de parlement decreed the suppression of the Mémoire, on the grounds that it did not express the Université’s view, nor had it received the requisite permissions for publication.^[22] To record this agonistic [p.7] exchange between the Parlement and Combalusier, Xaupi folded the two in-4o sheets of the arrêt in six – so they would fit inside his in-12o volume – and pasted them to the back of the Mémoire. Readers of Xaupi’s compilation are thus confronted with this polemic, in its chronological order of publication.

Also in Xaupi’s volume is the anonymous Lettre où l’on examine, quel plan d’étude on pourroit suivre dans les écoles publiques (1762).^[23] The Lettre notes that several authorities have lately encouraged the rethinking of collège education. ‘Le Parlement de Paris de son côté a demandé […] à l’Université de cette Ville un Mémoire qui n’a point encore paru: l’Académie des Jeux Floraux a proposé pour sujet du prix qu’elle a dessein de donner l’année prochaine, quel Plan d’Etude on pourroit suivre en France.’^[24] The Lettre refers to the Académie des Jeux Floraux de Toulouse’s 1763 concours question – ‘Quel serait en France le plan d’étude le plus avantageux?’ – and to the Parlement de Paris’s arrêt of 3 September 1762, which requests that all universities in its jurisdiction (Paris, Reims, Bourges, Poitiers, Angers and Orléans) submit their ideas about the curriculum that should be adopted in the ex-Jesuit collèges.^[25]

The most famous text in Xaupi’s volume, though, is Breton parlementaire Louis René de Caradeuc de La Chalotais’s Essai d’éducation nationale, ou Plan d’études pour la jeunesse (1763). La Chalotais (1701-1785) had been a major campaigner against the Jesuits.^[26] In his Essai, he turns to what to do with the collèges now the Jesuits are gone (for he hopes that the occasion will herald a reconfigu- ration of teaching in all collèges). Like D’Alembert, La Chalotais holds that the collèges must produce patriotic Frenchmen with useful skills. In a thinly veiled criticism of Rousseau’s ‘negative education’, he writes: ‘[a]bandonnons tous les paradoxes sur l’inutilité ou sur le danger des sciences; […] dirigeons les études vers la plus grande utilité publique.’^[27] Targeting the Jesuits, La Chalotais argues that [p.8] teachers must be non-cloistered, state-trained Frenchmen. Inspired by Locke and Condillac, he advocates empirical experience as a better pedagogical method than rote learning or abstract reasoning. And he also posits history, natural history, maths and experimental physics as foundational subjects. Crucially, La Chalotais also proposes changes to the teaching of language and littérature, which he describes as the backbone of collège education for boys aged ten and over. In place of a more-or-less-exclusively Latin curriculum, he argues, ‘[i]l faut donner le pas à la Langue maternelle’, adding, ‘il est honteux que dans une éducation de France on néglige la Littérature Françoise.’^[28]

La Chalotais’s text has left an enduring mark on French education, not least because it is among the first publications to use the phrase ‘éducation nationale’ to refer to the idea of centrally controlled, uniform public schools.^[29] As David A. Bell has shown, the eighteenth century saw the emergence of nationalism in France.^[30] In 1758, the Académie française created a prize for eulogies of ‘[les] hommes célèbres de la nation’; in 1765, the Comédie-Française staged Pierre- Laurent Buirette de Belloy’s patriotic tragedy Le Siège de Calais; and in 1798, the word nationalisme is first attested in print.^[31] Written during the wave of nationalism that followed France’s defeats in the Seven Years War, La Chalotais’s Essai reveals his desire to protect France from dangerous foreign enemies (in this case, the ultramontane Jesuit Order) and to regenerate the nation. And his notion of an éducation nationale appealed to many contemporaries. 

Among those who praised the Essai was Parisian parlementaire Barthélemy-Gabriel Rolland d’Erceville (1734-1794), whose Compte rendu aux chambres assemblées, des différens mémoires envoyés par les universités sises dans le ressort de la cour (1769) is commended by the [p.9] notes in Xaupi’s compilation.^[32] In his Compte rendu, d’Erceville at last reports on the mémoires sent from universities to the Parlement, in response to its arrêt of 3 September 1762. Having consulted these and as many other recent works on teaching reform as he could find (and there were many), d’Erceville recommends what he considers the best ideas. Among them, he proposes that each university provide teachers for nearby collèges; that all sufficiently able boys be allowed to attend a collège; that lessons be in French, not Latin; that the exercise of version be preferred to thème; and that collèges adopt new, standardised textbooks.^[33]

The texts that Xaupi collected, all published in the months after the Jesuit expulsion, set the tone for what became a great debate about the purpose and the practice of public, literary education. By the close of 1789, the controversy consisted of over 200 texts, written by more than 120 actors.^[34] I call it the Querelle des collèges. Although scholars have studied some of its texts, no critic has recognised it as a quarrel – one of the many that animated early modern France.^[35] It [p.10] was not just the work of an initiated elite, but involved dozens of private tutors, collège professors, journalists, little-known hommes de lettres and even a few women.^[36] It was not just a Parisian affair either, with at least forty-nine texts published outside of the capital, many written by teachers at regional collèges. Xaupi’s compilation, then, is an eighteenth-century collection of a segment of this Querelle. His volume shows that, even as the Querelle des collèges was being written, its interventions were already being identified as part of a recognisable dispute. Moreover, his compilation attests to a will to document the dialogism and agonism of this quarrel: in short, to record the Querelle as a querelle.^[37] Xaupi was not the only one to do this. But, before I get to this, it is time to introduce the second curious phenomenon that lies at the heart of this study. 

Littérature

Around the mid-eighteenth century, the meaning of the French word littérature began to change. Until then, littérature meant ‘erudition’ or ‘cultural knowledge’: it was something one had. Richelet defines it as ‘[l]a sience des belles lettres. Honnêtes connoissances, doctrine, érudition’.^[38] In 1754, Voltaire was still describing littérature in these terms. In a ‘petit essai’ seemingly intended for the Encyclopédie, he writes that ‘[l]a littérature […] désigne dans toute l’Europe une connaissance des ouvrages de goût, une teinture d’histoire, de poésie, d’éloquence, de critique’.^[39] Voltaire makes a point of refusing alternative senses. ‘On ne distingue point les ouvrages d’un poète, [p.11] d’un orateur, d’un historien par ce terme vague de littérature’.^[40] The patriarch was behind the times, though, for the meaning of ‘littérature’ was already moving.

In 1740, the Jansenist homme de lettres Claude-Pierre Goujet (1697-1767) published the first volume of his Bibliothèque françoise, ou Histoire de la littérature françoise (1740-1756), an eighteen-volume history of important texts written in French. It is often unclear whether Goujet understands ‘littérature’ as ‘erudition’, conferred by great works, or as the works themselves. Even if he intends the former, his interest in telling a history of ‘[l]es ouvrages en chaque genre écrits en notre langue [emphasis added]’ encourages readers to metonymically substitute the word ‘ouvrages’ with the word for their quality, ‘littérature’.^[41] Although Goujet’s ‘littérature’ is drawn from all fields of the arts and sciences, it nonetheless stands as a corpus of celebrated, modern, French works.

Several years later, the abbé Noël-Antoine Pluche (1688-1761) encouraged a similar metonymic shift, but this time towards understanding ‘littérature’ as a beautiful, aesthetically pleasing text. In his bestselling work of natural history, Le Spectacle de la nature (1732-1750), Pluche recommends that girls study basic classical mythology, so they can read and appreciate ‘les plus beaux ouvrages de littérature.’^[42] And in his treatise on language-learning, La Mécanique des langues et l’art de les enseigner (1751), he argues that all boys must acquire ‘le goût de la belle littérature’.^[43] With his increasingly close association of ‘littérature’ with beauty, Pluche brings ‘littérature’ into the territory of ‘belles-lettres’, as the abbé Charles Batteux (1713-1780), chair of Latin and Greek philosophy at the Collège royal, does just two years later. In 1753, Batteux’s famous literary manual, the Cours de belles lettres distribué par exercices (1747-1748), was prepared for republication under an edited title: the Cours de belles-lettres, ou Principes de la littérature. Two years later still, when republished again, it became simply the Principes de littérature. Under Batteux’s pen, ‘littérature’ symbolically replaces [p.12] ‘belles-lettres’, taking on its meanings as a corpus of pleasing, eloquent, valued texts, and as the name for the study of such works.

Although dictionaries took time to catch up with contemporary usage, works such as Goujet’s, Pluche’s and Batteux’s show that it was during the Ancien Régime that the word ‘littérature’ acquired some of the senses it retains today.^[44] This has been noted by scholars including Philippe Caron, Robert Escarpit, and Annie Becq.^[45] Through analysis of several hundred publications, Caron finds that from as early as the 1680s, ‘littérature’ starts to become synonymous with ‘belles-lettres’. This gathers speed in the mid-eighteenth century, and by the early nineteenth century, ‘littérature’ means things that ‘belles-lettres’ never did.^[46] In Germaine de Staël’s De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800), for instance, ‘littérature’ refers to great philosophical texts, while in La Harpe’s Lycée, ou Cours de littérature ancienne et moderne (1799-1805), ‘littérature’ is a field with its own history. Despite identifying earlier semantic drift, then, Caron concludes that ‘la Révolution française sert de frontière chronologique entre l’ère des Belles-Lettres et l’ère de la Littérature.’^[47]

These qualitative, semantic changes go hand-in-hand with quantitative ones, as we can see by using Google’s online word-searching tool, NGram Viewer. Launched in 2010, NGram Viewer enables users to search for words and phrases in a large subsection of the Google Books corpus of digitized books.^[48] By displaying search results as a longitudinal line graph, NGram Viewer produces a picture of changes in frequency of word use over time. Of course, this tool has limitations. Although the Google Books project claimed, in 2019, to have digitized more than 40 million books in over 400 languages, [p.13 (Figure 2), p.14] dating back to the 1500s, the NGram algorithm searches only a subset of this full corpus.^[49] However, Google has not yet made public the exact composition of this subset, meaning that users cannot know which texts word occurrences come from.^[50] Moreover, as widely noted, the optical character recognition (OCR) software used to recognise words in Google Books’ scanned images is still sometimes imperfect, particularly for early modern texts.^[51]

These flaws, however, have only a negligeable impact on the overall results, and it is possible to mitigate even their small effect. Recent editions of Ngram use improved OCR technology.^[52] Users can also manually search Ngram’s raw data for remaining OCR misrecognitions, or non-standard punctuation and capitalisation. A raw-data search for the words littérature and belles-lettres, for example, can also pick up Ngrams identified by Google’s software as litlérature, belleslettres, belles Lettres and dozens more. Such a search adds tens of thousands of items to the results that the standard, online Ngram Viewer missed.^[53] This is what I did, using Ngram’s 2020 French- language corpus, for the years 1650-1900. Figure 2 represents a subset of the results for 1750-1800, shown as a proportion of the total number of pages in the corpus each year.^[54] This graph shows broad trends in the frequency of use of the words littérature and belles-lettres, in a larger corpus than has ever been exploited (more than 184,000 texts in these fifty years alone). The parallel decline in use of belles-lettres and rise of littérature show that, from the 1760s, littérature comes to rival, and then to replace, belles-lettres.^[55] It suggests that we may need to push [p.15] back Caron’s ‘frontière chronologique’ between the ‘era of belles- lettres’ and that of ‘littérature’. For, according to quantitative word use in this corpus at least, the true turning point is not the Revolution, but rather the 1760s, when littérature is first used at a greater relative frequency than belles-lettres for more than three years in a row.^[56] After 1766 littérature takes off, leaving belles-lettres behind.

Scholars have often argued that four key publications played a central role in founding modern notions of littérature, namely, Mercier’s De la littérature et des littérateurs (1778), Marmontel’s Eléments de littérature (1786), as well as La Harpe’s Lycée and Staël’s De la littérature.^[57] These works did undoubtedly fuel the use of the word littérature after 1780. Yet, they do not explain the increased use of the word in and after the 1760s, seen in Figure 2. Moreover, besides the question of quantity, there remain questions of quality. Was littérature used in modern senses, such as those employed by Goujet, Pluche or Batteux, when it was used in the 1760s, 1770s and 1780s? And why did the eighteenth century see the emergence of new meanings of the word littérature at all?

Scholars have offered different hypotheses in answer to that latter question. Ann Jefferson posits four phenomena as having created a need for a new idea of littérature as a type of aesthetic writing: (1) an interest in defining the aesthetic nature of all of the arts; (2) the division of the category of lettres (into arts versus sciences, for instance), which encouraged similar division of the category of littérature; (3) the emergence of a professional literary field; and (4) the need for a new category of writing, distinct from the categories of classical poetics, which could house modern genres (such as the novel).^[58]

Caron, meanwhile, argues that littérature superseded belles-lettres when people sought a new word to convey new attitudes to literary learning. As belles-lettres came to be seen as frivolous, it was considered a less desirable subject for schoolboys; the word littérature (with [p.16] its legacy connotation of ‘erudition’) seemed to announce a more palatable aim for literary study.^[59] Annie Becq offers a third hypothesis, in which modern ideas of littérature are in fact the work of ‘anciens’. Becq suggests that, in the 1740s, the word became synonymous with belles-lettres thanks to reactionary writers such as the younger Lefranc de Pompignan (1715-1790) and Elie-Catherine Fréron (1718-1776), the latter the founder and editor of the Année littéraire, who sought to protect part of the field of belles-lettres from the invasive influence of the philosophes.^[60] This word, long associated with erudition and prestige, allowed them to ring-fence part of the domain they felt to be under threat.

All of these hypotheses recount attempts by one interested party or another – be it teachers, journalists or other would-be literary authorities – to lay claim to an old word, and to bend it in new conceptual directions, as required.^[61] Moreover, these hypotheses are not mutually exclusive: on the contrary, all undoubtedly played a part in driving the semantic shift of the word littérature. Yet, Jefferson’s, Caron’s and Becq’s accounts only resolve part of the puzzle as to how modern ideas of littérature emerged. They do not fully explain, for instance, how nation became such an important organising criterion for littérature. Equally, while Becq identifies the importance of the press in publicising new notions of littérature, the reason these ideas gained such traction in this period – where else they were transmitted, why and why they stuck – remains unclear. A crucial missing piece of the puzzle, this book argues, is the Querelle des collèges.

Nascent ideas of littérature as a corpus of great, pleasing texts suited querelleurs, too. In their desire to distance themselves from traditional collège practices of teaching rhetoric and belles-lettres, many reformers sought a new vocabulary for their new practices. The title term of Batteux’s bestselling literary manual seemed to fit. When La Chalotais calls for the collèges to teach ‘la littérature françoise’, he means a canon of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors, crowned by Voltaire. His ‘littérature’ is a national corpus that will mould boys into ‘grands [p.17] hommes’ by giving them patriotic, French tastes. Other querelleurs defended traditional collège literary teaching against the attacks of La Chalotais and his like, but also did so with reference to modern ideas of littérature. In 1788, the abbé Gosse (dates unknown), professeur de belles-lettres at the Parisian Collège de la Marche, argues that the Université de Paris has no need to change its teaching, for it has brought ‘la littérature françoise’ to its present, glorious state:

Dans ses colleges ont été formés ces génies admirables, qui ont porté la littérature françoise à un si haut point de perfection, que leur langue est enfin devenue la langue universelle de l’Europe. C’est du sein de l’Université que sont sortis les Bossuet, les Fénelon, les Moliere, les Boileau, les Crebillon, les Polignac, les Malezieu, les Rousseau, les Rollin, les Renaudot, les Malebranche, les Cochin […], les Condé, les Descartes, les Villars, les Catinat, les Corneilles, les Bourdaloue, les Massillon, les la Fontaine, les Voltaire, les d’Alembert.^[62]

These French literary stars (most, though not all, of whom are seventeenth-century ones) are proof, for Gosse, that traditional literary teaching practices are not broken, and so need no fixing.

The abbé Chrétien Leroy (1711-1780), emeritus professor of humanities and rhetoric of the Parisian Collège du cardinal Lemoine and ardent anti-philosophe, also supported the traditional Université, and took aim at ‘innovative’ schools such as the Benedictine Collège de Sorèze, which became a preparatory school for the Ecole royale militaire in 1776. Leroy is aghast that some students at Sorèze study no Latin, while others read works by philosophes such as Voltaire and Montesquieu. His objections mobilise the idea of littérature as a field – of production, or of study. ‘Oui, sans doute, la littérature tient à la philosophie, & exige une certaine indépendance’, he acknowledges, ‘mais à quelle philosophie tient-elle, quelle indépendance exige- t-elle?’^[63] If ‘littérature’ requires an ‘esprit philosophique’, pupils should have as little as possible to do with it. ‘Dans le vrai, la littérature n’est qu’un accessoire à l’éducation’, Leroy dismissively concludes.^[64] [p.18]

Despite Leroy’s protestations, as the Querelle went on, all camps became increasingly convinced that boys must study something called littérature. Dieudonné Thiébault (1733-1807), homme de lettres and long-standing professeur de grammaire at the Académie militaire de Berlin, lists its benefits in his Nouveau plan d’éducation publique (1778):

L’étude de la Littérature développe le bon Goût; elle est d’un grand secours pour le maintien des mœurs honnêtes & polies; elle fournit les délassements les plus agréables & les plaisirs les plus nobles aux ames délicates; elle étend & fait valoir les talents les plus utiles à la Société; elle a l’influence la plus grande & la plus directe sur tous les beaux Arts: tous ces points sont trop bien prouvés, pour qu’il soit nécessaire de chercher à relever l’importance de cette étude.^[65]

The problem was that querelleurs could not agree on what littérature was. French or Latin? Living or deceased authors? Pleasing texts or philosophical ones?

And yet, the now famous question qu’est-ce que la littérature? did not cross anyone’s lips. Littérature, in the sense of a type of text, was not yet sufficiently stable for people to question its essence. In any case, it did not suit querelleurs to ask; instead, they simply took. In the 218 texts of the Querelle, pedagogues, politicians and the press put the word littérature into print again and again, defining and redefining it as they argued about what collège ‘classics’ should be and how to teach them. The major claim of this book, then, is that littérature came to rival belles-lettres in the 1760s and 1770s thanks, in no small part, to the Querelle des collèges. Propelled by distrust of the Jesuit Order and the desire to restore France’s reputation following the Seven Years War, the Querelle cemented nation as a classifying criterion for littérature. Indeed, as Adrian O’Connor has recently shown, the debates about public education in this period were driven by a fundamental dispute about what the French nation should be, and how to produce grands hommes to glorify it.^[66] Ultimately, the Querelle played a decisive role in publicising, stabilising and legitimising modern ideas of littérature: both through its quantity of publications and by taking littérature into classrooms, thereby transmitting it to a new generation. And, until now, it has been hiding in plain sight. [p.19]

Methodologies

To bring the Querelle des collèges into view, this study uses a number of methodological tools. The traditional literary approach of close reading allows me to attend to authors’ lexical choices, rhetorical techniques and discursive strategies. However, this study is interested not just in authors, but in all those who argued about or taught littérature. In order to bring together these many ways of engaging with littérature (often studied, today, within different disciplinary silos), this book considers them as so many ‘practices’ of littérature, following the sociological method pioneered by Pierre Bourdieu.^[67] Sometimes these practices are recorded in published texts, while at other times they are accessible only via manuscript traces in school archives.

As both a conceptual and a lexical history, the study also adopts Raymond Williams’ ‘keywords’ methodology, which attends to semantically rich words that reflect and shape cultures, binding or dividing users.^[68] ‘Literature’ is one of Williams’ keywords.^[69] After remarking upon its etymological roots (from the Latin littera, ‘a letter of the alphabet’, and its plural, litterae, ‘written discourse’), Williams notes that ideas of national corpora started to emerge from the 1760s: first in German, with Nationallitteratur, and over the following two decades, in French, Italian and later English.^[70] Williams has more trouble identifying when ‘literature’ came to mean ‘pleasing writing’, which he roughly posits as a post-eighteenth-century sense. Despite its imprecision (a symptom of the lack of scholarship in this area when Williams was writing, in the 1980s), his account helpfully underscores that modern European notions of ‘literature’ developed differently in different national and linguistic contexts, even if these contexts influenced one another.^[71] Since this study is interested specifically in the French case, it will refer to the French word littérature throughout. [p.20]

This book is also informed by recent work on quarrels, especially within early modern French cultural history.^[72] Research has shown that quarrels are not always labelled as such at their time of writing – often going by synonyms such as dispute, controverse and polémique – but that they are nonetheless quarrels, in their discursive form.^[73] This is the case for some of the most famous early modern disputes, notably the Querelle des anciens et des modernes.^[74] Rather than focusing on labels, then, we might more fruitfully look to long-hand signs to identify whether contemporaries understood a debate as a quarrel. In ‘The language of quarrels’ (2017), Alexis Tadié establishes just such a set of common discursive features of quarrels, noting that quarrels typically employ more agonistic than irenic vocabulary; that they often have a judge; that they thrive on publicity, particularly in the press; that they commonly have a dialogical, call–response structure; that they overlap with one another; and that they can be about something other than what they appear to be about.^[75] As chapters 3 and 4 of this book show, the Querelle des collèges has all of these features. Dominique Julia posits that ‘le débat autour des matières et des méthodes de l’enseignement des collèges est sans nul doute l’un des plus vifs du XVIIIe siècle.’^[76] And yet, no scholarship has precisely recognised this debate as a quarrel. Calling it the Querelle des collèges is part of an attempt to restore to it its contemporary significance, and to remind readers today of its discursive form as it played out and was perceived in the period. The point of this exogenous label, then, is to better draw out the quarrel’s endogenous practices.

Interleaved with the literary and sociological approaches of this book are digital methods. In recent years, digital tools have become increasingly important to humanities study. New ways of cataloguing, searching and visualising information have facilitated new types of [p.21] research, or have allowed scholars to spot previously hidden trends.^[77] The approach of this book is to dovetail digital with traditional humanities methodologies, such that the two mutually reinforce one another. As a case in point, the graph of lexical ‘big data’ from Google’s Ngram project suggests that the mid-1760s was a turning point in quantitative use of the word littérature, yet we can only understand what caused this change through qualitative work. Conversely, it is easy to claim that what some scholars see as a relatively peaceful debate was in fact an agonistic quarrel but, in the space of one book, it is difficult to support this with qualitative evidence from all corners of such a large quarrel. Digital methods can produce an aerial picture of its actors, its ideological camps and its agonism. 

Specifically, this study uses methods drawn from social network analysis to model and analyse the Querelle des collèges as a network of actors that commend or criticise one another. Producing a represen- tation of the Querelle as a network required several preliminary stages, the first of which was to compile a corpus of the Querelle, provided in the appendices. To date, the most comprehensive bibliography of eighteenth-century French texts on education has been Ferdinand Buisson’s, in his Dictionnaire de pédagogie (1887-1888).^[78] Buisson’s list hints at the presence of an unusual event, perhaps a polemic. For the twenty-seven years between 1734 and 1761, Buisson identifies thirty publications about education, but, over the next twenty-seven years (1762-1789), he records 154: five times the previous number. Using Buisson’s foundational list, and drawing on the bibliographical work of Martine Sonnet, Julia, Grandière and Figeac, as well as my own research, this book provides a corpus of the Querelle that numbers 218 works, by 126 actors. To my knowledge, this makes it the largest corpus of French texts on education for the years 1762-1789.^[79] [p.22]

To qualify as part of the Querelle, texts must do at least one of the following (although they usually do more):

1.         state an opinion about collège teaching practices;

2.         present plans for the reform of collège-level, public literary teaching;

3.         engage with a text that does (1) and/or (2), and specifically with its ideas about literary education.

To account for the role of the press, alongside stand-alone publications the corpus includes articles from three periodicals, each with a different editorial stance: the Jesuits’ Journal de Trévoux, Fréron’s anti-philosophe Année littéraire and the worldly Mercure de France. Just over 25 per cent of the Querelle is waged on the pages of these journals.^[80] The majority of interventions (206) date between 1762 and 1789. However, close reading revealed twelve works published between 1750 and 1761 that are frequently referred to in Querelle texts published between 1762 and 1789, and which fulfil criteria one and two above. Since scholars have shown that a text can be pulled into a quarrel against its author’s will, I have counted these implicated, 1750-1761 texts as part of the Querelle.^[81] Finally, the corpus includes a small number of published interventions by authorities which do not state an opinion on collège teaching, but which encourage public engagement with the dispute and are regularly cited by Querelle texts. Such ‘catalyst’ texts include academic concours and parliamentary arrêts.

In order to map the Querelle as a network, I then turned this corpus into a database that records which texts refer to one another, and the nature of these references: negative, positive, neutral or ambivalent.^[82] Coyer’s Plan d’éducation publique (1770), for instance, makes a negative reference to Rousseau’s Emile, a positive reference to La Chalotais’s Essai and an implicit positive reference to D’Alembert’s article ‘Collège’ (signalled by the laudatory reuse of D’Alembert’s words). Coyer’s Plan, in turn, receives eight references from other Querelle texts, two of which are positive and six negative.

This database enables the Querelle to be understood quantita- tively. Some features of the Querelle are visible without the need for quantitative work; it is clear, for instance, that Emile receives by far the most negative references of any text (27). Others, however, are [p.23] more difficult to see from close reading alone. The text with the most positive references, for example, is La Chalotais’s Essai (15), but this is closely followed by Emile (13). Equally, quantitative study provides a clear picture of the peaks and troughs of the Querelle; the year in which the highest number of negative references is made, for instance, is 1785 (17), while 1768 sees the most positive references (25). Such statistics do not replace the close reading at the heart of this study, on the contrary, they are the product of it, since it was this reading that allowed me to produce the corpus and the database. This combination of quantitative and qualitative work ultimately allows readers to appreciate the dispute from several angles.

Finally, social network scholar Marc Sarazin used the statistical computing software ‘R’ to produce dynamic (Figures 3 and 4) and static (Figures 5, 6 and 7) network visualisations of the Querelle, using the database information.^[83] Much recent humanities work – particularly in early modern studies – has participated in what Ruth Ahnert and others term the ‘network turn’.^[84] Building on this work, this study is one of the first to visualise a historical quarrel as a network, and to use methods drawn from social network analysis to understand its dynamics.^[85] When represented as a dynamic network that changes over time, the Querelle des collèges, displayed as a network of texts, plays out as shown in Figure 3, viewable in the digital edition of this book.^[86] Figure 4 represents the same Querelle as a network of people.

In the full-colour versions of these graphics, available online here, the coloured arrows represent the nature of the references (in network analysis terms, the ‘ties’ or ‘edges’) between actors (the ‘nodes’).^[87] [p.24 (Figure 3), p.25 (Figure 4), p.26 (Figure 5)] Negative references are shown by red arrows, positive by green, ambivalent by amber and neutral by grey.^[88] A black line represents actors that respond to a ‘catalyst’, as is the case for Jean Navarre’s Discours qui a remporté le prix, par le jugement de l’Académie des Jeux Floraux, [p.27 (Figure 6)] en l’année 1763, sur ces paroles: Quel serait, en France, le plan d’étude le plus avantageux? (1763), which responds to the Académie des Jeux Floraux’s concours question. Actors are divided into three categories, represented by coloured circles: blue for individual authors or their texts, yellow for periodicals or their articles, and purple for institutional authorities (such as an académie or parlement) or their publications.

The dynamic visualisations of the Querelle, in particular, reveal that Rousseau was not ‘the’ actor who ignited the Querelle. Rather, [p.28 (Figure 7)] many early, agonistic interventions involve the Parlement de Paris, anti-philosophes, the periodical press and collège teachers. Moreover, the static network visualisation of people (Figure 6), in which node size is represented as a function of ‘out-degree centrality’ (the number of references an actor makes, rather than the references they receive), shows that Rousseau is not straightforwardly the Querelle’s ‘central’ actor. According to this measure of centrality, Rousseau is peripheral: he does [p.29] not make a single reference in the Querelle.^[89] On the basis of out-degree centrality, periodicals are the Querelle’s most central actors, with the Année littéraire making forty-two references, and the Mercure de France thirty-three. They are closely followed by the parlementaire Rolland d’Erceville (thirty-one references); the professeur de philosophie of the Collège de Beauvais Dominique-François Rivard (1697-1778) (twenty- eight); and the professeur d’éloquence of the Université d’Aix, later teacher at the Berlin military academy, Jean-Alexis Borrelly (1738-1810) (twenty- one). Looking at the Querelle in terms of the references made reveals a dispute powered by the periodical press, and by unexpected actors such as parlementaires and little-known teachers. Social network analysis of the Querelle thus allows us to challenge long-held assumptions about the central actors in eighteenth-century French educational discourse.

Outline

The first chapter of this book begins by situating the Querelle in the longer history of early modern French debates about, and changes to, literary teaching. It follows the pre-history of the Querelle as constructed by querelleurs themselves, who identified themselves within a lineage of reformers and critics: from Budé and his humanist interest in teaching bonæ literæ, to Montaigne’s criticism of rote learning; from seventeenth-century quarrels between Jesuits and Jansenists, to early-eighteenth-century manuals by pedagogues such as Rollin and Batteux. In reconstructing this history, the chapter simultaneously traces a genealogy of the words and concepts that preceded (and then often coexisted with) littérature, particularly bonæ literæ (bonnes lettres) and belles-lettres. The chapter shows that it was precisely quarrels about literary teaching – about which texts to value, how to teach them and to what end – that propelled the emergence of new words and ideas within this semantic constellation. As such, chapter 1 builds on the work of scholars including Hélène Merlin and Joan DeJean, who have shown that early modern quarrels often resulted in linguistic and conceptual change.^[90] [p.30]

Moving from pre-history to immediate causes, chapter 2 outlines the three streams of polemic that merged to produce the Querelle des collèges. These were D’Alembert’s agonistic Encyclopédie article ‘Collège’ (1753); the quarrel against the Jesuits, which led to their expulsion (1761-1764); and the controversy surrounding Emile, published in May 1762. Scholars have studied these events in isolation, but have not considered how they interacted to produce a perfect storm of polemicism. Chapter 2 argues that, taken together, these controversies represent the prequels – or pré-querelles – to the Querelle.

The central chapters of the book focus on the Querelle, retracing it roughly chronologically. Chapter 3 shows how early interventions by académies and parlementaires encouraged public engagement with collège reform. These interventions sketched out the Querelle’s key subjects of dispute. What place should Latin occupy in the collège curriculum? What texts and authors qualify as French ‘classics’? Should members of religious orders be allowed to teach, and how should teachers be trained? And what could replace the classroom exercises of memori- sation, dispute and translation into Latin?

Chapter 4 begins by zooming out to look at the educational discourse that surrounded the Querelle in the 1770s and 1780s. Perhaps surprisingly, it shows that some women campaigning for better girls’ education engaged with the Querelle so as to capitalise on its publicity and muster support for their own educational cause. Although the peak of the Querelle is in the 1760s, in terms of the number of texts published annually, this chapter shows that its texts of the late 1770s and 1780s are particularly agonistic. This polemical force was powered by a surge of anti-philosophe reactionism that further splintered debate, leaving the path to collège reform more unclear than ever. What brought an end to the Querelle, then, was the Revolution, which dramatically changed the educational landscape and engulfed the Querelle in a wave of new, more far-reaching educational questions.

While following the twists and turns of the Querelle, chapters 3 and 4 highlight the ways in which querelleurs used the word littérature to refer to the texts they wished to see taught in collège classrooms. Initially, this vocabulary offered anti-Jesuit querelleurs a lexical signpost to highlight their rejection of the traditional teaching of belles-lettres, seen as unpatriotic, outdated and associated with the Jesuits. For these querelleurs, littérature incarnated the opposite: a modern, French canon. As the Querelle unfurled, however, those in other camps – who supported the teaching of Latin, or of a uniquely seventeenth-century French canon – reclaimed this term that was fast [p.31] becoming a keyword, to refer to the different texts and authors that they valued.

Scholars have regularly concluded that the collège reforms proposed in this period failed.^[91] However, the final two chapters of this book propose a different narrative, offering two unintended legacies of the Querelle. The first is in the contemporary changes to literary teaching in a small but important group of schools: the royal military schools. Drawing on original archival research, chapter 5 shows that the Parisian Ecole royale militaire, created by Louis XV in 1751, was explicitly founded as an alternative to the collèges, and intervened in the Querelle through its teaching practices. The school’s library catalogue, parts of which are published here for the first time, reveals that the Ecole militaire collected Querelle texts, much as Xaupi had done. In 1776, when ten regional preparatory military collèges were created, Batteux (famous for his Cours de belles-lettres, later the Principes de littérature) was employed to produce their textbook. And in the 1780s, the literary manual used at the Parisian Ecole militaire praised modern, French, often living authors as exemplary grands hommes. Chapter 5 shows that the military school used littérature to help fashion patriotic national leaders, the most notable success of which was Napoleon. Yet, the emperor was not alone. This chapter uncovers how, during their influential careers, many military school alumni reproduced the practices of littérature they had learned at school, and sometimes even introduced them to new generations of French schoolchildren.^[92]

The second legacy of the Querelle is first found in print, before making it into classrooms. Looking backwards, chapter 6 shows that the four key texts (discussed above) by Mercier, Marmontel, La Harpe and Staël, often seen to have ‘founded’ modern French notions of littérature, have unexpected connections to the collèges, the Querelle and its actors. Then, looking forwards, the chapter shows how the conceptions of littérature promoted by these four authors went on to influence revolutionary and early-nineteenth-century [p.32] teaching practices, from the teaching of littérature at the experi- mental Ecole normale, to the literary syllabus of the first lycées. This final chapter therefore crystallises the argument that modern ideas of littérature emerged through a feedback loop between what is taught as littérature and quarrels about what should be taught as littérature – themselves functions of ideas about what the nation is, and what it is felt it should be.

The central claim of this study, then, is that modern, French ideas of littérature emerged as a side-effect of a quarrel about what public, literary education should be, and what it should do for France. By reconstructing this forgotten chapter in the history of the idea of littérature, which is also the history of how something called littérature first began to be taught in French schools, this book allows us to better understand how littérature became the disputed, value-laden concept it is today. For, as this study shows, from the moment when littérature became ‘modern’, this is what it was. Qu’est-ce que la littérature? The answer of this book, at least, is that it is the by-product of an Ancien Régime quarrel about education and national identity.