
Threatened by Prejudices: French Revolutionary Textbooks - Petiver
https://jhiblog.org/2016/09/12/threatened-by-prejudices-french-revolutionary-textbooks/
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Animats
Are any translations of such textbooks available? I'm looking.

Most of the links in the article are broken. Try "bibliotheques-
specialisees.paris.fr" instead of "bspe-p-pub.paris.fr". Catalog entries can
be found, but not full text. Here's the pamphlet mentioned.[1]

The archives of the meetings on planning the post-Revolution curriculum are in
the Internet Archive.[2] Seven volumes, in French. Probably useful only to
someone doing a doctoral thesis on education in France.

[1] [http://bibliotheques-
specialisees.paris.fr/ark:/73873/pf0000...](http://bibliotheques-
specialisees.paris.fr/ark:/73873/pf0000657199?highlight=L%C3%A9onard%20Bourdon%20de%20la%20Crosni%C3%A8re&posInPage=0&bookmark=de46bc93-e961-4bcd-88ab-8c02fbdd4353&queryid=61bfd964-3adf-4ea1-aa7c-1d458b405568&searchType=all)

[2]
[https://archive.org/stream/procsverbauxd01fran](https://archive.org/stream/procsverbauxd01fran)

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seszett
Most of these books should be available in digitalised form on Gallica (from
the National Library), here's the full scan of your first link for example:

[http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k48859k.r](http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k48859k.r)

~~~
Animats
Thanks. I may be misreading this, but that seems to say that the object of
education is to familiarize young people, by practice, with their
constitutional rights and duties. There's talk of immunizing young people
against the frivolities and corruption of the previous age. (He probably means
the court at Versailles. Marie Antoinette and all that.) Prejudice comes up on
page 5, as a result of those goals, not a object of it. He means class
prejudice. Remember, they'd just dumped the nobility and killed off many of
them. This is a sketch for the implementation plan for Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity.

~~~
eternalban
Not sure about the historic accuracy of this, but this scene [1] from Andrzej
Wajda's Danton (1983) depicts the household of Robespierre and seems apropos.

[1]:
[https://youtu.be/kcwmrh-R7T0?t=3m25s](https://youtu.be/kcwmrh-R7T0?t=3m25s)

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JohnLeTigre
This reminded me of how lonely I feel in my society; defining prejudices in a
Gadamerian way.

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B1FF_PSUVM
Ah, the way to Pol Pot.

Murderous 'enlightenment', wiping out the mind of a society and trying to make
a 'tabula rasa' for delirious fantasies of paradise on Earth.

Always works out well.

(Soundtrack: Holiday in Cambodia by the Dead Kennedys
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KTsXHXMkJA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KTsXHXMkJA)
)

~~~
qsymmachus
There's probably a middle ground between Pol Pot and a therapeutic nihilism
that denies the possibility of improving society.

~~~
api
A middle ground? No way! Heresy! Either we utterly demolish all social norms
and structures and create a top-down designed society, or we enshrine all
traditions as immutable for all eternity. Anything else is just a wishy-washy
half measure.

In all seriousness...

The optimum in a complex multi-objective optimization problem is almost never
at the edge, and nuances do in fact matter. It really feels like at some point
circa the 1960s American society completely lost the ability to think in terms
of anything other than immutable absolute dogmas (a.k.a. fundamentalism in all
its forms) and simplified sound-bite slogans.

