The Enlightenment in Practice: Academic Prize Contests and Intellectual Culture in France, 1670-1794

Abstract

In this lively and well documented book, Jeremy Caradonna seeks to broaden our understanding of the Enlightenment by bringing into the picture the important practice of the academic prize competition, a ubiquitous cultural institution of ancien régime France, one that, with few exceptions, has remained largely unexplored. Of course, we have heard of one Rousseau from Geneva who was propelled to literary stardom overnight by the members of the obscure provincial Academy of Dijon (who lived to regret it, as Caradonna shows in a fascinating and highly entertaining chapter)—but that was only one peak of a huge mountain, which it took the Revolution to raze down (even though Marat and Robespierre and a few other revolutionaries, to belabour the metaphor, had used it as a jumping off point). Thanks to extensive research in libraries and archives in Paris and in the provinces, Caradonna has given us the first thorough, in-depth analysis of the prize contest culture. Between 1670 (when the French Academy revived the ancient poetry and eloquence prizes that provincial academies had been sponsoring since the Middle Ages), until 1793, when the Academies were abolished by the revolutionary government, an estimated fifteen thousand competitors from all walks of life put their talents to test in contests that were open (mostly respecting meritocratic principles of fairness and blind submission, with relative independence from royal and ecclesiastical censorship, and qualified tolerance for politely voiced dissent) to a wide swat of the learned, and not-so-learned, public: to women (the book provides a long list of female laureates of the concours between 1671–1790), to ambitious beginners, provincial hacks, obscure scientists and even farmers. In the course of the eighteenth century, scientific, literary and agricultural academies and scholarly societies blossomed and multiplied in every major city of France, and most of them organized their own prize contests: in the 1670s there were thirty-eight yearly competitions across France; by 1780, there were over four hundred. (A nearly complete list of all the prize contests offered by the academies between 1670 and 1793 is available on the author’s web site).