This article is the third part of the series Why You Wouldn’t Want to Live in the 19th Century. Indeed, after the horrors of ill health (here) and transport difficulties (here) education was the most painful experience in early life. As was one’s entire childhood.
Let’s start with the earliest history. During the Dark Ages, scholarship was reserved for the clergy. We hear that the idea of public schools originated with Charlemagne, but he was only concerned with the formation of his administrative staff. Those who desired knowledge sought it in private. They naturally congregated in large cities. The first European colleges of public education appeared four hundred years later, in the 13th century. La Sorbonne, the first college in Paris, was founded in 1253 by Robert de Sorbon, the chaplain of king Saint-Louis, in buildings that the king had given him for this purpose.
Sorbon founded the college to protect students, already numerous in the Latin Quarter, from the bad associations they contracted there, and to save them from exploitation by the people who housed them. Soon, the example set by the king’s chaplain bore fruit. Other colleges were founded by high-ranking priests. The University was born in the 13th century from the corporate organization of masters and scholars of Paris. Theology, law, medicine, and the arts were taught to young people from four nations: French, Picards, Normans, and English, thus conferring on the university an international prestige from the outset.
What was life like in the colleges?
The strictest discipline reigned in all these houses. Alfred Franklin, the learned librarian of the Mazarine Library, who studied the life in schools and colleges of the past, gives us an idea of it by summarizing the rule of the college of Montaigu, one of the most terrible for the austerity of its discipline.
Young scholars should never drink wine; half a herring or an egg constituted the invariable menu of their meal. The older ones were better treated; because of their age and the long work required of them, the rule allowed them: one-third of a pint of wine, one-thirtieth part of a pound of butter, a dish of common vegetables cooked without meat, a herring or two eggs, and for dessert a small piece of cheese. The entire staff, without exception, always observed all the fasts prescribed by the Church.”
The workload was enormous for the half-starved growing bodies. Here is the daily program:
4:00 AM – Get up! A student charged with the duties of awakener roamed the rooms, and, in winter, lit the candles there.
5:00 to to 6:00 AM – Lessons
6:00 – First meal consisting of a small piece of bread.
7:00 to 8:00 – Recess
8:00 to 10:00 – Lessons
10:00 to 11:00 – Discussion and argumentation
11:00 – Dinner accompanied by a reading of the Bible or the Lives of the Saints. The chaplain recited the Benedicite and the Graces, to which he added a pious exhortation. The principal then took the floor, addressed praise or blame to the students, and announced the punishments deserved the day before.
12:00 to 2:00 PM – Review of lessons, various work
2:00 PM to 3:00 PM – Recreation
3:00 to 5:00 – Lessons
5:00 to 6:00 PM – Discussion and argumentation
6:00 PM – Supper
6:15 PM – Review of the day’s work
7:30 PM – Prayers
8:00 PM – Bedtime (9:00 PM in summer)
The students never had a whole day off. Twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday, they were taken for an afternoon walk. As for feast days, they were spent in exercises of devotion. The holidays, which were not then called holidays, but the grape harvest, took place in September. It was the only time when young people could return to their families. They stayed at the college for the rest of the year. This routine did not change for centuries.
In the middle of the 16th century, a young gentleman, Henri de Mesmes, was a student at the college in Toulouse.
We were up at four o’clock, and having prayed to God, we went to study at five o’clock, our heavy books under our arms, our writing desks, and our candlesticks in our hands. We heard all the readings until ten o’clock struck, without any interruption; then went to dinner.
After dinner, we read, as a form of play, Sophocles or Aristophanes or Euripides, and sometimes Demosthenes, Cicero, Virgilius, Horatius. At one o’clock at the studies; at five, at home, repeating and seeing in our books the places [passages], until after six. Then we supped and read in Greek or Latin.”
This young student hardly wasted his time. At the age of twelve, he recited Homer from cover to cover by heart and could write Latin and Greek verses. These methods of education would quickly exhaust weak children, but they made true scholars of those who were strong enough to bear the fatigue. Most complied with enthusiasm. Never did the fever for knowledge arouse more ardor than among the schoolchildren at the time of the Renaissance. As for those who showed no spirit of discipline, the masters had an infallible means of arousing their zeal and of making them wise and attentive to their lessons.
This means was the whip.
The idea of the instinctively criminal child prevailed. Pedagogy by blows, at school as well as in the family, was thus justified. This attitude softened in the 19th century when school reforms were in full swing, but corporal punishment to instill discipline went on well into the 20th century.
The whip was an indispensable tool for education. Evidence of its importance can be found even in the symbolic sculptures of churches. No one was spared, not even the king if he was young enough. Louis XIII, aged ten, was whipped after his coronation. Let’s read his father’s, Henri IV’s, instructions for the young prince’s education:
I want and command you to whip him whenever he will be obstinate or do something wrong, knowing well for myself that there is nothing in the world which brings him more profit than that, what I recognized by experience to have benefited me; because, being of his age, I was much whipped there. That’s why I want you to face him and make him hear.”
In accordance with the paternal wish, the future Louis XIII was whipped over and over again. In the Diary kept by Héroard, his doctor, we see that in his childhood he was whipped almost as often as purged or bled. He had already ascended the throne before they whipped him again. On May 15, 1610, he was proclaimed king; on October 17, he was crowned in Reims. This did not prevent him from being whipped again on March 10, 1611, for having obstinately opposed M. de Souvre, his governor.
Louis XIV was whipped; the Regent was whipped. His mother, Princess Palatine, wrote in 1710: “When my son was small, I never gave him a slap in the face, but I whipped him so hard that he still remembers it.”
When princes, and even young crowned heads, were thus deliberately whipped, how could schoolchildren and young people in colleges be spared the whipping? In truth, they were not. Among the personnel of the colleges, there was a special functionary charged with applying the whip to the pupils. At the end of the 18th century, a certain Chevallier appeared on the list of staff at the Mazarin college for the sum of 150 pounds, with the title of Scrubber of the Library and Corrector.
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Voices were raised against the brutality of which children were sometimes victims in colleges. Michel de Montaigne protests:
You only hear cries, and of children tortured and of masters drunk in their anger, guiding them with a dreadful face, their hands armed with whips.”
Over two hundred years later, Mercier is indignant about it in his Tableau de Paris which was created in 1782.
We torment the pleasant childhood, we inflict daily punishments on it. Let us penetrate into the interior of these schools. We see tears running down childish cheeks; we hear sobs and groans; we see their pedagogues whose mere appearance inspires dread, armed with whips and rods, treating with inhumanity the first age of life.”
But these traditions were preserved intact until, and beyond, the Revolution in 1789. The Revolution democratized education, but it was still reserved for the rich. The following century brought critical innovations. From 1833, all municipalities with more than 500 inhabitants had to have a boys’ school. In 1850, schools were “encouraged” for girls. Starting with the July Monarchy (1830-1848), and especially under the Second Empire (1852-1870), the public authorities endeavored to prohibit cruel punishments in schools. They invoked its immoral nature, in particular when it caused serious injuries or even death. Excesses such as “children beaten up, sometimes hampered by ropes like a domestic animal put to death, ears torn off or torn by a metal object, use of slender sticks like the goads of the herdsman,” were prohibited by the Guizot law of 1834, but for all sorts of reasons which made convictions complicated, the masters continued for a long time to resort to public humiliation and violence of all kinds. The historian Ernest Lavisse recalls the tyranny of his teachers around 1850:
School discipline was harsh; for minor faults, one was punished by simple kneeling; for more serious ones by kneeling with a raised hand carrying a brick, or else by blows with a stick, the most serious penalty.”
He evokes here one of the variants of the punishment. It consisted of staying in mid-flexion, sometimes on one leg, arms outstretched, with a stack of books in each hand.
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Detention was another form of punishment. Schoolchildren were never assured of enjoying the weekly rest. The detention of Sunday was sometimes inflicted on them as a severe punishment. A poorly learned lesson, a missing homework, a distraction from studying, and the guilty student saw himself in detention.
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The saying “Spare the rod, spoil the child” sounds familiar to many seniors’ ears even today. Beating was the fate of unruly children whether they were at school or at home. According to 19th-century law, children were the property of their parents, and parental cruelty went unpunished unless it ended in death. Public awakening was slow to come. In France, the civil unrest in 1968 brought many further reforms in education, including the absolute prohibition of corporal punishment.
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