Abstract
This article takes as its starting point the commonplace that Rousseau’s Emile enabled his contemporaries to discover not only childhood but physical education. Focused on what the pedestal erected for Jean-Jacques somewhat overshadows, a brief historiographic overview and a survey of some major writings on education before Rousseau (by the Abbot Fleury, John Locke, Jean-Pierre de Crousaz and Charles Rollin) will show that the ideas defended by the writer were not innovative in the slightest. But also, and this seems far more important, that these ideas took place in a particular context : the mid-eighteenth century dispute between pedagogues and physicians over the body of the child, which resulted as much from the medicalization of pedagogy as from the educationalization of medicine, at a time when the boundaries between disciplines had not yet been defined. In the context of the ascension to power of physicians, reinforced by the first statistics on child mortality, as will be suggested in conclusion, Rousseau’s advocacy for corporal education gave the initiative back to the pedagogues.
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Notes
I am borrowing this definition from Jacques Ulmann (1997, pp. 182–183). Inspired by John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), Ulmann shows that, aside from the physical care of newborns, corporal education in the eighteenth century covers all that concerns diet, clothing, and sleep and rest, including the movements and trials that the body is subjected to with the aim of recreating or reinforcing it.
The abbot Claude Fleury was governor for the princes of Conti, for the duke of Vermandois (Louis XIV’s natural son), then under-tutor for the duke of Burgundy at Fénelon’s request. Author of an Ecclesiastical History in twenty volumes, many times reissued, he saw his catechism excluded under pretense of Jansenism. See Hoarau (2005).
Crousaz goes as far as stating that a father is working towards the ruin of his son by taking him hunting, an exercise that, should it bring him praise, would only make him an “honorable butcher” (Crousaz 1722, pp. 444 and 466).
Brouzet wished “that Doctors would start practicing the Medicinal Education of children and that the law would repress in their favor or even better, in the favor of society, the abuses that are born in this regard of the harmful but unfortunately condoned usurpation of Ministers, Doctors or Empiricists” (Brouzet 1754, pp. XXI–XXII).
“Education: The care taken to raise and feed children. A father must provide for the expenses of the education of his children, even if they are natural born. It is said more ordinarily of the care taken to cultivate the spirit, either for science or for good conduct. The main obligation we have towards our parents is good education” (Furetière 1690). Richelet’s dictionary gives the following definition: “Education. Manner in which a child is raised and instructed (To give a good education to one’s children. To have no education.)” (Richelet 1680).
Cf. Cadogan (1750, p. 7): “In the lower class of Mankind, especially in the Country, Disease and Mortality are not so frequent, either among the Adult, or the Children. Health and Posterity are the Portion of the Poor, I mean the laborious: The Want of Superfluity confines them more within the Limits of Nature.” Concerning this issue, see Morel (1977).
Rousseau declares in particular that he has no intention of enlarging on the “vanity of medicine,” that it is necessary to balance “the advantage of a cure effected by the doctor against the death of a hundred sick persons killed by him,” that medicine is a “fashion among us,” “a lying art, made more for the ills of the mind than for those of the body,” that if it is “useful to some men” it is “fatal to humankind,” and finally “Let me be given, then, a pupil who does not need all those people, or I shall refuse him. I do not want others to ruin my work” (Rousseau 2010, pp. 180–181).
See the letter by Pierre-Jean du Monchaux, King’s doctor in the military hospital of Douai, from 8 June 1762: “There is only one thing I don’t like in your book. You despise doctors, you appear to hate them.” Dr François Thierry wrote in a similar vein to Albrecht von Haller, on 13 July 1762: “A bit of friendship and respect that I believe I still deserve from him should have stopped him from insulting doctors as he does, or at least encouraged him to make some exceptions” (Leigh 1970a, b/XII, pp. 28–29). A refutation of Rousseau’s criticism of doctors was published in numbers 49 and 50 of the Gazette de médecine (June 1762).
Letter from Rousseau to the knight Orlando de Lorenzy from 3 November 1760 (Leigh 1969/VII, p. 282).
For example, by offering a biscuit to Emile’s friend who was willing to run, when Emile was being lazy (Rousseau 1980, pp. 393–395).
“I would not take on a sickly and ill-constituted child, were he to live until eighty. I want no pupil always useless to himself and others, involved uniquely with preserving himself, whose body does damage to the education of his soul.” (Rousseau 2010, p. 180).
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Tosato-Rigo, D. In the Shadow of Emile: Pedagogues, Pediatricians, Physical Education, 1686–1762. Stud Philos Educ 31, 449–463 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-012-9317-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-012-9317-4