engleski

The Intellectual Emancipation in Contradiction: Revolution against the Church

Louis Althusser presented a theory in 1971 concerning the ideological state apparatus. By applying that theory to French society in the 18th century, one can recognize the Catholic Church as a dominant ideological state apparatus of the ancien régime. With the arrival of the Revolution and the fall of the ancien régime, the attack on the Church was inevitable. In each stage of the Revolution, there were multiple approaches to the conflict with the Church, its removal from a position of dominance, the setting of new ideological state systems, or conflicts within the already existing ones. Althusser identifies schooling as the new dominant ideological state apparatus that replaced the Church. We can ultimately agree with this claim, but there remains the question of how schooling actually developed within particular stages of the Revolution. The Constitutional Church and the initial conflicts revolving around it during the first years of the Revolution, as well as the religion of the citizen in the time of Jacobinism, held primacy among the conflicts in the central ideological state apparatus up until 1794, an apparatus traditionally held by the Catholic Church. A brutal attack on the Church from 1793 to 1794, in the form of dechristianisation, was meant to remove the remaining unwanted elements of the ancien régime and the failed attempt at a Constitutional Church. In some ways, the attack might have even been an attempt at an intellectual (perhaps even spiritual) emancipation from what the revolutionaries saw and believed to be the delusions and superstitions that the Church and Christianity promoted.

Education; revolution; Church

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