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Public academic prize contests—the concours académique—played a significant role in the intellectual life of Enlightenment France, with aspirants formulating positions on such matters as slavery, poverty, the education of women, tax reform, and urban renewal and submitting the resulting essays for scrutiny by panels of judges. In The Enlightenment in Practice, Jeremy L. Caradonna draws on archives both in Paris and the provinces to show that thousands of individuals—ranging from elite men and women of letters artisans, and peasants—participated in these intellectual competitions, a far broader range of people than has been previously assumed.
Caradonna contends that the Enlightenment in France can no longer be seen as a cultural movement restricted to a small coterie of philosophers or a limited number of printed texts. Moreover, Caradonna demonstrates that the French monarchy took academic competitions quite seriously, sponsoring numerous contests on such practical matters as deforestation, the quality of drinking water, and the nighttime illumination of cities. In some cases, the contests served as an early mechanism for technology transfer: the state used submissions to identify technical experts to whom it could turn for advice. Finally, the author shows how this unique intellectual exercise declined during the upheavals of the French Revolution, when voicing moderate public criticism became a rather dangerous act.
Jeremy L. Caradonna is Associate Professor of History at the University of Alberta.
"The Enlightenment in Practice is a remarkable achievement. It is a tour de force that will make us think differently about the Enlightenment for a long time to come. The author who has uncovered so much about academic prizes deserves one himself."
Jeremy D. Popkin, University of Kentucky, author of News and Politics in the Age of Revolution:
"If this impressive book were an entry in an eighteenth-century French academic concours, it would certainly deserve a prize. Jeremy L. Caradonna has taken an aspect of the French Enlightenment of which scholars have been vaguely aware and researched it thoroughly. He demonstrates the importance of academic prize competitions in the culture of the period and makes a persuasive case for his claim that his findings require us to recognize that the Enlightenment was a considerably more open and inclusive movement than has been previously realized."
William Beik:
"This book adds an important dimension to our understanding of the cultural climate in prerevolutionary France. Mobilizing an impressive body of research on the academies and their prize contestants, Cardonna also presents their story in clear, beautifully organized prose."
Jérôme Loiseau:
"At ?rst glance, Jeremy Caradonna's book is a new study about the world of academies in France that follows and complements similar works by Daniel Roche..Readers will enjoy this well-written and well-constructed history, which adds an important piece to the puzzle of the history of the Enlightenment. In addition, the book o?ers a new perspective on modern state building in underlining the rise of public expertise, a path that should be continued in the future."
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