Talk:.NzE.MjY1MzQ

Citizens, this is how Vendée was born, its cradle was the ignorance of laws, its growth was caused by the methods set in place to prevent the Revolution from infiltrating; & so the gods of ignorance, the defiant priests, the conspiring nobles, the greedy craftsmen & the weak administrators or accomplices opened this hideous wound in the heart of France: we must therefore crush ignorance, & establish teachers of the French language in the countryside.

       	For three years the national assemblies have been speaking about and discussing public education; for a long time the need for primary schools has been felt: these are moral subsistences of the first necessity that the countryside asks of you; but perhaps we are still too academic & too far removed from the people to give them the institutions most adapted to their most pressing needs.
       	The laws of education prepare a person to be an artisan, an artist, a scholar, a writer, a legislator & a public official; but the first laws of education must prepare a person to be a citizen: to be a citizen, however, one must obey the laws, & to obey the laws, one must know them. You owe the people this primary education, which will have them understanding the voice of the legislator. What contradiction brings to our mind the departments of the Haut & Bas Rhine, those of Morhiban, Finistère, Ille-&-Villaine, Loire-Inférieuere, Côtes-du-Nord, Lower Pyrenees and Corsica? The legislator speaks a language which those who must execute and obey do not understand. The ancients never knew such striking and dangerous contrasts.

We must popularize the language, we must destroy that aristocracy of language that seems to establish a polished nation in the midst of a barbarous nation.