The Academy of Arras: how did Dubois de Fosseux make the scholars shine in the century of the Enlightenment?

In the eighteenth century, Arras was not only a garrison and trading town: it also housed one of the provincial academies that made the spirit of the Enlightenment shine far from Paris. Founded in 1737, the Academy of Arras gathered scholars, men of letters and the curious of all knowledge, and knew its hour of glory under the leadership of its tireless perpetual secretary, Ferdinand Dubois de Fosseux, whose immense correspondence made him a European intellectual crossroads. It also counted, among its members, a young lawyer destined for a quite different fate: Maximilien Robespierre. A look back at this learned company that embodied, at Arras, the life of the mind in the century of the Enlightenment.

An academy in the century of the Enlightenment

The Academy of Arras came into being in 1737, endowed with royal letters patent that gave it an official existence. It belonged to that vast movement of provincial academies which, throughout the eighteenth century, spread through the principal towns of the kingdom, in the image of the prestigious Académie française and the great Parisian companies. These institutions, half-learned half-worldly, gathered the cultivated elite of a town, magistrates, ecclesiastics, physicians, men of law and notables enamoured of sciences and belles-lettres. They wished to be hearths of knowledge, where one discussed literature, history, natural sciences, agriculture or questions of public utility. At Arras, the Academy first turned its attention to belles-lettres, before gradually widening its field to the whole of useful knowledge. It organised regular sessions, readings of memoirs, and above all competitions endowed with prizes that attracted competitors from the whole region and sometimes from elsewhere. This intellectual effervescence prolonged, in a more institutional framework, the lettered sociability of which the Rosati of Arras offered the lighter and more convivial side. Where the Rosati celebrated the rose and friendship, the Academy cultivated knowledge and debate; but both testified to the same vitality of the mind in the Arras of the Enlightenment. The Academy of Arras thus asserted itself as one of the major cultural institutions of the town, contributing to its reputation as an enlightened city, where ideas and knowledge circulated and were discussed within a chosen company.

Ferdinand Dubois de Fosseux, the soul of the Academy

If the Academy of Arras has left a lasting trace, it owes it in great part to one man: Ferdinand Dubois de Fosseux. Born in 1742, this Arras notable, curious about everything and passionate for knowledge, became in 1785 the perpetual secretary of the company, a key function that made him the animator and spokesman of the institution. A man of the Enlightenment in every sense of the term, Dubois de Fosseux distinguished himself by his openness of mind, his taste for intellectual exchanges and his tireless activity in the service of the diffusion of knowledge. Under his impulse, the Academy knew a particularly active period, marked by the multiplication of works, competitions and correspondences. Dubois de Fosseux was not a cabinet scholar shut up in his books: he was a man of network, a passer of ideas, who maintained links with countless correspondents across France and Europe. His role went far beyond that of a simple administrative secretary: he was the soul of the Academy, the one who gave it its dynamism and its influence. His personality embodies marvellously the spirit of the provincial Enlightenment, made of universal curiosity, faith in the progress of knowledge and intellectual sociability. Thanks to him, the modest academy of a provincial town was able to raise itself to the rank of a true crossroads of knowledge, in relation with the great intellectual hearths of the time. Without Dubois de Fosseux, the Academy of Arras would doubtless have remained a learned company among others; with him, it acquired a dimension and a notoriety that still distinguish it in the history of the provincial academies.

The correspondence of Dubois de Fosseux

The most remarkable work of Dubois de Fosseux was unquestionably his immense correspondence, one of the richest known for provincial France of the end of the eighteenth century. For years, he maintained an epistolary network of exceptional scope, exchanging thousands of letters with correspondents scattered across the kingdom and beyond. This correspondence covered the most diverse subjects: literary and scientific questions, philosophical debates, agricultural information, news of the academies and scholars, curiosities of all kinds. It made of Dubois de Fosseux a true nerve centre of the circulation of ideas, an intermediary between the isolated scholars of the province and the great hearths of knowledge. This epistolary network illustrates marvellously one of the major traits of the Enlightenment: the constitution of a republic of letters, an intellectual community without borders where ideas circulated freely through the channel of correspondence. At a time when the means of communication were slow and limited, these exchanges of letters served as a permanent forum, allowing distant minds to dialogue, to keep informed and to take part in the common intellectual life. The correspondence of Dubois de Fosseux constitutes today a precious historical source, which illuminates the intellectual, social and cultural life of the Artois and of France on the eve of the Revolution. It testifies to the vitality of a province often wrongly perceived as a cultural desert, and reveals the existence of a dense network of curiosity and erudition, of which Arras and its Academy constituted one of the most active nodes, prolonging the prestige of Arras literary capital.

The competitions and the debates

Like most academies of its time, that of Arras regularly organised competitions endowed with prizes, which constituted one of its most important means of action. The Academy proposed a subject, often a question of morals, literature, sciences or public utility, and invited competitors to compose a memoir to try to win the prize. These competitions, highly prized, attracted candidates from the whole region and sometimes from further afield, and gave rise to debates and discussions within the company. They were a formidable stimulant of reflection and writing, offering local talents an occasion to make themselves known and to measure their pen. The subjects put to competition reflected the preoccupations of the time: useful reforms, economic and social questions, progress of sciences and techniques, moral and philosophical subjects. Through these competitions, the Academy took part in the great movement of critical reflection that characterised the Enlightenment, contributing to the elaboration and diffusion of new ideas. The sessions of the Academy were also the occasion for readings of memoirs and learned discussions, where the members presented the fruit of their research and debated the great questions of the moment. This intense intellectual life made of the Academy a place of emulation and exchange, where critical spirit and taste for knowledge found to be exercised. Far from being a frozen and dusty institution, the Academy of Arras was a living company, animated by the passion for knowledge and the desire to contribute, in its measure, to the progress of enlightenment and the improvement of society.

Robespierre academician

Among the members of the Academy of Arras figures a name that the Revolution was to make famous: Maximilien Robespierre. A young Arras lawyer enamoured of belles-lettres and new ideas, he was admitted into the company and took an active part in it, to the point of becoming its director in 1786, as the historians of his youth, notably Hervé Leuwers, recall. Before being the politician we know, Robespierre was therefore a provincial academician, a man of letters who read discourses before his colleagues and took part in the works of the institution. This membership illuminates an often unknown aspect of his personality: his intellectual formation, his taste for writing and eloquence, his immersion in the culture of the Enlightenment. The discourses and memoirs he presented to the Academy testify to a mind already inclined towards the questions of justice, morals and reform, themes that were to nourish his revolutionary commitment. It would however be excessive to make of the Academy a laboratory of the Revolution: it remained an institution of the Ancien Régime, devoted to knowledge and lettered sociability, and nothing there explicitly announced the upheavals to come. But the membership of Robespierre in this company recalls that the future statesman formed himself, like so many other actors of the Revolution, in the crucible of the provincial culture of the Enlightenment. The image of the young Robespierre academician at Arras, reading his memoirs before an assembly of cultivated notables, offers a striking contrast with the figure of the revolutionary tribune, and recalls the richness and complexity of a path that began in the learned circles of his native town.

Useful knowledge and progress

Beyond belles-lettres, the Academy of Arras devoted itself increasingly to questions of useful knowledge, in the practical and reforming spirit that characterised the ending Enlightenment. One took interest there in agriculture and the means of improving it, in techniques and inventions, in economy, in public health and in all matters likely to contribute to the well-being of society. This orientation towards utility reflected a conviction shared by the enlightened minds of the time: knowledge should not remain a pure speculation, but serve concrete progress and the improvement of living conditions. The provincial academies, anchored in their territory, were particularly well placed to promote this type of applied research, in connection with local realities. The Artois, a rich agricultural region, offered a favourable ground for these reflections on agronomy and rural economy. The Academy of Arras thus took part in the movement of learned societies which, throughout the kingdom, sought to put science at the service of the public good. This interest in material and social progress testifies to an optimism characteristic of the Enlightenment, founded on faith in the power of reason and knowledge to transform the world. The works of the Academy in this domain, often unknown, contributed to the diffusion of new ideas and to the modernisation of minds. They inscribe the Arras institution in the great reforming current which, on the eve of the Revolution, aspired to a more rational, more just and more prosperous social order, guided by the lights of reason.

The Academy and the Revolution

The French Revolution upheaved the destiny of the Academy of Arras, like that of all the academies of the kingdom. In 1793, the Convention abolished the royal academies, judged too linked to the Ancien Régime and its privileges. The Academy of Arras thus disappeared, carried away by the turmoil, at the same time as so many institutions inherited from the monarchy. This brutal suppression put an end to more than half a century of learned activity and intellectual influence. The paradox does not lack savour: it is under a Revolution in which a former director of the Academy, Robespierre, took so considerable a part, that the institution was abolished. The academies, symbols of an elitist culture and an old order, no longer found their place in the new France that was seeking itself. The disappearance of the Academy of Arras thus belongs to the great movement of clean slate that characterised the revolutionary years, erasing many traditional bodies and institutions. Yet the spirit of curiosity and knowledge that had animated it did not totally disappear. The men who had frequented it, the works it had aroused, the correspondences it had maintained left a lasting trace in the intellectual memory of the town. The suppression of 1793 was therefore not the definitive end of the learned life of Arras, but an interruption, to which would succeed, once the passions appeased, a rebirth under other forms.

The legacy of the Academy of Arras

The history of the Arras academies did not stop with the revolutionary suppression. In the nineteenth century, learned life was reborn at Arras, and a new company perpetuated, under forms adapted to the era, the legacy of the former Academy. This continuity testifies to the vitality and depth of the intellectual roots of the town, capable of making its learned institutions reborn after the revolutionary rupture. Today, the memory of the Academy of Arras and of its perpetual secretary Dubois de Fosseux remains preciously preserved, notably through the archives and ancient collections that one can consult among the libraries of Arras, guardians of this intellectual heritage. The Academy of Arras occupies a notable place in the history of the provincial Enlightenment, as one of the most living examples of that intellectual effervescence which, far from limiting itself to Paris, reached the provincial towns and aroused there hearths of knowledge and debate. It recalls that Arras, often known for its military and political history, was also a city of culture and knowledge, where the spirit of the Enlightenment found to flourish. To rediscover the Academy of Arras is to find again this learned and curious face of the town of former times, and to pay homage to those men who, in a modest provincial town, contributed in their measure to the great movement of progress of knowledge that characterised the century of the Enlightenment and prepared, in many respects, the modern world.