Lavoisier "anti-clérical"?
Was Lavoisier a sceptical Enlightenment rationalist or (as a number of websites insist) a Christian believer?
This is a difficult question to answer: in the his writings and in his many letters which have come down to us, there is almost no mention of religion.
However, in October 1791 he penned the following tirade against clerical education:
Public education as it exists in almost the whole of Europe, has been set up not to form citizens but to produce priests, monks and theologians. The spirit of the Church has always opposed innovation, and because the first Christians spoke and prayed in Latin...it has been deemed necessary to pray in Latin to the end of time. For this reason the European education system is almost entirely directed towards teaching Latin.
If one reviews the public acts, the thesis of metaphysics and ethics defended in the Colleges, one sees that they are only an introduction to theology, that theology is the highest form of knowledge, which shapes whole education system.
The only goal of public education is to form priests. For a long time the Colleges were open only to those who studied for the priesthood. Since an ecclesiastical career led to honour and fortune, the catholic nations were naturally divided into two classes: ecclesiastics, who had all the instruction and the illiterate who formed almost all the rest of the nation. This is how, at first by chance, and then by strategy, all the means to destroy errors and prejudices was concentrated in the hands of those who had an interest in propagating them.
This era, composed of sixteen centuries almost entirely lost to reason and philosophy, during which the progress of the human mind was almost entirely suspended, where often there were retrograde steps, will always be remarkable in the history of humanity, and one must judge how great will be those in the eyes of posterity who have overturned these antique monuments of ignorance and barbarism.
Introduction to Lavoisier's Reflections on the Plan for Public Instruction presented by M. Talleyrand-Perigord.
This uncharacteristically forthright piece prefaces a long manuscript which Lavoisier prepared for Talleyrand. The latter had unsuccessfully presented a plan for public education to the Constituent Assembly just days before it adjourned. The new Legislative then almost immediately created a Committee on Public Education which asked Talleyrand to revise and publish his report. He initially consulted Laplace, Monge, Condorcet Vicq d'Azyr and La Harpe, then submitted his second version to Lavoisier, asking for a response within eight days; "I would be most grateful if you would show great severity and tell me frankly what you find displeasing about this lengthy work". Lavoisier replied conscientiously, but in the event Talleyrand chose not to modify his report further and Lavoisier's work remained unpublished. Lavoisier was later to elaborate his ideas on technical education in his Réflexions sur l'instruction publique, presented to the Convention on behalf of the Bureau de Consultation des Arts et Métiers in September 1793.
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