author
Louis-René de Caradeuc de La Chalotais
1701–1785
Best known for challenging royal authority in eighteenth-century Brittany, this sharp-tongued magistrate also wrote passionately about education and public life. His career placed him at the center of legal and political fights that helped foreshadow larger upheavals in France.
1 Audiobook
Essai d'éducation nationale, ou, plan d'études pour la jeunesse
by Louis-René de Caradeuc de La Chalotais
About the author
Born in Rennes in 1701, Louis-René de Caradeuc de La Chalotais became a leading French magistrate and served as procureur général of the parlement of Brittany. He is most often remembered for his role in the Brittany Affair, a long conflict in which the Breton parlement resisted the crown over taxation and authority.
He was also a prominent critic of the Jesuits and wrote influential attacks on the order in the early 1760s. In 1763, he published Essai d'éducation nationale, arguing for a more practical national education and giving him a place among the public-minded reformers of the French Enlightenment.
La Chalotais died in Rennes in 1785. Although he was a man of the old legal order rather than a revolutionary, later historians have often seen the struggles he joined under Louis XV as part of the tensions that pointed toward the French Revolution.