Manon's Academic Adventure

In 1777, the Académie of Besançon proposed an essay competition with the following question: How can educating women contribute to the improvement of men? Such competitions were common at the time, a way both for the provincial academies to make themselves known throughout the country, and for fledgling writers to get published.
 
Competitions were especially rife during the decades preceeding the Revolution, with 357 between 1770 and 1779, that is, more than 35 per year. As well as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose career as a writer took off when he won the Academy of Dijon competition with his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences in 1749, many famous names of that time entered and won academic competitions, such as Jean-Francois Marmontel, novelist and friend of Olympe, Jacques Pierre Brissot, Abbe Gregoire and Jean-Paul Marat to edit.

​Manon’s first mention of her academic project to her friend Sophie Cannet is very brief, and almost blustery – look at all the crazy things I’m trying to do, she seems to say – none of them will come to anything:

​14 January 1777
I have never found myself with some many ongoing projects, and so little disposition to work at them. I am a bit like those project makers who never perform and always plan. I have begun an academic discourse: ahem! That is no small affair; I have sketched out a metaphysical dissertation, I am mapping out in my head a little philosophical novel. My mind is wandering from the one to the others, caressing them in turns, and then forgetting them, and does not move forward in anything.  

​In April she sent it the Academy, and in June, still waiting for an answer, she told her friend about it: 

​21 June 1777
Would you be surprised if, as a reply to your jokes, I were to send you my academic laurels, that I had picked behind your back? No such thing happened, and I jest. I would have to wait too long to let it be a surprise, I would not have the courage to keep quiet about my efforts for six months, for instance. We will know in October, through a public announcement, what happened on 1 May at the Academy of Besancon. Do you think that if I had sent a discourse at that time that I would be able to stop myself telling you then? It is hard not to tell one’s friend, the custodian of one’s follies. So I will tell you that a certain paper fell into my hands by chance, a few months ago, and I saw the advertisement of the said Academy, offering this question: “How could educating women contribute to the improvement of men?” I was struck, I dreamt, I wrote, amidst all the worries that my mind is perpetually subject to. I made a small discourse, and without showing it, without discussing it with anyone at all, I sent if off in April, under, by the way, the anonymity that suits me, and that I want to keep whatever happens. I am ignorant of the decision that was made, and I do not hope for much. The republic of Letters would have to be poor in clever skillful members for there not to better answers than mine on such an important question. If I get the chance, I will send you this little scribbling.

​It turned out nobody won. Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Rousseau’s disciple, and author of the novel Paul and Virginie, got an honorary mention.