Meritocracy and social mobility: a reflection about pedagogy

Described as the moment of the end of the society of orders, The French Revolution defends the idea of equality and introduces the notion of merit. On the night of August 4th, the Assembly abolished privileges. Revolutionary discourse defends the idea of equality among human being, free and equal in right, from birth to death, and whatever their origins. By adopting "la loi Le Chapelier", in June 1791, the Assembly intends to prohibit corporatist privileges, and to ban lobbies to the Assembly, establishing the concept of equality, and a certain idea of society and socio-political values. If the text harms lobbies1, it raises the question of mutual aid within trades in a hierarchical society, structured around trades solidarities2, communal, municipal and territorial solidarities of the Middle Ages, as illustrated by the use and survival of "communal property" and the passage of the "common good", with right of use, to the "national good", inducing a change of scale of the commons and a distortion, by the distance, of the social bond. 1 Liébart, D., « Un groupe de pression contre-révolutionnaire : le club Massiac sous la constituante », Annales historiques de la Révolution française 354 | octobre-décembre 2008, http://ahrf.revues.org/10873, DOI : 10.4000/ahrf.10873. 2 Liebart, D., & Manca, M., La finance et le soin : gouvernance, systèmes mutualistes et répartition du risque, (2017, November 27),Version 3, Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1066858