Urban Adjacent: Regionalism and Veterinary Education's Place under the Monarchy and during the French Revolution

In the 1760s, France was the first European kingdom to formalise veterinary education. The world's first veterinary school was sponsored by Louis XV after receiving a proposal from equestrian and educator Claude Bourgelat. At the time, Bourgelat was a recognised expert on equine anatomy, medicine, and riding. The principal function of veterinary education was to extend his robust knowledge about horses to other economically essential livestock, primarily cattle and sheep. With the promise that standardised education of animal health would bring agricultural prosperity, the monarchy reimagined European statecraft as a multispecies affair. This ideological and economic shift endured the transfer of power from monarchs to the third estate and the Revolutionary governments who claimed to speak for their citizens' interests. The case study of regional politics of veterinary education in the Enlightenment illuminates several continuities and discontinuities between the Old Regime and the Republic when it came to vocational education. Using historical geography, the author reconstructs how the original placement of the first veterinary schools in the 1760s and its subsequent re-evaluation during the French Revolution marked the development of a new awareness that the place where one trained to heal cattle changed whose cattle were healed. Veterinarians successfully argued that when one considered livestock as an essential part of France's economy, urban spaces were dependent on the services of rural labourers. Debates about placement hinged on shifting ideas about the value of urban-elite knowledge versus the rural power of the peasantry during the Enlightenment as well as radically shifting governmental priorities from the monarchy to the Republic.