| Authorship Notes |
Mathieu's dissertation won the accessit at the Lyon prize contest, and excerpts were published in the 1788 print version, accompanied by the jury's comments and Turlin's winning piece. Letters from Mathieu in the correspondence at the Lyon Academy show this publication was without his consent. The jury considered it to be the best piece of the contest defending the utility of travels, but rhetorically inferior to Turlin's.
It is structured in two halves: travel in the service of the education of the men, and in the service of the education of the citizen. The jury appreciated particularly his comments on travel as form of physical education. On the contrary, he is criticized for a logical contradiction: travel requires preliminary knowledge in order to be useful, but also a fully flexible mind not overburdened with already established ideas. |
