How does the expansion of public education affect mass contention against authorities? While existing evidence suggests that states expand education to promote social order, the extent to which it works has not yet been systematically studied. I investigate this issue within the context of 19th-century France, where primary education was explicitly designed to teach obedience. Exploiting quasi-random variation in access to schooling, I do not find evidence that education reduced public dissent in response to the coup of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in 1851. On the contrary, I show that localities with schools exhibited more insurgent activity and opposition to the regime at the ballot box. Additional results suggest that schools may have facilitated the rise of contentious politics by expanding the readership of newspapers and other written media. These findings demonstrate that education can empower the population, even when it is designed to promote obedience.