There are now of these spiritual governors about 180,000, installed in the five regions of the world, each assigned to the leadership of about 1000 souls and as special guardian of a distinct flock, all ordained by bishops instituted by the Pope, he being absolute monarch and declared such by the latest council. In the new Rome as in the ancient Rome, authority has gradually become concentrated until it has centered in and is entrusted wholly to the hands of one man. Romulus, the Alban shepherd, was succeeded by Caesar Augustus, Constantine or Theodosius, whose official title was "Your Eternal," "Your Divine," and who pronounced their decrees "immutable oracles." Peter, the fisherman of Galilee, was succeeded by infallible pontiffs whose official title is "Your Holiness," and whose decrees, for every Catholic, are "immutable oracles" in fact as in law, not hyperbolically, but in the full sense of the words expressed by exact terms. The imperial institution has thus formed itself anew; it has simply transferred itself from one domain to another; only, in passing from the temporal order of things to the spiritual order, it has become firmer and stronger, for it has guarded against two defects which weakened its antique model.—One the one hand, it has provided for the transmission of supreme power; in old Rome, they did not know how to regulate this; hence, when an interregnum occurred, the many violent competitors, the fierce conflicts, the brutalities, all the usurpations of force, all the calamities of anarchy. In Catholic Rome, the election of the sovereign pontiff belongs definitively to a college of prelates[5340] who vote according to established formalities; these elect the new pope by a majority of two-thirds, and, for more than four centuries, not one of these elections has been contested; between each defunct pope and his elected successor, the transfer of universal obedience has been prompt and unhesitating and, during as after the interregnum, no schism in the Church has occurred.—On the other hand, in the legal title of Caesar Augustus there was a defect. According to Roman law, he was only the representative of the people; the community had delegated all its rights incorporate to him; but in it alone was omnipotence vested. According to canon law, omnipotence was vested solely in God; it is not the Catholic community which possesses this and delegates it to the Pope;[5341] his rights accrue to him from another and higher source.[5342] He is not the elect of the people, but the interpreter, vicar and representative of Jesus Christ.



III. The Church today.

Existing Catholicism and its distinctive traits.—Authority, its prestige and supports.—Rites, the priest, the Pope. —The Catholic Church and the modern State.—Difficulties in France born out of their respective constitutions.—

Such is the Catholic Church of to-day, a State constructed after the type of the old Roman empire, independent and autonomous, monarchical and centralized, with a domain not of territory but of souls and therefore international, under an absolute and cosmopolite sovereign whose subjects are simultaneously subjects of other non-religious rulers. Hence, for the Catholic Church a situation apart in every country, more difficult than for Greek, Slavic or Protestant churches; these difficulties vary in each country according to the character of the State and with the form which the Catholic Church has received in them.[5343] In France, since the Concordat, these difficulties are of greater gravity than elsewhere.

When, in 1802, the Church initially received her French form, this was a complete systematic organization, after a general and regular plan, according to which she formed only one compartment of the whole. Napoleon, by his Concordat, organic articles and ulterior decrees, in conformity with the ideas of the century and the principles of the Constituent Assembly, desired to render the clergy of all kinds, and especially the Catholic clergy, one of the subdivisions of his administrative staff, a corps of functionaries, mere agents assigned to religious interests as formerly to civil matters and therefore manageable and revocable. This they all were, in fact, including the bishops, since they at once tendered their resignations at his order. Still, at the present day all, except the bishops, are in this situation, having lost the ownership of their places and the independence of their lives, through the maintenance of the consular and imperial institutions, through removal, through the destruction of the canonical and civil guarantees which formerly protected the lower clergy, through the suppression of the officialite; through the reduction of chapters to the state of vague shadows, through the rupture or laxity of the local and moral tie which once attached every member of the clergy to a piece of land, to an organized body, to a territory, to a flock, and through the lack of ecclesiastical endowment, through the reduction of every ecclesiastic, even a dignitary, to the humble and precarious condition of a salaried dependent.[5344]

A regime of this kind institutes in the body subject to it an almost universal dependence, and hence entire submission, passive obedience, and the stooping, prostrate attitude of the individual no longer able to stand upright on his own feet.[5345] The clergy to which it is applied cannot fail to be managed from above, which is the case with this one, through its bishops, the Pope's lieutenant-generals, who give the countersign to all of them. Once instituted by the Pope, each bishop is the governor for life of a French province and all-powerful in his circumscription we have seen to what height his moral and social authority has risen, how he has exercised his command, how he has kept his clergy under discipline and available, in what class of society he has found his recruits, through what drill and what enthusiasm every priest, including himself, is now a practiced soldier and kept in check; how this army of occupation, distributed in 90 regiments and composed of 50,000 resident priests, is completed by special bodies of troops subject to still stricter discipline, by monastic corporations, by four or five thousand religious institutions, nearly all of them given to labor and benevolence; how, to the subordination and correct deportment of the secular clergy is added the enthusiasm and zeal of the regular clergy, the entire devotion, the wonderful self-denial of 30,000 monks and of 120,000 nuns; how this vast body, animated by one spirit, marches steadily along with all its lay supporters towards one end. This purpose, forever the same, is the maintenance of its dominion over all the souls that it has won over, and the conquest of all the souls over which it has not yet established its domination.

Nothing could be more antipathetic to the French State. Built up like the Church, after the Roman model, it is likewise authoritative and absorbent. In the eyes of Napoleon, all these priests appointed or sanctioned by him, who have sworn allegiance to him, whom he pays annually or quarterly, belong to him in a double sense, first under the title of subjects, and next under the title of clerks. His successors are still inclined to regard them in the same light; in their hands the State is ever what he made it, that is to say a monopolizer, convinced that its rights are illimitable and that its interference everywhere is legitimate, accustomed to governing all it can and leaving to individuals only the smallest portion of themselves, hostile to all bodies that might interpose between them and it, distrustful and ill-disposed towards all groups capable of collective action and spontaneous initiation, especially as concerns proprietary bodies. A self-constituted daily overseer, a legal guardian, a perpetual and minute director of moral societies as of local societies, usurper of their domains, undertaker or regulator of education and of charitable enterprises, the State is ever in inevitable conflict with the Church. The latter, of all moral societies, is the most active; she does not let herself be enslaved like the others, her soul is in her own keeping; her faith, her organization, her hierarchy and her code are all her own. Against the rights of the State based on human reason, she claims rights founded on divine revelation, and, in self-defense, she justly finds in the French clergy, as the State organized it in 1802, the best disciplined militia, the best classified, the most capable of operating together under one countersign and of marching in military fashion under the impulsion that its ecclesiastical leaders choose to give it.

Elsewhere, the conflict is less permanent and less sharp the two conditions which aggravate it and maintain it in France are, one or both, wanting. In other European countries, the Church has not the French form imposed upon it and the difficulties are less; in the United States of America, not only has it not undergone the French transformation, but the State, liberal in principle, interdicts itself against interventions like those of the French State and the difficulties are almost null. Evidently, if there was any desire to attenuate or to prevent the conflict it would be through the first or the last of these two policies. The French State, however, institutionally and traditionally, always invasive, is ever tempted to take the contrary course.[5346]—At one time, as during the last years of the Restoration and the first years of the second Empire, it allies itself with the Church; each power helps the other in its domination, and in concert together they undertake to control the en tire man. In this case, the two centralizations, one ecclesiastic and the other secular, both increasing and prodigiously augmented for a century, work together to overpower the individual. He is watched, followed up, seized, handled severely, and constrained even in his innermost being; he can no longer breathe the atmosphere around him; we can well remember the oppression which, after 1823 and after 1852, bore down on every independent character and on every free intellect.—At another time, as under the first and the third Republic, the State sees in the Church a rival and an adversary; consequently, it persecutes or worries it and we of to-day see with our own eyes how a governing minority, steadily, for a long time, gives offence to a governed majority where it is most sensitive; how it breaks up congregations of men and drives free citizens from their homes whose only fault is a desire to live, pray and labor in common; how it expels nuns and monks from hospitals and schools, with what detriment to the hospital and to the sick, to the school and to the children, and against what unwillingness and what discontent on the part of physicians and fathers of families, and at what bungling waste of public money, at what a gratuitous overburdening of taxation already too great.



IV. Contrasting Vistas.

Other difficulties of the French system.—New and scientific conception of the world.—How opposed to the Catholic conception.—How it is propagated.—How the other is defended.—Losses and gains of the Catholic Church.—Its narrow and broad domains.—Effects of Catholic and French systems on Christian sentiment in France.—Increased among the clergy and diminished in society.

Other disadvantages of the French system are still worse.—In (the nineteenth) century, an extraordinary event occurs. Already about the middle of the preceding century, the discoveries of scientists, coordinated by the philosophers, had afforded the sketch in full of a great picture, still in course of execution and advancing towards completion, a picture of the physical and moral universe. In this sketch the point of sight was fixed, the perspective designed, the various distances marked out, the principal groups drawn, and its outlines were so correct that those who have since continued the work have little to add but to give precision to these and fill them up.[5347] In their hands, from Herschel and Laplace, from Volta, Cuvier, Ampere, Fresnel and Faraday to Darwin and Pasteur, Burnouf, Mommsen and Renan, the blanks on the canvas have been covered, the relief of the figures shown and new features added in the sense of the old ones, thus completing it without changing in any sense the expression of the whole, but, on the contrary, in such a way as to consolidate, strengthen and perfect the master-conception which, purposely or not, had imposed itself on the original painters, all, predecessors and successors, working from nature and constantly inviting a comparison between the painting and the model.—And, for one hundred years, this picture, so interesting, so magnificent, and the accuracy of which is so well guaranteed, instead of being kept private and seen only by select visitors, as in the eighteenth century, is publicly exposed and daily contemplated by an ever-increasing crowd. Through the practical application of the same scientific discoveries, owing to increased facilities for travel and intercommunication, to abundance of information, to the multitude and cheapness of books and newspapers, to the diffusion of primary instruction, the number of visitors has increased enormously.[5348] Not only has curiosity been aroused among the workmen in towns, but also with the peasants formerly plodding along in the routine of their daily labor, confined to their circle of six leagues in circumference. This or that small daily journal treats of divine and human things for a million of subscribers and probably for three millions of readers.—Of course, out of a hundred visitors, ninety of them are not capable of comprehending the sense of the picture; they give it only a cursory glance; moreover, their eyes are not properly educated for it, and they are unable to grasp masses and seize proportions. Their attention is generally arrested by a detail which they interpret in a wrong way, and the mental image they carry away is merely a fragment or a caricature; basically, if they have come to see a magisterial work, it is most of all due to vanity and so that his spectacle, which some of them enjoy, should not remain the privileged of a few. Nevertheless, however imperfect and confused their impressions, however false and ill-founded their judgments, they have learned something important and one true idea of their visit remains with them: of the various pictures of the world not one is painted by the imagination but from nature.[5349]

Now, between this picture and that which the Catholic Church presents to them, the difference is enormous. Even with rude intellects, or minds otherwise occupied, if the dissimilarity is not clearly perceived it is vaguely felt; in default of scientific notions, the simple hearsay caught on the wing, and which seem to have flickered through the mind like a flash of light over a hard rock, still subsists there in a latent state, amalgamating and agglutinating into a solid block until at length they form a massive, refractory sentiment utterly opposed to faith.—With the Protestant, the opposition is neither extreme nor definitive. His faith, which the Scriptures give him for his guidance, leads him to read the Scriptures in the original text and, hence, to read with profit, to call to his aid whatever verifies and explains an ancient text, linguistics, philology, criticism, psychology, combined with general and particular history; thus does faith lay hold on science as an auxiliary. According to diverse souls, the role of the auxiliary is more or less ample it may accordingly adapt itself to the faculties and needs of each soul, and hence extend itself indefinitely, and already do we see ahead the time when the two collaborators, enlightened faith and respectful science, will together paint the same picture, or each separately paint the same picture twice in two different frames.— With the Slavs and Greeks, faith, like the Church and the rite, is a national thing; creed forms one body with the country, and there is less disposition to dispute it; besides, it is not irksome; it is simply a hereditary relic, a domestic memorial, a family icon, a summary product of an exhausted art no longer well understood and which has ceased to produce. It is rather sketched out than completed, not one feature having been added to it since the tenth century; for eight hundred years this picture has remained in one of the back chambers of the memory, covered with cobwebs as ancient as itself, badly lighted and rarely visited; everybody knows that it is there and it is spoken of with veneration; nobody would like to get rid of it, but it is not daily before the eyes so that it may be compared with the scientific picture.—Just the reverse with the Catholic picture. Each century, for eight hundred years, has applied the brush to this picture; still, at the present time we see it grow under our eyes, acquiring a stronger relief, deeper color, a more vigorous harmony, an ever more fixed and striking expression.—To the articles of belief which constitute the creed for the Greek and Slavic church, thirteen subsequent Catholic councils have added to it many others, while the two principal dogmas decreed by the last two councils, Transubstantiation by the council of Trent and the Infallibility of the Pope by that of the Vatican, are just those the best calculated to hinder forever any reconciliation between science and faith.

Thus, for Catholic nations, the dissimilarity, instead of diminishing, is aggravated; both pictures, one painted by faith and the other by science, become more and more dissimilar, while the profound contradiction inherent in the two conceptions becomes glaring through their very development, each developing itself apart and both in a counter-sense, one through dogmatic verdicts and through the strengthening of discipline and the other by ever-increasing discoveries and by useful applications, each adding daily to its authority, one by precious inventions and the other by good works, each being recognized for what it is, one as the leading instructor of positive truths and the other as the leading instructor of sound morality. That is why we find a combat in each Catholic breast as to which of the two concepts is to be accepted as guide. To every sincere mind and to one capable of entertaining both, each is irreducible to the other. To the vulgar mind, unable to combine both in thought, they exist side by side and clash with each other only occasionally when action demands a choice. Many intelligent, cultivated people, and even savants, especially specialists, avoid confronting them, one being the support of their reason and the other the guardian of their conscience; between them, in order to prevent any possible conflict, they interpose in advance a wall of separation, a compartment partition,[5350]" which prevents them from meeting and clashing. Others, at length, clever or not too clear-sighted politicians, try to force their agreement, either by assigning to each its domain and in prohibiting mutual access, or by uniting both domains through the semblance of bridges, by imitation stairways, and other illusory communications which the phantasmagoria of human eloquence can always establish between incompatible things and which procure for man, if not the acquisition of a truth, at least a pleasure in the play of words. The ascendancy of the Catholic faith over these uncertain, inconsequent, tormented souls is more or less weak or strong according to time, place, circumstance, individuals and groups; in the larger group it has diminished, while it has increased in the smaller one.

The latter comprises the regular and secular clergy with its approximate recruits and its small body of supporters; never was it so exemplary and so fervent; the monastic institution in particular never flourished so spontaneously and more usefully. Nowhere in Europe are more missionaries formed, so many "brethren" for small schools, so many volunteers, male and female, in the service of the poor, the sick, the infirm and of children, such vast communities of women freely devoting their lives to teaching and to charity.[5351] Life in common, under uniform and strict rules, to a people like the French, more capable than any other of enthusiasm and of emulation, of generosity and of discipline, naturally prone to equality, sociable and predisposed to fraternity through the need of companionship, sober, moreover, and laborious, a life in common is no more distasteful in the convent than in the barracks, nor in an ecclesiastical army more than in a lay army, while France, always Gallic, affords as ready a hold nowadays to the Roman system as in the time of Augustus. When this system obtains a hold on a soul it keeps its hold, and the belief it imposes becomes the principal guest, the sovereign occupant of the intellect. Faith, in this occupied territory, no longer allows her title to be questioned; she condemns doubt as a sin, she interdicts investigation as a temptation, she presents the peril of un belief as a mortal danger, she enrolls conscience in her service against any possible revolt of reason. At the same time that she guards herself against attacks, she strengthens her possession; to this end, the rites she prescribes are efficient, and their efficiency, multiplicity and convergence—confession and communion, retreats, spiritual exercises, abstinences, and ceremonies of every kind, the worship of saints and of the Virgin, of relics and images, orisons on the lips and from the heart, faithful attendance on the services and the exact fulfillment of daily duties—all attest it.

Through its latest acquisitions and the turn it now takes, Catholic faith buries itself in and penetrates down to the very depths of the sensitive and tried souls which it has preserved from foreign influences; for it supplies to this chosen flock the aliment it most needs and which it loves the best. Below the metaphysical, abstract Trinity, of which two of the three persons are out of reach of the imagination, she has set up an historical Trinity whose personages are all perceptible to the senses, Mary, Joseph and Jesus. The Virgin, since the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, has risen to an extraordinary height; her spouse accompanies her in her exaltation;[5352] between them stands their son, child or man, which forms the Holy Family.[5353] No worship is more natural and more engaging to chaste celibates in whose brain a pure, vague vision is always present, the reverie of a family constituted without the intervention of sex. No system of worship furnishes so many precise objects for adoration, all the acts and occurrences, the emotions and thoughts of three adorable lives from birth to death and in the beyond, down to the present day. Most of the religious institutions founded within the past eighty years devote themselves to meditation on one of these lives considered at some one point of incident or of character, either purity, charity, compassion or justice, conception, nativity or infancy, presence in the Temple, at Nazareth, at Bethany, or on Calvary, the passion, the agony, the assumption or apparition under this or that circumstance or place, and the rest. There are now in France, under the name and patronage of Saint Joseph alone, one hundred and seventeen congregations and communities of women. Among so many appellations, consisting of special watchwords designating and summing up the particular preferences of a devout group, one name is significant there are seventy-nine congregations or communities of women which have devoted themselves to the heart of Mary or of Jesus or to both together.[5354] In this way, besides the narrow devotion which is attached to the corporeal emblem, a tender piety pursues and attains its supreme end, the mute converse of the soul, not with the dim Infinite, the indifferent Almighty who acts through general laws, but with a person, a divine person clothed with the vesture of humanity and who has not discarded it, who has lived, suffered and loved, who still loves, who, in glory above, welcomes there the effusions of his faithful souls and who returns love for love.

All this is incomprehensible, bizarre or even repulsive to the public at large, and still more so to the vulgar. It sees in religion only what is very plain, a government; and in France, it has already had enough of government temporally; add a complementary one on the spiritual side and that will be more and too much. Alongside of the tax-collector and the gendarme in uniform, the peasant, the workman and the common citizen encounter the cure in his cassock who, in the name of the Church, as with the other two in the name of the State, gives him orders and subjects him to rules and regulations. Now every rule is annoying and the latter more than the others; one is rid of the tax-collector after paying the tax, and of the gendarme when no act is committed against the law; the cure is much more exacting; he interferes in domestic life and in private matters and assumes to govern man entirely. He admonishes his parishioners in the confessional and from the pulpit, he lords it over them even in their inmost being, and his injunctions bind them in every act, even at home, around the fireside, at table and in bed, comprising their moments of repose and relaxation, even hours of leisure and in the tavern. Villagers, after listening to a sermon against the tavern and drunkenness, murmur and are heard to exclaim: "Why does he meddle with our affairs? Let him say his mass and leave us alone." They need him for baptism, marriage and burial, but their affairs do not concern him. Moreover, among the observances he prescribes, many are inconvenient, tasteless or disagreeable—fasting, Lent, a passive part in a Latin mass, prolonged services, ceremonies of which the details are all insignificant, but of which the symbolic meaning is to-day of no account to people in attendance; add to all this the mechanical recitation of the Pater and of the Ave, genuflections and crossing one's self, and especially obligatory confession at specified dates. Nowadays the worker and the peasant manage without these constraints. In many villages, there is nobody at high mass on Sundays but women, and often, in small numbers, one or two troops of children led by the clerical instructor and by the "Sister," with a few old men; the great majority of the men remain outside, under the porch and on the square before the church chatting with each other about the crops, on local news and on the weather.

In the eighteenth century, when a cure was obliged to report to the "intendant" the number of inhabitants of his parish, he had only to count his communicants at the Easter service; their number was about that of the adult and valid population, say one half or two fifths of the sum total.[5355] Now, at Paris, out of two millions of Catholics who are of age, about one hundred thousand perform this strict duty, aware of its being strict and the imperative prescription of which is stamped in their memory by a rhyme which they have learned in their infancy;[5356] out of one hundred persons, this is equal to five communicants, of which four are women and one is a man, in other words, about one woman out of twelve or thirteen and one man out of fifty. In the provinces,[5357] and especially in the country, there is good reason for doubling and even tripling these figures; in the latter case, the most favorable one and, without any doubt, the rarest, the proportion of professed Christians is that of one to four among women and one man out of twelve. Evidently, with the others who make not attend Church regularly, with the three women and the eleven other men, their faith is only verbal; if they are still Catholics, it is on the outside and not within.

Besides this separation from the main body and this indifference, other signs denote disaffection and even hostility.—In Paris, at the height of the Revolution, in May and June 1793, the shopkeepers, artisans and market-women, the whole of the common people, were still religious,[5358] "kneeling in the street" when the Host passed by, and before the relics of Saint Leu carried along in ceremonial procession, passionately fond of his worship, and suddenly melted, "ashamed, repentant and with tears in their eyes, when, inadvertently, their Jacobin rulers tolerated the publicity of a procession. Nowadays, among the craftsmen, shopkeepers and lower class of employees, there is nothing more unpopular than the Catholic Church. Twice, under the Restoration and the second Empire, she has joined hands with a repressive government, while its clergy has seemed to be not merely an efficient organ but, again, the central promoter of all repression.— Hence, accumulated bitterness that still survives. After 1830, the archbishopric of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois is sacked; in 1871 the archbishop and other ecclesiastical hostages are murdered. For two years after 1830 a priest in his cassock dared not show himself in public;[5359] he ran the risk of being insulted in the streets; since 1871, the majority of the Parisian electors, through the interposition of the Municipal Council which they elect over and over again, persists in driving "Brethren" and "Sisters" from the schools and hospitals in order to put laymen in their places and pay twice as much for work not done as well.[5360]—In the beginning, antipathy was confined to the clergy; through contamination, it reached the doctrine, to include the faith, the entire Catholicism and even Christianity itself. Under the Restoration, it was called, in provocative language, the priest party, and under the second Empire, the clericals. Afterwards, confronting the Church and under a contrary name, the anti-clerical league was formed by its adversaries, a sort of negative church which possessed, or tried to, its own dogmas and rites, its own assemblies and discipline: and for lack of something better, it has its own fanaticism, that of aversion; on the word being given, it marches, rank and file, against the other, its enemy, and manifests, if not its belief, at least its unbelief in refusing or in avoiding the ministration of the priest. In Paris, twenty funerals out of a hundred, purely civil, are not held in a church; out of one hundred marriages, twenty-five, purely civil, are not blessed by the Church; twenty-four infants out of a hundred are not baptized.[5361]

And, from Paris to the provinces, both sentiment and example are propagated. For sixteen years, in our parliaments elected by universal suffrage, the majority maintains that party in power which wages war against the Church; which, systematically and on principle, is and remains hostile to the Catholic religion; which has its own religion for which it claims dominion; which is possessed by a doctrinal spirit, and, in the direction of intellects and souls, aims at substituting this new spirit for the old one; which, as far as it can, withdraws from the old one its influence, or its share in education and in charity; which breaks up the congregations of men, and overtaxes congregations of women; which enrolls seminarians in the army, and deprives suspect cures of their salaries; in short, which, through its acts collectively and in practice, proclaims itself anti-Catholic. Many of its acts certainly displease the peasant. He would prefer to retain the teaching "brother" in the public school and the "sister" in the hospital as nurse or as teacher in the school; both would cost less, and he is used to their dark dresses and their white caps; moreover, he is not ill-disposed towards his resident cure, who is a "good fellow." Nevertheless, in sum, the rule of the cure is not to his taste; he does not wish to have him back, and he distrusts priests, especially the aspect of their allies who now consist of the upper bourgeoisie and the nobles. Hence, out of ten million electors, five or six millions, entertaining partial dislikes and mute reservations, continue to vote, at least provisionally, for anti-Christian radicals. All this shows that, through an insensible and slow reaction, the great rural mass, following the example of the great urban mass, is again becoming pagan[5362]; for one hundred years the wheel turns in this sense, without stopping, and this is serious, still more serious for the nation than for the Church.

In France, the inner Christianity, has, for all that, through the dual effect of its Catholic and French envelope, grown warmer among the clergy especially among the regular clergy, but is has cooled off among the people and it is especially here that it is needed.

*****

Post Scriptum:

Taine died in 1893 not long after having written this. Much has happened since and the struggle between "Lay Republicans" and the Catholic Church has continued. In "QUID 2000," a French popular reference manual containing on page 515 some notes on the evolution of the Catholic religion in France, we can read the following:

"1899-11-11 the police occupies l'Assomption, 6, rue Francois Ier. The Augustin brothers are accused in court for breaking the law forbidding unauthorized assemblies... 1900 Thomas, mayor of Kremlin-Bicetre, forbids the wearing of the ecclesiastical costume in his town. This example is followed by others..." Reading further we may learn that later in 1901 to 1904 the various Catholic orders are forbidden or dissolved and most French Church property seized. In 1905 a law decreeing a separation between the State and the Church is narrowly and bitterly voted and a struggle between France and the Pope begins ... Between 1914 and 1918 25 000 priests and seminarians are mobilized and app. 5000 among them fall. This disarms many of the Church's enemies and in 1920 funds are appropriated for the re-establishment of the French embassy to the Pope in Rome. etc. etc. Today the Catholic religion is tolerated more or less in the same manner as Judaism, Islam etc. (SR.)

*****

[Footnote 5301: The Budget of 1881. 17,010 desservans of small parishes have 900 francs per annum; 4500 have 1000 francs; 9492, sixty years of age and over, have from 1100 to 1300 francs. 2521 cures of the second class have from 1200 to 1300 francs; 850 cures of the first class, or rated the same, have from 1500 to 1600 francs; 65 archipretre cures have 1600 francs, that of Paris 2400 francs; 709 canons have from 1600 to 2400 francs; 193 vicars-general have from 2500 to 4000 francs.—Abbe Bougaud, "le Grand Peril," etc., p.23. In the diocese of Orleans, which may be taken as an average type, fees, comprising the receipts for masses, are from 250 to 300 francs per annum, which brings the salary of an ordinary desservant up to about 1200 francs.]

[Footnote 5302: The fees, etc., of the cure of the Madeleine are estimated at about 40,000 francs a year. The prefect of police has 40,000 francs a year, and the prefect of the Seine, 50,000 francs.]

[Footnote 5303: Praelectiones juris canonici, II., 264-267.]

[Footnote 5304: Ibid., II., 268.]

[Footnote 5305: "The Ancient Regime," pp. 119, 147. (Ed. Laffont I. pp. 92, 115.) (On the "Chartreuse" of Val Saint-Pierre, read the details given by Merlon de Thionville in his "Memoires.")]

[Footnote 5306: Praelectiones juris canonici, II.,205. (Edict of Louis XIII., 1629, art. 9.)]

[Footnote 5307: The following are other instances. With the "Filles de Saint-Vincent de Paule," the superior of the "Pretres de la Mission" proposes two names and all the Sisters present choose one or the other by a plurality of votes. Local superiors are designated by the Council of Sisters who always reside at the principal establishment.—With the "Freres des Ecoles Chretiennes," assembled at the call of the assistants in function, a general chapter meets at Paris, 27 rue Oudinot. This chapter, elected by all professed members belonging to the order, comprises 15 directors of the leading houses and 15 of the older brethren who have been at least fifteen years in profession. Besides these 30, the assistants in function, or who have resigned, and the visitors of the houses form, by right, a part of the chapter which comprises 72 members. This chapter elects the general superior for ten years. He is again eligible; he appoints for three years the directors of houses, and he can prolong or replace them. With the Carthusians, the superior-general is elected by the professed brethren of the Grande Chartreuse who happen to be on hand when the vacancy occurs. They vote by sealed ballots unsigned, under the presidency of two priors without a vote.]

[Footnote 5308: The reader may call to mind the portrait of Brother Philippe by Horace Vernet. For details of the terrible mortifications inflicted on himself by Lacordaire see his life by Father Chocarne. "Every sort of mortification which the saints prized, hair-cloth jackets of penance, scourges, whips of every kind and form, he knew of and used.... He scourged himself daily and often several times during the day. During Lent and especially on Good Friday he literally scored and flayed himself alive."]

[Footnote 5309: Notes (unpublished) by Count Chaptal.]

[Footnote 5310: "Etat des congregations, communantes et associations religieuses, autorisees et non-autorisees, dresse en execution" according to article 12, law of Dec. 28, 1876. (Imprimerie nationale, 1878)—"L'Institut des freres des ecoles chretiennes," by Eugene Rendu (1882), p. 10.—Th. W. Allies, "Journal d'un voyage en France, p.81. (Conversation with Brother Philippe, July 16, 1845.)—"Statistique de Institut des Freres des Ecoles Chretiennes," Dec.31, 1888. (Drawn up by the head establishment.) Out of the 121 houses of 1789, there were 117 of these in France and 4 in the colonies. Out of the 1,286 houses of 1888, there are 1,010 in France and in the colonies. The other 276 are in other countries.]

[Footnote 5311: Emile Keller, "Les Congregations religieuses en France" (1880), preface, xxIII., xvIII., and p. 492.]

[Footnote 5312: In 1789, 37,000 Sisters; in 1866, 86,000 Sisters ("Statistique de la France," 1866); in 1878, 127,753 Sisters ("Etat des congregations," etc.).]

[Footnote 5313:. (But today, around 1990, there are only 5 nuns per 10,000 inhabitants. SR.)]

[Footnote 5314: Emile Keller, ibid., passim.—In many communities of men and of women the personal expenses of each member are not over 300 francs per annum; with the Trappists at Devielle this is the maximum.—If the value of the useful labor performed by these 160,000 monks and nuns be estimated at 1000 francs per head, which is below the real figures, the total is 160 millions per annum; estimate the expenses of each monk or nun at 500 francs per head and the total is 80 millions a year. The net gain to the public is 80 millions per annum.]

[Footnote 5315: "La Charite a Nancy," by Abbe Girard, p. 245.—The same judgment is confirmed by the Rev. T. W. Allies, in a "Journal d'un voyage en France," 1848, p. 291. "The dogma of the real presence is the centre of the whole religious life of the Church (Catholic): it is the secret support of the priest in his mission, so painful and so filled with abnegation. It is by this that the religious orders are maintained."]

[Footnote 5316: This question is examined by St. Thomas in his Summa Theologica.]

[Footnote 5317: For the past twenty years, owing to the researches of psychologists and physiologists, we have begun to know something of the subterranean regions of the mind and the latent processes taking place there. The storing, the residue and unconscious combination of images, the spontaneous and automatic transformation of images into sensations, the composition, disassociations and splitting into dual personalities of the ego, the alternate or simultaneous coexistence of two, or more than two, distinct persons in the same individual, the suggestions accomplished later and at fixed dates, the chock of the return from the inside to the outside, and the physical effect on the nervous extremities of the mental sensations, all these late discoveries have resulted in a new conception of mind, and psychology, thus renewed, throws a sharp light on history.]

[Footnote 5318: See in "Herodiade," by Flaubert, the depicting of these "kingdoms of the world or of the century," as they appeared to Palestinian eyes in the first century. For the first four centuries we must consider, confronting the Church, by way of contrast and in full relief, the pagan and Roman world, the life of the day, especially in the baths, at the circus, in the theatre, the gratuitous supplies of food, of physical enjoyments and of spectacles to the idle populace of the towns, the excesses of public and private luxury, the enormity of unproductive expenditure, and all this in a society which, without our machines, supported itself by hand-labor; next, the scantiness and dearness of available capital, a legal rate of interest at twelve per cent, the latifundia, the oberati, the oppression of the working classes, the diminution of free laborers, the exhaustion of slaves, depopulation and impoverishment, at the end the colon attached to his glebe, the workman to his tool, the curiale to his curie, the administrative interference of the centralized State, its fiscal exigencies, all that it sucked out of the social body, and the more strenuously inasmuch as there was less to be sucked out of it. Against these sensual habits and customs and this economic system the Church has preserved its primitive aversion, especially on two points, in relation to the theatre and to loaning money at interest.]

[Footnote 5319: See St. Paul's epistle to the Romans, ch. I., 26 to 32; also the First Epistle to the Corinthians, ch. XIII.]

[Footnote 5320: The First Epistle of John, II. 16.]

[Footnote 5321: Acts of the Apostles, ch. IV.,32, 34 and 35.]

[Footnote 5322: I cannot help but conclude that the two world wars, started by Christian Governments, led to socialism and religious decay. How large a role television played in removing the need for clerical guidance and comfort is hard to determine, the fact is that the Churches in Europe stand mostly empty and Taine's description fits rather will on today's society. (SR.)]

[Footnote 5323: Saint Athanasius, the principal founder of Christian metaphysics, did not know Latin and learned it with great difficulty at Rome when he came to defend his doctrine. On the other hand, the principal founder of western theology, Saint Augustin, had only an imperfect knowledge of Greek.]

[Footnote 5324: For example, the three words which are essential and technical in metaphysical speculations on the divine essence, have no real equivalent in Latin, while the words by which an attempt is made to render these terms, verbum, substantia, persona, are very inexact. Persona and substantia, in Tertullian, are already used in their Roman sense, which is always juridical and special.]

[Footnote 5325: Sir Henry Sumner Maine, "Ancient Law," p. 354. The following is profound in a remarkable degree: "Greek metaphysical literature contained the sole stock of words and ideas out of which the human mind could provide itself with the means of engaging in the profound controversies as to the Divine Persons, the Divine Substance, and the Divine Natures. The Latin language and the meager Latin philosophy were quite unequal to the undertaking, and accordingly the western or Latin-speaking provinces of the Empire adopted the conclusions of the East without disputing or reviewing them."]

[Footnote 5326: Maine, "Ancient Law," p.357 "The difference between the two theological systems is accounted for by the fact that, in passing from the East to the West, theological speculation had passed from a climate of Greek metaphysics to a climate of Roman law." Out of this arose the Western controversies on the subject of Free-will and Divine Providence. "The problem of Free-will arises when we contemplate a metaphysical conception under a legal aspect."]

[Footnote 5327: Ibid. "The nature of Sin and its transmission by inheritance; the debt owed by man and its vicarious satisfaction; the necessity and sufficiency of the Atonement; above all the apparent antagonism between Free-will and the Divine Providence-these were the points which the West began to debate as ardently as ever the East had discussed the articles of its more special creed." This juridical fashion of conceiving theology appears in the works of the oldest Latin theologians, Tertullian and Saint Cyprian.]

[Footnote 5328: Ibid. Among the technical notions borrowed from law and here used in Latin theology we may cite "the Roman penal system, the Roman theory of the obligations established by Contract or Delict," the intercession or act by which one assumes the obligation contracted by another, "the Roman view of Debts and of the modes of incurring, extinguishing and transmitting them, the Roman notion of the continuance of individual existence by Universal Succession,"]

[Footnote 5329: Cf. Fustel de Coulanges, "La Gaule Romaine," p.96 and following pages, on the rapidity, facility and depth of the transformation by which Gaul became Latinized.]

[Footnote 5330: The Church of England, in its confession of faith, makes this express declaration.]

[Footnote 5331: As called by Joseph de Maistre, referring to the Greek church.]

[Footnote 5332: Duke Sermoneta-Gaetani has shown in his geographic map of the "Divine Comedy" the exact correspondence of this poem with the "Somme" by Saint Thomas.—It was already said of Dante in the middle ages, Theologus Dantes nullius dogmatis expers.]

[Footnote 5333: Cf. "L'Empire des tsars et les Russes," by Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, vol. III., entire, on the characteristics of the Russian clergy.]

[Footnote 5334: Bossuet, ed. Deforis, VI., 169. The Meaux catechism (reproduced, with some additions, in the catechism adopted by Napoleon). "What works are deemed satisfactory?"—"Works unpleasant to us imposed by the priest as a penance."—"Repeat some of them."—"Alms-giving, fastings, austerities, privations of what is naturally agreeable, prayers, spiritual readings."]

[Footnote 5335: Ibid. "Why is confession ordained?"—"To humble the sinner.. . "—"Why again?"—"To submit one's self to the power of the Keys and to the judgment of the priests who have the power to punish and remit sins."]

[Footnote 5336: Bossuet, ibid., Catechisme de Meaux, VI., 140-142.]

[Footnote 5337: "Manreze du pretre," by Father Caussette, I., 37. "Do you see that young man of twenty-five who will soon traverse the sanctuary to find the sinners awaiting him? It is the God of this earth who sanctifies him... Were Jesus Christ to descend into the confessional he would say, Ego te absolvo. He is going to say with the same authority, Ego te absolvo. Now this is an act of the supreme power; it is greater, says Saint Augustin, than the creation of heaven and earth."—T. W. Allies, "Journal d'un voyage en France," 1845, p.97. "Confession is the chain which binds all Christian life."]

[Footnote 5338: "Manreze du pretre," I., 36. "The Mother of God has undoubtedly more credit than you, but she has less authority. Undoubtedly, she accords favors, but she has not given one single absolution."]

[Footnote 5339: Could one imagine that Stalin, that that apostate former student expelled from the Tiflis Theological Seminary, would, on reading Taine's text, have conceived the idea of having communist missionaries, directed by the KGB in Moscow, direct an army of agents inside the capitalist world? (SR.)]

[Footnote 5340: Like a central committee of the communist party? (SR.)]

[Footnote 5341: Praelectiones juris canonici, I., 101. "The power entrusted to St. Peter and the apostles is wholly independent of the community of believers."]

[Footnote 5342: Here Lenin pretended to install the Proletariat and announced its (his own) dictatorship. (SR.)]

[Footnote 5343: Here we have a clear model for an International Communist Party, tasked with the creation of a visible organization whenever this is possible, but with an invisible structure of missionaries, recruiters, controllers, policemen and agents, since any bourgeois state must, once it discovers the party's true aims, forbid it and drive it underground. To the Christian dream of an eternal life in heaven or hell, the communist movement has its promise of a millenary on earth contrasted by the immediate annihilation of any traitor or dangerous opponent. (SR.)]

[Footnote 5344: "Cours alphabetique et methodique du droit canon," by Abbe Andre, and "Histoire generale de Eglise, vol. XIII., by Bercastel et Henrion. The reader will find in these two works an exposition of the diverse statutes of the Catholic Church in other countries. Each of these statutes differs from ours in one or several important articles; the fixed, or even territorial, endowment of the clergy, the nomination to the episcopate by the chapter, or by the clergy of the diocese, or by the bishops of the province, public competition for curacies, irremovability, participation of the chapter in the government of the diocese, restoration of the officialite; return to the prescriptions of the Council of Trent (Cf. especially the Concordats between the Holy See and Prussia, Bavaria, Wurtemberg, Baden, the two Hesses, Belgium, Austria, Spain, and the statutes accepted or established by the Holy See in Ireland and the United States.)]

[Footnote 5345: The brothers Allignol, "De l'Etat actuel du clerge en France," p.248. "The mind of the desservant is no longer his own. Let him beware of any personal sentiment or opinion!... He must cease being himself and must lose, it may be said, his personality."—Ibid., preface, XIX. "Both of us, placed in remotes country parishes,... are in a position to know the clergy of the second class well, to which, for twenty years, we belong."]

[Footnote 5346: The principal means of action of the State is the right of appointing bishops. The Pope, however, installs them; consequently, the Minister of Worship must have an understanding beforehand with the nuncio, which obliges it to nominate candidates irreproachable in doctrine and morals, but it avoids nominating ecclesiastics that are eminent, enterprising or energetic; once installed and not removable, they would cause trouble. Such, for example, was M. Pie, bishop of Poitiers, nominated by M. de Falloux in the time of the Prince-President, and so annoying during the Empire; in order to keep him in check, M. Levert, the cleverest and most adroit prefect, had to be sent to Poitiers; for many years they waged the most desperate war under proper formalities, each playing against the other the shrewdest and most disagreeable tricks. Finally, M. Levert, who had lost a daughter and was denounced from the pulpit, was obliged, on account of his wife's feelings, to leave the place. (This happened to my own knowledge, as between 1852 and 1867 I visited Poitiers five times.) At the present day, the Catholics complain that the government nominates none but mediocre men for bishops and accepts none others for cantonal cures. (Today, in 1999, we can look back on a century of quarrelling, even war, between Rome and Paris with the separation of the Catholic Church and the State in 1905, sequestration of all church property, impoverishment of the clergy, interdiction of the different orders, papal bulls, ending in 1914 when the State had to concentrate all effort towards winning the war. Today the church is allowed to operate but its influence is much reduced as it the case for all the religions since the advent of the consumer society with television etc. SR.)]

[Footnote 5347: "The Ancient Regime," pp 171, 181, 182. (Ed. Laffont I., p. 129 to 139.)]

[Footnote 5348: M. de Vitrolles, "' Memoires," I., 15. (This passage was written in 1847.) "Under the Empire, readers were to those of the present day as one to a thousand. Newspapers, in very small number, scarcely obtained circulation. The public informed itself about victories, as well as the conscription, in the articles of the 'Moniteur,' posted by the prefects."—From 1847 to 1891, we all know by our own experience that the number of readers has augmented prodigiously.]

[Footnote 5349: I wonder what Taine would have said of television, that system which allows its producers to make all mankind believe that the lies and figments of the imaginations put in front of them show the true and real world as it is. (SR.)]

[Footnote 5350: An expression by Renan in relation to Abbe Lehir, an accomplished professor of Hebrew.]

[Footnote 5351: Th. W. Allies, rector of Launton, "Journal d'un voyage en France," p.245. (A speech by Father Ravignan, August 3, 1848) "What nation in the Roman church is more prominent at the present day for its missionary labors? France, by far. There are ten French missionaries to one Italian." Several French congregations, especially the "Petites Soeurs des Pauvres" and the "Freres des Ecoles Chretiennes," are so zealous and so numerous that they overflow outside of France and have many establishments abroad.]

[Footnote 5352: "Manreze du pretre," by Father Caussette, II.,419: "Now that I have placed one of your hands in those of Mary let me place the other in those of Saint Joseph.... Joseph, whose prayers in heaven are what commands to Jesus were on earth. Oh, what a sublime patron, and what powerful patronage!... Joseph, associated in the glory of divine paternity;... Joseph, who counts twenty-three kings among his ancestors!" Along with the month of the year devoted to the adoration of Mary, there is another consecrated to Saint Joseph.]

[Footnote 5353: "Etat des congregations," etc. (1876). Eleven congregations or communities of women are devoted to the Holy Family and nineteen others to the Child-Jesus or to the Infancy of Jesus.]

[Footnote 5354: One of these bears the title of "Augustines de l'interieur de Marie" and another is devoted to the "Coeuragonisant de Jesus."]

[Footnote 5355: At Bourron (Seine-et-Marne), in 1789, which had 600 inhabitants, the number of communicants at Easter amounted to 300; at the present day, out of 1200 inhabitants there are 94]

[Footnote 5356: Th. W. Allies, "Journal d'un voyage en France," III., p. 18: "M. Dufresne (July 1845) tells us that out of 1,000,000 inhabitants in Paris 300,000 attend mass and 50,000 are practising Christians."—(A conversation with Abbe Petitot, cure of Saint-Louis d'Antin, July 7.1847.) "2,000,000 out of 32,000,000 French are really Christians and go to confession."—At the present day (April 1890) an eminent and well-informed ecclesiastic writes: "I estimate the number of those who observe Easter at Paris at about 100,000."—"The number of professing Christians varies a great deal according to parishes: Madeleine, 4,500 out of 29,000 inhabitants; Saint Augustin, 6,500 out of 29,000; Saint Eustache, 1,750 out of 20,000; Bellancourt, 500 out of 10,000; Grenelle, 1,500 out of 47,500; and Belleville, 1,500 out of 60,000 inhabitants."]

[Footnote 5357: Abbe Bougaud, "Le Grand Peril," etc., p.44: "I know a bishop who, on reaching his diocese, tried to ascertain how many of the 400,000 souls entrusted to his keeping performed their Easter duties. He found 37,000. At the present day, owing to twenty years of effort, this number reaches 55,000. Thus, more than 300,000 are practically unbelievers."—"Vie de Mgr. Dupanloup," by Abbe Lagrange, I., 5'. (Pastoral letter by Mgr. Dupanloup, 1851.) "He considers that he is answerable to God for nearly 350,000 souls, of which 200,000 at least do not fulfill their Easter duties; scarcely 45,000 perform this great duty."]

[Footnote 5358: "The Revolution," II.,390. (Ed. Laff. I., p. 177.)]

[Footnote 5359: Th.-W. Allies, "Journal," etc., p.240 (Aug. 2, 1848, conversation with Abbe Petitot):" In 1830, the priests were obliged for two years to abandon wearing their costume in the street, and only recovered their popularity by their devotion to the sick at the time of the cholera."—In 1848, they had won back respect and sympathy; "the people came and begged them to bless their liberty-poles."—Abbe Petitot adds: "The church gains ground every day, but rather among the upper than the lower classes."]

[Footnote 5360: Emile Keller, "Les Congregations," etc., p.362 (with the figures in relation to Schools).—"Debats" of April 27, 1890 (with the figures in relation to hospitals. Deaths increased in the eighteen secularized hospitals at the rate of four per cent).]

[Footnote 5361: Fournier de Flaix, "Journal de la Societe de Statistique," number for Sep. 1890, p.260. (According to registers kept in the archiepiscopal archives in Paris)—"Compte-rendu des operations du Conseil d'administration des pompes funebres a Paris" (1889): funerals wholly civil in 1882, 19.33 per cent; in 1888, 19.04 per cent; in 1889, 18.63 per cent.—"Atlas de statistique municipale." ("Debats" of July 10, 1890:) The poorer the arrondissement, the greater the number of civil funerals; Menilmontant wins hands down, one third of the funerals here being civil.]

[Footnote 5362: Abbe Joseph Roux (cure at first of Saint-Silvain, near Tulle, and then in a small town of Correze), "Pensees," p. 132 (1886): "There is always something of the pagan in the peasant. He is original sin in all its brutish simplicity."—"The peasant passed from paganism to Christianity mostly through miracles; he would go back at less cost from Christianity to paganism.... It is only lately that a monster exists, the impious peasant.... The rustic, in spite of school-teachers, even in spite of the cures, believes in sorcerers and in sorcery the same as the Gauls and Romans."—Therefore the means employed against him are wholly external. ("Vie de Mgr. Dupanloup," by Abbe Lagrange, pastoral notes of Mgr. Dupanloup, I., 64.) "What has proved of most use to you in behalf of religion in your diocese during the last fifteen years? Is it through this—is it through that? No, it is through medals and crosses. Whatever is given to these good people affords them pleasure; they like to have presents of Our Lord and the Blessed Virgin. These objects, with them, stand for religion. A father who comes with his child in his arms to receive the medal will not die without confessing himself."—The reader will find on the clergy and peasantry in the south of France details and pictures taken from life in the novels of Ferdinand Fabre ("L'abbe Tigrane," "les Courbezons," "Lucifer,," "Barnabe," "Mon Oncle Celestin," "Xaviere," "Ma Vocation").]



BOOK SIXTH. PUBLIC INSTRUCTION.



CHAPTER I. PUBLIC INSTRUCTION



I. Public instruction and its three effects.

Public instruction and its three effects.—Influences of the master, of the pupils on each other, and of discipline. —Case in which all three tend towards producing a particular type of man.

AT fixed intervals a man, in a room, gathers around him children, youths, a group of young people, ten, twenty, thirty or more; he talks to them for one or two hours and they listen to him. They sit alongside of each other, look in each other's faces, touch each other's elbows, feel that they are class-mates, of the same age and occupied with the same tasks. They form a society and in two ways, one with another and all with the master. Hence they live under a statute: every society has one of its own, spontaneous or imposed on it; as soon as men, little or big, come together in any number, in a drawing-room, in a cafe, in the street, they find themselves subject to a local charter, a sort of code which prescribes to them, or interdicts a certain sort of conduct. And so with the school: positive rules along with many tacit rules are here observed and these form a mould which stamps on minds and souls a lasting imprint. Whatever a public lesson may be, whatever its object, secular or ecclesiastic, whether its subject-matter is religious or scientific, from the bottom to the top of the scale, from the primary school and the catechism up to the great seminary, in upper schools and in the faculties, we find in abridgment the academic institution. Of all social engines, it is probably the most powerful and the most efficient; for it exercises three kinds of influence on the young lives it enfolds and directs, one through the teacher, another through the fellow students and the last through rules and regulations.

On the one hand, the master, considered a scholar, teaches with authority and the pupils, who feel that they are ignorant, learn with confidence.—On the other hand, outside of his family and the domestic circle, the student finds in his group of comrades a new, different and complete world which has its own ways and customs, its own sense of honor and its own vices, its own view of things (esprit de corps), in which independent and spontaneous judgments arise, precocious and haphazard presentiments, expressions of opinion on all things human and divine. It is in this environment that he begins to think for himself, in contact with others like himself and his equals, in contact with their ideas, much more intelligible and acceptable to him than those of mature men, and therefore much more persuasive, contagious and exciting; these form for him the ambient, penetrating atmosphere in which his thought arises, grows and shapes itself; he here adopts his way of looking at the great society of adults of which he is soon to become a member, his first notions of justice and injustice, and hence an anticipated attitude of respect or of rebellion, in short, a prejudice which, according as the spirit of the group is reasonable or unreasonable, is either sound or unsound, social or antisocial.—Finally, the discipline of the school has its effect. Whatever its rules and regulations may be, whether liberal or despotic, lax or strict, monastic, military or worldly, whether a boarding or a day school, mixed or exclusive, in town or in country, with predominance of gymnastic training or intellectual efforts, with the mind given to the study of things or to the study of words, the pupil enters into a ready-made setting. According to the diversities of this setting or framework he practices different exercises; he contracts different habits; he is developed or stunted physically or morally, in one sense or in a contrary sense. Hence, just as the system is good or bad, he becomes more or less capable or incapable of bodily or mental effort, of reflection, of invention, of taking the initiative, of starting an enterprise, of subordinating himself to a given purpose, of willing, persistent association, that is to say, in sum, of playing an active and useful part on the stage of the world he is about to enter upon. Observe that this apprenticeship in common, sitting on benches according to certain regulations and under a master, lasts six, ten, fifteen years and often twenty; that girls are not exempt from it; that not one boy out of a hundred is educated to the end at home by a private teacher; that, in secondary and even in superior instruction, the school wheel turns uniformly and without stopping ten hours a day if the scholar boards outside, and twenty-four hours a day if he boards within; that at this age the human clay is soft, that it has not yet received its shape, that no acquired and resistant form yet protects it from the potter's hand, against the weight of the turning-wheel, against the friction of other morsels of clay kneaded alongside of it, against the three pressures, constant and prolonged, which compose public education.

Evidently, there is here an enormous force, especially if the three pressures, instead of opposing each other, as often happens, combine and converge towards the production of a certain finished type of man; if, from infancy to youth and from youth to adult age, the successive stages of preparation are superposed in such a way as to stamp the adopted type deeper and with more exactness; if all the influences and operations that impress it, near or far, great or small, internal or external, form together a coherent, defined, applicable and applied system. Let the State undertake its fabrication and application, let it monopolize public education, let it become its regulator, director and contractor, let it set up and work its machine throughout the length and breadth of the land, let it, through moral authority and legal constraint, force the new generation to enter therein—it will find twenty years later in these minors who have become major, the kind and number of ideas it aimed to provide, the extent, limit and form of mind it approves of, and the moral and social prejudice that suits its purposes.



II. Napoleon's Educational Instruments.

Napoleon's aim.—University monopoly.—Revival and multitude of private schools.—Napoleon regards them unfavorably.—His motives.—Private enterprises compete with public enterprise.—Measures against them.—Previous authorization necessary and optional suppression of them.—Taxes on free education in favor of the university.—Decree of November, 1811.—Limitation of secondary teaching in private schools. —How the university takes away their pupils.—Day-schools as prescribed.—Number of boarders limited.—Measures for the restriction or assimilation of ecclesiastical schools. —Recruits forcibly obtained in prominent and ill-disposed families.—Napoleon the sole educator in his empire.

Such is the aim of Napoleon:[6101]

"In the establishment of an educational corps," he says to himself,[6102] "my principal aim is to secure the means for directing political and moral opinions."

Still more precisely, he counts on the new institution to set up and keep open for inspection a universal and complete police registry. "This registry must be organized in such a way as to keep notes on each child after age of nine years."[6103] Having seized adults he wants to seize children also, watch and shape future Frenchmen in advance; brought up by him, in his hands or in sight, they become ready-made a assistants, docile subjects and more docile than their parents.[6104] Amongst the latter, there are still to many unsubmissive and refractory spirits, too many royalists and too many republicans; domestic traditions from family to family contradict each other or vary, and children grow up in their homes only to clash with each other in society afterwards. Let us anticipate this conflict; let us prepare them for concord; all brought up in the same fashion, they will some day or other find themselves unanimous,[6105] not only apparently, as nowadays through fear or force, but in fact and fundamentally, through inveterate habit and by previous adaptation of imagination and affection. Otherwise, "there will be no stable political state" in France;[6106] "so long as one grows up without knowing whether to be a republican or monarchist, Catholic or irreligious, the State will never form a nation; it will rest on uncertain and vague foundations; it will be constantly exposed to disorder and change."—Consequently, he assigns to himself the monopoly of public instruction; he alone is to enjoy the right to manufacture and sell this just like salt and tobacco; "public instruction, throughout the Empire, is entrusted exclusively to the university. No school, no establishment for instruction whatever," superior, secondary, primary, special, general, collateral, secular or ecclesiastic, "may be organized outside of the imperial university and without the authorization of its chief."[6107]

Every factory of educational commodities within these boundaries and operating under this direction is of two sorts. Some of them, in the best places, interconnected and skillfully grouped, are national units founded by the government, or at its command, by the communes,— faculties, lycees, colleges, and small communal schools; others, isolated and scattered about, are private institutions founded by individuals, such as boarding-schools and institutions for secondary instruction, small free schools. The former, State undertakings, ruled, managed, supported and turned to account by it, according to the plan prescribed by it and for the object it has proposed, are simply a prolongation of itself; it is the State which operates in them and which, directly and entirely, acts through them: they enjoy therefore all its favor and the others all its disfavor. The latter, during the Consulate, revived or sprung up by hundreds, in all directions, spontaneously, under the pressure of necessity, and because the young need instruction as they need clothes, but haphazard, as required according to demand and supply, without any superior or common regulation—nothing being more antipathetic to the governmental genius of Napoleon:

"It is impossible,"[6108] he says, "to remain longer as we are, since everybody can start an education shop the same as a cloth shop"

and furnish as he pleases, or as his customers please, this or that piece of stuff, even of poor quality, and of this or that fashion, even extravagant or out of date: hence so many different dresses, and a horrible medley. One good obligatory coat, of stout cloth and suitable cut, a uniform for which the public authority supplies the pattern, is what should go on the back of every child, youth or young man; private individuals who undertake this matter are mistrusted beforehand. Even when obedient, they are only half-docile; they take their own course and have their own preferences, they follow their own taste or that of parents. Every private enterprise, simply because it exists and thrives, constitutes a more or less independent and dissenting group, Napoleon, on learning that Sainte-Barbe, restored under the direction of M. de Lanneau, had five hundred inmates, exclaims:[6109] "How does it happen that an ordinary private individual has so many in his house?" The Emperor almost seems jealous; it seems as if he had just discovered a rival in one corner of his university domain; this man is an usurper on the domain of the sovereign; he has constituted himself a centre; he has collected around him clients and a platoon; now, as Louis XIV. said, the State must have no "platoons apart." Since M. de Lanneau has talent and is successful, let him enter the official ranks and become a functionary. Napoleon at once means to get hold of him, his house and his pupils, and orders M. de Fontaines, Grand-Master of the University, to negotiate the affair; M. de Lanneau will be suitably compensated; Sainte-Barbe will be formed into a lycee, and M. de Lanneau shall be put at the head of it. Let it be noted that he is not an opponent, an irregular: M. de Fontaines himself praises his teaching, his excellent mind, his perfect exactitude, and calls him the universitarian of the university. But he does not belong to it, he stands aloof and stays at home, he is not disposed to become a mere cog-wheel in the imperial manufactory. Therefore, whether he is aware of it or not, he does it harm and all the more according to his prosperity; his full house empties the lycees; the more pupils he has the less they have. Private enterprises in their essence enter into competition with public enterprise.

For this reason, if tolerated by the latter, it is reluctantly and because nothing else can be done; there are too many of them; the money and the means to replace them at one stroke would be wanting. Moreover, with instruction, the consumers, as with other supplies and commodities, naturally dislike monopoly; they must be gradually brought to it; resignation must come to them through habit. The State, accordingly, may allow private enterprises to exist, at least for the time being. But, on condition of their being kept in the strictest dependence, of its arrogating to itself the right over them of life and death, of reducing them to the state of tributaries and branches, of utilizing them, of transforming their native and injurious rivalry into a fruitful and forced collaboration. Not only must private schools obtain from the State its express consent to be born, for lack of which they are closed and their principals punished,[6110] but again, even when licensed, they live subject to the good-will of the Grand-Master, who can and must close them as soon as he recognizes in them "grave abuses and principles contrary to those professed by the University." Meanwhile, the University supports itself with their funds; since it alone has the right to teach, it may profit by this right, concede for money the faculty of teaching or of being taught alongside of it, oblige every head of an institution to pay so much for himself and so much for each of his pupils; in sum, here as elsewhere, in derogation of the university blockade, as with the continental blockade, the state sells licenses to certain parties. So true is this that, even with superior instruction, when nobody competes with it, it sells them: every graduate who gives a course of lectures on literature or on science must pay beforehand, for the year, 75 francs at Paris and 50 francs in the provinces. Every graduate who begin to lecture on law or medicine must pay beforehand 150 francs at Paris and 100 francs in the provinces.[6111] There is the same annual duty on the directors of secondary schools, boarding-schools and private institutions. Moreover, to obtain the indispensable license, the master of a boarding-school at Paris must pay 300 francs, and in a province 200 francs; the principal of an institution in Paris pays 600 francs, and in the provinces 400 francs; besides that, this license, always revocable, is granted only for ten years; at the end of the ten years the titular must obtain a renewal and pay the tax anew. As to his pupils, of whatever kind, boarding scholars, day scholars, or even gratis,[6112] the University levies on each a tax equal to the twentieth of the cost of full board; the director himself of the establishment is the one who fixes and levies the tax; he is the responsible collector of it, book-keeper and the debtor. Let him not forget to declare exactly the terms of his school and the number of his pupils; otherwise, there is investigation, verification, condemnation, restitution, fine, censure, and the possible closing of his establishment.

Regulations, stricter and stricter, tighten the cord around his neck and, in 1811, the rigid articles of the last decree draw so tight as to insure certain strangling at short date. Napoleon counts on that.[6113] For his lycees, especially at the start, have not succeeded; they have failed to obtain the confidence of families;[6114] the discipline is too military, the education is not sufficiently paternal, the principals and professors are only indifferent functionaries, more or less egoist or worldly. Only former subaltern officers, rude and foul-mouthed, serve as superintendents and assistant-teachers. The holders of State scholarships bring with them "habits fashioned out of a bad education," or by the ignorance of almost no education at all,[6115] so that "for a child that is well born and well brought up," their companionship is lopsided and their contact as harmful as it is repulsive. Consequently, the lycees during the first years,[6116] solely filled with the few holders of scholarships, remain deserted or scarcely occupied, whilst "the elite of the young crowd into more or less expensive private schools."

This elite of which the University is thus robbed must be got back. Since the young do not attend the lycee because they like it, they must come through necessity; to this end, other issues are rendered difficult and several are entirely barred; and better still, all those that are tolerated are made to converge to one sole central outlet, a university establishment, in such a way that the director of each private school, changed from a rival into a purveyor, serves the university instead of injuring it and gives it pupils instead of taking them away. In the first place, his high standard of instruction is limited;[6117] even in the country and in the towns that have neither lycee nor college, he must teach nothing above a fixed degree; if he is the principal of an institution, this degree must not go beyond the class of the humanities; he must leave to the faculties of the State their domain intact, differential calculus, astronomy, geology, natural history and superior literature. If he is the master of a boarding-school, this degree must not extend beyond grammar classes, nor the first elements of geometry and arithmetic; he must leave to State lycees and colleges their domain intact, the humanities properly so called, superior lectures and means of secondary instruction.—In the second place, in the towns possessing a lycee or college, he must teach at home only what the University leaves untaught;[6118] he is not deprived, indeed, of the younger boys; he may still instruct and keep them; but he must conduct all his pupils over ten years of age to the college or lycee, where they will regularly follow the classes as day-scholars. Consequently, daily and twice a day, he marches them to and fro between his house and the university establishment; before going, in the intermission, and after the class is dismissed he examines them in the lesson they have received out of his house; apart from that, he lodges and feeds them, his office being reduced to this. He is nothing beyond a watched and serviceable auxiliary, a subaltern, a University tutor and "coach," a sort of unpaid, or rather paying, schoolmaster and innkeeper in its employ.

All this does not yet suffice. Not only does the State recruit its day-scholars in his establishment but it takes from him his boarding-scholars. "On and after the first of November 1812,[6119] the heads of institutions and the masters of boarding-schools shall receive no resident pupils in their houses above the age of nine years, until the lycee or college, established in the same town or place where there is a lycee, shall have as many boarders as it can take." This complement shall be 300 boarders per lycee; there are to be "80 lycees in full operation "during the year 1812, and 100 in the course of the year 1813, so that, at this last date, the total of the complement demanded, without counting that of the colleges, amounts to 30,000 boarding-scholars. Such is the enormous levy of the State on the crop of boarding-school pupils. It evidently seizes the entire crop in advance; private establishments, after it, can only glean, and through tolerance. In reality, the decree forbids them to receive boarding-scholars; henceforth, the University will have the monopoly of them.

The proceedings against the small seminaries, more energetic competitors, are still more vigorous. "There shall be but one secondary ecclesiastical school in each department; the Grand-Master will designate those that are to be maintained; the others are to be closed. None of them shall be in the country. All those not situated in a town provided with a lycee or with a college shall be closed. All the buildings and furniture belonging to the ecclesiastic schools not retained shall be seized and confiscated for the benefit of the University. "In all places where ecclesiastical schools exist, the pupils of these schools shall be taken to the lycee or college and join its classes." Finally, "all these schools shall be under the control of the University; they must be organized only by her; their prospectus and their regulations must be drawn up by the council of the University at the suggestion of the Grand Master. The teaching must be done only by members of the University at the disposition of the Grand Master." In like manner, in the lay schools, at Sainte-Barbe for example,[6120] every professor, private tutor, or even common superintendent, must be provided with a special authorization by the University. Staff and discipline, the spirit and matter of the teaching, every detail of study and recreation,[6121] all are imposed, conducted and restrained in these so-called free establishments; whatever they may be, ecclesiastic or secular, not only does the University surround and hamper them, but again it absorbs and assimilates them; it does not even leave them any external distinctive appearance. It is true that, in the small seminaries, the exercises begin at the ringing of a bell, and the pupils wear an ecclesiastic dress; but the priest's gown, adopted by the State that adopts the Church, is still a State uniform. In the other private establishments, the uniform is that which it imposes, the lay uniform, belonging to colleges and lycees "under penalty of being closed "; while, in addition, there is the drum, the demeanor, the habits, ways and regularity of the barracks. All initiative, all invention, all diversity, every professional or local adaptation is abolished.[6122] M. de Lanneau thus wrote[6123]: "I am nothing but a sergeant-major of languid and mangled classes... to the tap of a drum and under military colors."

Against the encroachments of this institutional university there is no longer neither public nor private shelter, since even domestic education at home, is not respected. In 1808,[6124] "among the old and wealthy families which are not in the system," Napoleon selects ten from each department and fifty at Paris of which the sons from sixteen to eighteen must be compelled to go to Saint-Cyr and, on leaving it, into the army as second lieutenants.[6125] In 1813, he adds 10,000 more of them, many of whom are the sons of Conventionalists or Vendeans, who, under the title of guards of honor, are to form a corps apart and who are at once trained in the barracks. All the more necessary is the subjection to this Napoleonic education of the sons of important and refractory families, everywhere numerous in the annexed countries. Already in 1802, Fourcroy had explained in a report to the legislative corps the political and social utility of the future University.[6126] Napoleon, at his discretion, may recruit and select scholars among his recent subjects; only, it is not in a lycee that he places them, but in a still more military school, at La Fleche, of which the pupils are all sons of officers and, so to say, children of the army. Towards the end of 1812, he orders the Roman prince Patrizzi to send his two sons to this school, one seventeen years of age and the other thirteen[6127]; and, to be sure of them, he has them taken from their home and brought there by gendarmes. Along with these, 90 other Italians of high rank are counted at La Fleche, the Dorias, the Paliavicinis, the Alfieris, with 120 young men of the Illyrian provinces, others again furnished by the countries of the Rhine confederation, in all 360 inmates at 800 per annum. The parents might often accompany or follow their children and establish themselves within reach of them. This privilege was not granted to Prince Patrizzi; he was stopped on the road at Marseilles and kept there.—In this way, through the skilful combination of legislative prescriptions with arbitrary appointments, Napoleon becomes in fact, directly or indirectly, the sole head-schoolmaster of all Frenchmen old or newcomers, the unique and universal educator in his empire.



III. Napoleon's machinery.

His machinery.—The educating body.—How its members come to realize their union.—Hierarchy of rank.—How ambition and amour-propre are gratified.—The monastic principle of celibacy.—The monastic and military principle of obedience.—Obligations contracted and discipline enforced. —The Ecole Normale and recruits for the future university.

To effect this purpose, he requires a good instrument, some great human machine which designed, put together and set up by himself, henceforth works alone and of its own accord, without deviating or breaking down, conformably to his instructions and always under his eye, but without the necessity of his lending a hand and personally interfering in its predetermined and calculated movement. The finest engines of this sort are the religious orders, masterpieces of the Catholic, Roman and governmental mind, all managed from above according to fixed rules in view of a definite object, so many kinds of intelligent automatons, alone capable of working indefinitely without loss of energy, with persistency, uniformity and precision, at the minimum of cost and the maximum of effect, and this through the simple play of their internal mechanism which, fully regulated beforehand, adapts them completely and ready-made to this special service, to the social operations which a recognized authority and a superior intelligence have assigned to them as their function.—Nothing could be better suited to the social instinct of Napoleon, to his imagination, his taste, his political policy and his plans, and on this point he loftily proclaims his preferences.

"I know," says he to the Council of State, "that the Jesuits, as regards instruction, have left a very great void. I do not want to restore them, nor any other body that has its sovereign at Rome."[6128]

Nevertheless, one is necessary. "As for myself, I would rather confide public education to a religious order than leave it as it is to-day," which means free and abandoned to private individuals. "But I want neither one nor the other." Two conditions are requisite for the new establishment. First of all,

"I want a corporation because a corporation never dies"; it alone, through its perpetuity, maintains teaching in the way marked out for it, brings up "according to fixed principles" successive generations, thus assuring the stability of the political State, and "inspires youth with a spirit and opinions in conformity with the new laws of the empire." And this corporation must be secular. Its members are to be State and not Church "Jesuits";[6129] they must belong to the Emperor and not to the Pope, and will form, in the hands of the government, a civil militia composed of "ten thousand persons," administrators and professors of every degree, comprehending schoolmasters, an organized, coherent and lasting militia

As it must be secular, there must be no hold on it through dogma or faith, paradise or hell, no spiritual incitements; consequently, temporal means are to be employed, not less effective, when one knows how to manage them,—self-esteem, pride, (amour propre), competition, imagination, ambition, magnificent hopes and vague dreams of unlimited promotion, in short, the means and motives already maintaining the temper and zeal of the army. "The educational corps must copy the classification of military grades; "an order of promotion," a hierarchy of places is to be instituted; no one will attain superior rank without having passed through the inferior; "no one can become a principal without having been a teacher, nor professor in the higher classes without having taught in the lower ones."—And, on the other hand, the highest places will be within reach of all; "the young, who devoted themselves to teaching, will enjoy the perspective of rising from one grade to another, up to the highest dignities of the State." Authority, importance, titles, large salaries, pre-eminence, precedence,—these are to exist in the University as in other public careers and furnish the wherewithal for the most magnificent dreams.[6130] "The feet of this great body[6131] will be on the college benches and its head in the senate." Its chief, the Grand-Master, unique of his species, less restricted, with freer hands than the ministers themselves, is to be one of the principal personages of the empire; his greatness will exalt the condition and feeling of his subordinates. In the provinces, on every festive occasion or at every public ceremony, people will take pride in seeing their rector or principal in official costume seated alongside of the general or prefect in full uniform.[6132]

The consideration awarded to their chief will reflect on them; they will enjoy it along with him; they will say to themselves that they too, like him and those under him, all together, form an elite; by degrees, they will feel that they are all one body; they will acquire the spirit of the association and attach themselves to the University, the same as a soldier to his regiment or like a monk to his brethren in a monastery.

Thus, as in a monastic order, one must join the University by "going into the orders."[6133]—"I want," says Napoleon, "some solemnity attached to this act. My purpose is that the members of the corps of instruction should contract, not as formerly, a religious engagement, but a civil engagement before a notary, or before the justice of the peace, or prefect, or other (officer).... They will espouse education the same as their forerunners espoused the Church, with this difference, that the marriage will not be as sacred, as indissoluble.[6134]... They will engage themselves for three, six, or nine years, and not resign without giving notice a certain number of years beforehand." To heighten the resemblance, "the principle of celibacy must be established, in this sense, that a man consecrated to teaching shall not marry until after having passed through the first stages of his career; "for example, "the schoolmasters shall not marry before the age of twenty-five or thirty years, after having obtained a salary of three or four thousand francs and economized something." But, at bottom, marriage, a family, private life, all natural and normal matters in the great world of society, are causes of trouble and weakness in a corps where individuals, to be good organs, must give themselves up wholly and without reserve. "In future,[6135] not only must schoolmasters, but, again, the principals and censors of the lycees, and the principals and rulers of the colleges, be restricted to celibacy and a life in common."—The last complementary and significant trait, which gives to the secular institution the aspect of a convent, is this: "No woman shall have a lodging in, or be admitted into, the lycees and colleges."

Now, let us add to the monastic principle of celibacy the monastic and military principle of obedience; the latter, in Napoleon's eyes, is fundamental and the basis of the others; this principle being accepted, a veritable corporation exists; members are ruled by one head and command becomes effective.[6136] "There will be," says Napoleon, "a corps of instructors, if all the principals, censors and professors have one or several chiefs, the same as the Jesuits had their general and their provincial," like the soldiers of a regiment with their colonel and captain. The indispensable link is found; individuals, in this way, keep together, for they are held by authorities, under one regulation. As with a volunteer in a regiment, or a monk who enters a convent, the members of the University will accept its total regime in advance, present and future, wholly and in detail, and will subject themselves under oath. "They are to take an engagement[6137] to faithfully observe the statutes and regulations of the University. They must promise obedience to the Grand-Master in everything ordered by him for the service of the Emperor, and for the advantage of education. They must engage not to quit the educational corps and abandon their functions before having obtained the Grand-Master's consent. They are to accept no other public or private salaried function without the authentic permission of the Grand-Master. They are bound to give notice to the Grand-Master and his officers of whatever comes to their knowledge that is opposed to the doctrine and principles of the educational corps in the establishments for public instruction." There are many other obligations, indefinite or precise,[6138] of which the sanction is not only moral, but, again, legal, all notable and lasting, an entire surrender of the person who suffers more or less profoundly at having accepted them, and whose compulsory resignation must be assured by the fear of punishment. "Care must be taken[6139] to insure severe discipline everywhere: the professors themselves are to be subject in certain cases to the penalty of arrest; they will lose no more consideration on this account than the colonels who are punished in the same manner."[6140] It is the least of all penalties; there are others of greater and greater gravity,[6141] "the reprimand in presence of an academical board, censure in presence of the University board, transfer to an inferior office, suspension with or without entire or partial deprivation of salary, half-pay or put on the retired list, or stricken off the University roll," and, in the latter case, "rendered incapable of obtaining employment in any other public administration."—"Every member of the University[6142] who shall fail to conform to the subordination established by the statutes and regulations, or in respect due to superiors, shall be reprimanded, censured or suspended from his functions according to the gravity of the case." In no case may he withdraw of his own accord, resign at will, and voluntarily return to private life; he is bound to obtain beforehand the Grand-Master's assent; and, if the latter refuses this, he must renew his application three times, every two months, with the formalities, the delays and the importunacy of a long procedure; failing in which, he is not only stricken from the rolls, but again "condemned to a confinement proportioned to the gravity of the circumstances," and which may last a year.

A system of things ending in a prison is not attractive, and is established only after great resistance. "We were under the necessity," says the superior council,[6143] "of taking candidates as they could be found, differing infinitely in methods, principles and sentiments, accustomed to almost unlimited pardon or, at least, to being governed by the caprices of parents and nearly all disliking the regime attempted to be enforced on them." Moreover, through this intervention of the State, "the local authorities find one of their most cherished prerogatives wrested from them." In sum, "the masters detested the new duties imposed on them; the administrators and bishops protested against the appointments not made at their suggestion; fathers of families complained of the new taxes they had to pay. It is said that the University is known only by its imposts and by its forced regulations; again, in 1811, most of its masters are incompetent, or intractable, and of a bad spirit.—There is still another reason for tightening the cord that binds them into a corporation. "The absolute subordination of every individual belonging to the University is its first necessity; without discipline and without obedience, no University could exist. This obedience must be prompt, and, in grave cases, where recourse must be had to the authority of the government, obedience must always be provisional." But, on this incurably refractory staff, pressure is not enough; it has grown old and hardened; the true remedy, therefore, consists in replacing it with a younger one, more manageable, expressly shaped and wrought out in a special school, which will be for the University what Fontainebleau is for the army, what the grand seminaries are for the clergy, a nursery of subjects carefully selected and fashioned beforehand.