Such is the object of the "Ecole Normale."[6144] Young students enter it at the age of seventeen and bind themselves to remain in the University at least ten years.[6145] Young students enter it at the age of seventeen (for a period of 3 years) and bind themselves afterwards to remain in the University at least ten years. It is a boarding-school and they are obliged to live in common: "individual exits are not allowed," while "the exits in common... in uniform... can be made only under the direction and conduct of superintendent masters.. .. These superintendents inspect the pupils during their studies and recreations, on rising and on going to bed and during the night... No pupil is allowed to pass the hours set aside for recreation in his own room without permission of the superintendent. No pupil is allowed to enter the hall of another division without the permission of two superintendents.... The director of studies must examine the books of the pupils whenever he deems it necessary, and as often as once a month." Every hour of the day has its prescribed task; all exercises, including religious observances, are prescribed, each in time and place, with a detail and meticulousness, as if purposely to close all possible issues to personal initiation and everywhere substitute mechanical uniformity for individual diversities. "The principal duties of the pupils are respect for religion, attachment to the sovereign and the government, steady application, constant regularity, docility and submission to superiors; whoever fails in these duties is punished according to the gravity of the offense."[6146]—In 1812,[6147] the Normal School is still a small one, scarcely housed, lodged in the upper stories of the lycee Louis le Grand, and composed of forty pupils and four masters. But Napoleon has its eyes on it and is kept informed of what goes on in it. He does not approve of the comments on the "Dialogue de Sylla et d'Eucrate," by Montesquieu, on the "Eloge de Marc Aurele," by Thomas, on the "Annales" of Tacitus: "Let the young read Caesar's commentaries... Corneille, Bossuet, are the masters worth having; these, under the full sail of obedience, enter into the established order of things of their time; they strengthen it, they illustrate it," they are the literary coadjutors of public authority. Let the spirit of the Normal School conform to that of these great men. The University establishment is the original, central workshop which forges, finishes and supplies the finest pieces, the best wheels. Just now the workshop is incomplete, poorly fitted out, poorly directed and still rudimentary; but it is to be enlarged and completed and made to turn out more and better work. For the time being, it produces only what is needed to fill the annual vacancies in the lycees and in the colleges. Nevertheless, the first decree states that it is "intended to receive as many as three hundred youths."[6148] The production of this number will fill all vacancies, however great they may be, and fill them with products of superior and authentic quality. These human products thus manufactured by the State in its own shop, these school instruments which the State stamps with its own mark, the State naturally prefers. It imposes them on its various branches; it puts them by order into its lycees and colleges; at last, it accepts no others; not only does it confer on itself the monopoly of teaching, but again the preparation of the masters who teach. In 1813,[6149] a circular announces that "the number of places that chance to fall vacant from year to year, in the various University establishments, sensibly diminishes according as the organization of the teaching body becomes more complete and regular in its operation, as order and discipline are established, and as education becomes graduated and proportionate to diverse localities. The moment has thus arrived for declaring that the Normal School is henceforth the only road by which to enter upon the career of public instruction; it will suffice for all the needs of the service."



VI. Objects and sentiments.

Object of the educational corps and adaptation of youth to the established order of things.—Sentiments required of children and adults.—Passive acceptance of these rules. —Extent and details of school regulations.—Emulation and the desire to be at the head.—Constant competition and annual distribution of prizes.

What is the object of this service?—Previous to the Revolution, when directed by, or under the supervision of, the Church, its great object was the maintenance and strengthening of the faith of the young. Successor of the old kings, the new ruler underlines[6150] among "the bases of education," "the precepts of the Catholic religion," and this phrase he writes himself with a marked intention; when first drawn up, the Council of State had written the Christian religion; Napoleon himself, in the definitive and public decree, substitutes the narrowest term for the broadest.[6151] In this particular, he is politic, taking one step more on the road on which he has entered through the Concordat, desiring to conciliate Rome and the French clergy by seeming to give religion the highest place.—But it is only a place for show, similar to that which he assigns to ecclesiastical dignitaries in public ceremonies and on the roll of precedence. He does not concern himself with reanimating or even preserving earnest belief: far from that:

"it should be so arranged," he says,[6152] "that young people may be neither too bigoted nor too incredulous: they should be adapted to the state of the nation and of society."

All that can be demanded of them is external deference, personal attendance on the ceremonies of worship, a brief prayer in Latin muttered in haste at the beginning and end of each lesson,[6153] in short, acts like those of raising one's hat or other public marks of respect, such as the official attitudes imposed by a government, author of the Concordat, on its military and civil staff. They likewise, the lyceans and the collegians, are to belong to it and do already, Napoleon thus forming his adult staff out of his juvenile staff.

In fact, it is for himself that he works, for himself alone, and not at all for the Church whose ascendancy would prejudice his own; much better, in private conversation, he declares that he had wished to supplant it: his object in forming the University is first and especially "to take education out of the hands of the priests.[6154] They consider this world only as a vehicle for transportation to the other," and Napoleon wants "the vehicle filled with good soldiers for his armies," good functionaries for his administrations, and good, zealous subjects for his service.—And, thereupon, in the decree which organizes the University, and following after this phrase written for effect, he states the real and fundamental truth.

"All the schools belonging to the University shall take for the basis of their teaching loyalty to the Emperor, to the imperial monarchy to which the happiness of the people is confided and to the Napoleonic dynasty which preserves the unity of France and of all liberal ideas proclaimed by the Constitutions."

In other terms, the object is to plant civil faith in the breasts of children, boys and young men, to make them believe in the beauty, goodness and excellence of the established order of things, to predispose their minds and hearts in favor of the system, to adapt them to this system,[6155] to the concentration of authority and to the centralization of services, to uniformity and to "falling into line" (encadrement), to equality in obeying, to competition, to enthusiasm, in short, to the spirit of the reign, to the combinations of the comprehensive and calculating mind which, claiming for itself and appropriating for its own use the entire field of human action, sets up its sign-posts everywhere, its barriers, its rectilinear compartments, lays out and arranges its racecourses, brings together and introduces the runners, urges them on, stimulates them at each stage, reduces their soul to the fixed determination of getting ahead fast and far, leaving to the individual but one motive for living, that of the desire to figure in the foremost rank in the career where, now by choice and now through force, he finds himself enclosed and launched.[6156]

For this purpose, two sentiments are essential with adults and therefore with children:

The first is the passive acceptance of a prescribed regulation, and nowhere does a rule applied from above bind and direct the whole life by such precise and multiplied injunctions as under the University regime. School life is circumscribed and marked out according to a rigid, unique system, the same for all the colleges and lycees of the Empire, according to an imperative and detailed plan which foresees and prescribes everything even to the minutest point, labor and rest of mind and of body, material and method of instruction, class-books, passages to translate or to recite, a list of fifteen hundred volumes for each library with a prohibition against introducing another volume into it without the Grand-Master's permission, hours, duration, application and sessions of classes, of studies, of recreations and of promenades causing the premeditated stifling of native curiosity, of spontaneous inquiry, of inventive and personal originality, both with the masters and still more, with the scholars. This to such an extent that one day, under the second Empire, a minister, drawing out his watch, could exclaim with satisfaction,

"At this very time, in such a class, all the scholars of the Empire are studying a certain page in Virgil."

Well—informed, judicious, impartial and even kindly-disposed foreigners,[6157] on seeing this mechanism which everywhere substitutes for the initiative from below the compression and impetus from above, are very much surprised. "The law means that the young shall never for one moment be left to themselves; the children are under their masters' eyes all day" and all night. Every step outside of the regulations is a false one and always arrested by the ever-present authority. And, in cases of infraction, punishments are severe; "according to the gravity of the case,[6158] the pupils will be punished by confinement from three days to three months in the lycee or college, in some place assigned to that purpose; if fathers, mothers or guardians object to these measures, the pupil must be sent home and can no longer enter any other college or lycee belonging to the university, which, as an effect of university monopoly, thereafter deprives him of instruction, unless his parents are wealthy enough to employ a professor at home. "Everything that can be effected by rigid discipline is thus obtained[6159] and better, perhaps, in France than in any other country," for if, on leaving the lycee, young people have lost a will of their own, they have acquired "a love of and habits of subordination and punctuality" which are lacking elsewhere.

Meanwhile, on this narrow and strictly defined road, whilst the regulation supports them, emulation pushes them on. In this respect, the new university corps, which, according to Napoleon himself, must be a company of "lay Jesuits," resumes to its advantage the double process which its forerunners, the former Jesuits, had so well employed in education. On the one hand, constant direction and incessant watchfulness; on the other hand, the appeal to amour-propre and to the excitements of parades before the public. If the pupil works hard, it is not for the purpose of learning and knowing, but to be the first in his class; the object is not to develop in him the need of truthfulness and the love of knowledge, but his memory, taste and literary talent; at best, the logical faculty of arrangement and deduction, but especially the desire to surpass his rivals, to distinguish himself, to shine, at first in the little public of his companions, and next, at the end of the year, before the great public of grown-up men. Hence, the weekly compositions, the register of ranks and names, every place being numbered and proclaimed; hence, those annual and solemn awards of prizes in each lycee and at the grand competition of all lycees, along with the pomp, music, decoration, speeches and attendance of distinguished personages. The German observer testifies to the powerful effect of a ceremony of this kind[6160]:

"One might think one's self at the play, so theatrical was it;"

and he notices the oratorical tone of the speakers, "the fire of their declamation," the communication of emotion, the applause of the public, the prolonged shouts, the ardent expression of the pupils obtaining the prizes, their sparkling eyes, their blushes, the joy and the tears of the parents. Undoubtedly, the system has its defects; very few of the pupils can expect to obtain the first place; others lack the spur and are moreover neglected by the master. But the elite make extraordinary efforts and, with this, there is success. "During the war times," says again another German, "I lodged a good many French officers who knew one half of Virgil and Horace by heart." Similarly, in mathematics, young people of eighteen, pupils of the Polytechnic School, understand very well the differential and integral calculus, and, according to the testimony of an Englishman,[6161] "they know it better than many of the English professors."



V. Military preparation and the cult of the Emperor.

This general preparation is specified and directed by Napoleon as a policy, and, as he specially needs soldiers, the school, in his hands, becomes the vestibule of the barracks. Right away the institution received a military turn and spirit, and this form, which is essential to him, becomes more and more restricted. In 1805, during four months,[6162] Fourcroy, ordered by the Emperor, visits the new lycees "with an inspector of reviews and a captain or adjutant-major, who everywhere gives instruction in drill and discipline." The young have been already broke in; "almost everywhere," he says on his return, "I saw young people without a murmur or reflection obey even younger and weaker corporals and sergeants who had been raised to a merited rank through their good behavior and progress. He himself, although a liberal, finds reasons which justify to the legislative body this unpopular practice;[6163] he replies to the objections and alarm of the parents "that it is favorable to order, without which there are no good studies," and moreover "it accustoms the pupils to carrying and using arms, which shortens their work and accelerates their promotion on being summoned by the conscription to the service of the State." The tap of the drum, the attitude in presenting arms, marching at command, uniform, gold lace, and all that, in 1811, becomes obligatory, not only for the lycees and colleges, but again, and under the penalty of being closed, for private institutions.[6164] At the end of the Empire, there were in the departments which composed old France 76,000 scholars studying under this system of stimulation and constraint. "Our masters," as a former pupil is to say later on, "resembled captain-instructors, our study-rooms mess—rooms, our recreations drills, and our examinations reviews."[6165] The whole tendency of the school inclines it towards the military and merges therein on the studies being completed—sometimes, even, it flows into it before the term is over. After 1806,[6166] the anticipated conscriptions take youths from the benches of the philosophy and rhetoric classes. After 1808, ministerial circulars[6167] demand of the lycees boys (des enfants de bonne volonte), scholars of eighteen and nineteen who "know how to manoeuvre," so that they may at once be made under-officers or second-lieutenants; and these the lycees furnish without any difficulty by hundreds. In this way, the beardless volunteer entering upon the career one or two years sooner, but gaining by this one or two grades in rank.—"Thus," says a principal[6168] of one of the colleges, "the brain of the French boy is full of the soldier. As far as knowledge goes there is but little hope of it, at least under existing circumstances. In the schools, says another witness of the reign,[6169] "the young refuse to learn anything but mathematics and a knowledge of arms. I can recall many examples of young lads of ten or twelve years who daily entreated their father and mother to let them go with Napoleon."—In those days, the military profession is evidently the first of all, almost the only one. Every civilian is a pekin, that is to say an inferior, and is treated as such.[6170] At the door of the theatre, the officer breaks the line of those who are waiting to get their tickets and, as a right, takes one under the nose of those who came before him; they let him pass, go in, and they wait. In the cafe, where the newspapers are read in common, he lays hold of them as if through a requisition and uses them as he pleases in the face of the patient bourgeois.

The central idea of this glorification of the army, be it understood, is the worship of Napoleon, the supreme, unique, absolute sovereign of the army and all the rest, while the prestige of this name is as great, as carefully maintained, in the school as in the army. At the start, he put his own free scholars (boursiers) into the lycees and colleges, about 3000 boys[6171] whom he supports and brings up at his own expense, for his own advantage, destined to become his creatures, and who form the uppermost layer of the school population; about one hundred and fifty of these scholarships to each lycee, first occupants of the lycee and still for a long time more numerous than their paying comrades, all of a more or less needy family, sons of soldiers and functionaries who live on the Emperor and rely on him only, all accustomed from infancy to regard the Emperor as the arbiter of their destiny, the special, generous and all-powerful patron who, having taken charge of them now, will also take charge of them in the future. A figure of this kind fills and occupies the entire field of their imagination; whatever grandeur it already possesses it here becomes still more grand, colossal and superhuman. At the beginning their enthusiasm gave the pitch to their co-disciples;[6172] the institution, through its mechanism, labors to keep this up, and the administrators or professors, by order or through zeal, use all their efforts to make the sonorous and ringing chord vibrate with all the more energy. After 1811, even in a private institution,[6173] "the victories of the Emperor form almost the only subject on which the imagination of the pupils is allowed to exercise itself." After 1807,[6174] at Louis le Grand, the prize compositions are those on the recent victory of Jena. "Our masters themselves," says Alfred de Vigny, "unceasingly read to us the bulletins of the Grande Armee, while cries of Vive l'Empereur interrupted Virgil and Plato." In sum, write many witnesses,[6175] Bonaparte desired to bestow on French youths the organization of the "Mamelukes," and he nearly succeeded. More exactly and in his own words, "His Majesty[6176] desired to realize in a State of forty millions of inhabitants what had been done in Sparta and in Athens.—" But," he is to say later, "I only half succeeded. That was one of my finest conceptions";[6177] M. de Fontanes and the other university men did not comprehend this or want to comprehend it. Napoleon himself could give only a moment of attention to his school work, his halting-spells between two campaigns;[6178] in his absence, "they spoiled for him his best ideas"; "his executants "never perfectly carried out his intentions. "He scolded, and they bowed to the storm, but not the less continued on in the usual way." Fourcroy kept too much of the Revolution in mind, and Fontanes too much of the ancient regime; the former was too much a man of science, and the latter too much a man of letters; with such capacities they laid too great stress on intellectual culture and too little on discipline of the feelings. In education, literature and science are "secondary" matters; the essential thing is training, an early, methodical, prolonged, irresistible training which, through the convergence of every means—lessons, examples and habits—inculcates "principles," and lastingly impresses on young souls "the national doctrine," a sort of social and political catechism, the first article of which commands fanatical docility, passionate devotion, and the total surrender of one's self to the Emperor.[6179]

*****

[Footnote 6101: (and obviously the aim of all other dictatorships. (SR.))]

[Footnote 6102: Pelet de la Lozere, 161. (Speech by Napoleon to the Council of State, March 11, 1806.)]

[Footnote 6103: Our last son entered the French School system at the age of 5 in 1984 and his school record followed him from school to school until he left 13 years later with his terminal exam, the Baccalaureat. (SR.)]

[Footnote 6104: What a wonderful procedure, it was to be copied and used by all the dominant rulers of the 20th century. Taine's book is, however, not to be let into immature hands, so no wonder it was hardly ever referred to by those who had profited by it. (SR.)]

[Footnote 6105: A. de Beauchamp, Recueil des lois et reglements sur l'enseignement superior, 4 vol. ( (Rapport of Fourcroy to the Corps Legislatif, May 6, 1806.) "How important it is... that the mode of education admitted to be the best should add to this advantage, that of being uniform for the whole Empire, teaching the same knowledge, inculcating the same principles on individuals who must live together in the same society, forming in some way but one body, possessing but one mind, and all contributing to the public good through unanimity of sentiment and action."]

[Footnote 6106: Pelet de la Lozere, 154.]

[Footnote 6107: A. de Beauchamp, ibid. (Decree of March 7, 1808.)—Special and collateral schools which teach subjects not taught in the lycees, for example the living languages, which are confined to filling a gap, and do not compete with the lycees, are subject to previous authorization and to university pay.]

[Footnote 6108: Pelet de la Lozere, p. 170. (Session of the Council of State, March 20, 1806).]

[Footnote 6109: Quicherat, "Histoire de Sainte-Barbe," III., 125.]

[Footnote 6110: A. de Beauchamp, ibid. (Decrees of March 17, 1808, arts 103 and 105, of Sep. 17, 1808, arts. 2 and 3 of Novem. 15, 1801, arts. 54, 55 and 56.) "Should any one publicly teach and keep a school without the Grand-Master's consent, he will be officially prosecuted by our imperial judges, who will close the school.... He will be brought before the criminal court and condemned to a fine of from one hundred to two hundred francs, without prejudice to greater penalties, should he be found guilty of having directed instruction in a way contrary to order and to the public interest."—Ibid., art. 57. (On the closing of schools provided with prescribed authority.)]

[Footnote 6111: A. de Beauchamp, ibid. (Decree of Sep. 17, 1808, arts. 27, 28, 29, 30, and act passed April 7, 1809.)]

[Footnote 6112: Id., ibid. (Decrees of March 17, 1808, art. 134; of Sep. 17, 1808, arts. 25 and 26; of Nov.15, 1811, art. 63).]

[Footnote 6113: Ambroise Rendu, "Essai sur l'instruction publique," 4 vols., 1819, I., 221. (Notice to M. de Fontanes, March 24, 1808. "The university undertakes all public institutions, and must strive to have as few private institutions as possible.]

[Footnote 6114: Eugene Rendu, "Ambroise Rendu et l'Universite de France" (1861), pp.25, 26. (Letter of the Emperor to Fourcroy, Floreal 3, year XIII, ordering him to inspect the lycees and Report of Fourcroy at the end of four months.) "In general, the drum. the drill and military discipline keep the parents in most of the towns from sending their children to the lycee.... Advantage is taken of this measure to make parents believe that the Emperor wants only to make soldiers." Ibid. (Note of M. de Champagny, Minister of the Interior, written a few months later.) "A large half of the heads (of the lycee) or professors is, from a moral point of view, completely indifferent. One quarter, by their talk, their conduct, their reputation, exhibit the most dangerous character in the eyes of the youths... The greatest fault of the principals is their lack of religious spirit, religious zeal.... There are not more than two or three lycees in which this may be seen. Hence the removal of the children by the parents which is attributed to political prejudices; hence the rarity of paying pupils; hence the discredit of the lycees. In this respect opinion is unanimous."]

[Footnote 6115: "Histoire du College Louis le Grand," by Esmond, emeritus censor, 1845, p.267 "Who were the assistant-teachers? Retired subaltern officers who preserved the coarseness of the camp and knew of no virtue but passive obedience.... The age at which scholarships were given was not fixed, the Emperor's choice often falling on boys of fifteen or sixteen, who presented themselves with habits already formed out of a bad education and so ignorant that one was obliged to assign them to the lowest classes, along with children."—Fabry, "Memoires pour servir a l'histoire de l'instruction publique depuis 1789," I., 391. "The kernel of boarding-scholars, (holders of scholarships) was furnished by the Prytanee. Profound corruption, to which the military regime gives an appearance of regularity, a cool impiety which conforms to the outward ceremonies of religion as to the movements of a drill,... steady tradition has transmitted this spirit to all the pupils that have succeeded each other for twelve years."]

[Footnote 6116: Fabry, ibid., vol. II.,12, and vol. III., 399.]

[Footnote 6117: Decree of Nov.15, 1811, articles 15, 16, 22.]

[Footnote 6118: Quicherat, ibid., III.. 93 to 105.—Up to 1809, owing to M. de Fontane's toleration, M. de Lanneau could keep one half of his pupils in his house under the name of pupils in preparatory classes, or for the lectures in French or on commerce; nevertheless, he was obliged to renounce teaching philosophy. In 1810, he is ordered to send all his scholars to the lycee within three months. There were at this date 400 scholars in Sainte-Barbe.]

[Footnote 6119: Decree of Nov.15, 1811, articles 1, 4, 5, 9, 17 to 19 and 24 to 32.—"Proces-verbaux des seances du conseil de l'Universite imperiale." (Manuscripts in the archives of the Ministry of Public Instruction, furnished by M. A. de Beauchamp), session of March 12, 1811, note of the Emperor communicated by the Grand-Master. "His Majesty requires that the following arrangement be added to the decree presented to him: Wherever there is a lycee, the Grand-Master will order private institutions to be closed until the lycee has all the boarders it can contain." The personal intervention of Napoleon is here evident; the decree starts with him; he wished it at once more rigorous, more decidedly arbitrary and prohibitive.]

[Footnote 6120: Quicherat, ibid., III.,95-105.—Ibid., 126. After the decree of November 15, 1811, threatening circulars follow each other for fifteen months and always to hold fast or annoy the heads of institutions or private schools. Even in the smallest boarding-schools, the school exercises must be announced by the drum and the uniform worn under penalty of being shut up]

[Footnote 6121: Ibid., III., 42.—At Sainte-Barbe, before 1808, there were various sports favoring agility and flexibility of the body, such as running races, etc. All that is suppressed by the imperial University; it does not admit that anything can be done better or otherwise than by itself.]

[Footnote 6122: Decree of March 17, 1808, article 38. Among "the bases of teaching," the legislator prescribes "obedience to the statutes the object of which is the uniformity of instruction."]

[Footnote 6123: Quicherat, III., 128.]

[Footnote 6124: "The Modern Regime," I., 164.]

[Footnote 6125: See, for a comprehension of the full effect of this forced education, "Les Mecontens" by Merimee, the role of Lieutenant Marquis Edward de Naugis.]

[Footnote 6126: "Recueil," by A. de Beauchamp; Report by Fourcroy, April 20, 1802: "The populations which have become united with France and which, speaking a different language and accustomed to foreign institutions, need to abandon old habits and refashion themselves on those of their new country, cannot find at home the essential means for giving their sons the instruction, the manners and the character which should amalgamate them with Frenchmen. What destiny could be more advantageous for them and, at the same time, what a resource for the government, which desires nothing so much as to attach new citizens to France!"]

[Footnote 6127: "Journal d'un detenu de 1807 a 1814" (I vol., 1828, in English), p.167. (An account given by Charles Choderlos de Laclos, who was then at La Fleche.]

[Footnote 6128: Pelet de la Lozere, ibid., pp.162, 163.167. (Speeches by Napoleon to the Council of State, sessions of Feb. 10, March 1, 11 and 20, April 7, and May 21 and 29, 1806.)]

[Footnote 6129: Napoleon himself said this: "I want a corporation, not of Jesuits whose sovereign is in Rome, but Jesuits who have no other ambition but to be useful and no other interest but the public interest."]

[Footnote 6130: This intention is formally expressed in the law. (Decree of March 17, 1808, art. 30.) "Immediately after the formation of the imperial university, the order of rank shall be followed in the appointment of functionaries, and no one can be assigned a place who has not passed through the lowest. The situations will then afford a career which offers to knowledge and good behavior the hope of reaching the highest position in the imperial university."]

[Footnote 6131: Pelet de la Lozere, ibid.]

[Footnote 6132: "Proces-verbaux des seances du conseil de l'Universite." (In manuscript.) Memoir of February 1, 1811, on the means for developing the spirit of the corporation in the University. In this memoir, communicated to the Emperor, the above motive is alleged.]

[Footnote 6133: Pelet de la Lozere.]

[Footnote 6134: I can imagine the effect this description of Napoleon's genius and inventive spirit must have had on Lenin when he lived and studied in Paris and forged his plans for a communist state, a world revolution, an annihilation of the existing order and the creation of a new (and better) one. (SR.)]

[Footnote 6135: Decree of March 17, 1808, arts. 101, 102.]

[Footnote 6136: In any pre-revolutionary society, authority must be undermined, women introduced whenever it can lessen the efficiency of the organization. But once the revolution has won, then Lenin's dictum about entrusting men of administrative talent with the full authority of the dictatorship of the proletariat is to be followed. As Taine was translated into German, Hitler is likely, directly or indirectly to have studied Napoleon. Hitler's "fuehrerprincip" a principle which gave the Nazi society its terrible efficiency was probably the result. (SR.)]

[Footnote 6137: Decree of March 20, 1808, articles 40-46.]

[Footnote 6138: For example, act of March 31, 1812, On leaves of absence.—Cf. the regulations of April 8, 1810, for the "Ecole de la Maternite," titres ix, x and xi). In this strict and special instance we see plainly what Napoleon meant by "the police" of a school.]

[Footnote 6139: Pelet de la Lozere, Ibid.]

[Footnote 6140: It seems to me probable that an aspiring revolutionary like Hitler, Lenin, Stalin or Trotsky) would attempt to copy Napoleon's once he had successfully taken power inside first the party and later the state. To enhance the dissolution of a democracy the opposite system, that is tenure irrespective of performance, the right to operate militant trade unions and to conduct strikes, would be demanded for all government employees. (SR.)]

[Footnote 6141: Decree of March 17, 1808, articles 47 and 48.]

[Footnote 6142: Decree of Nov. 15, 1811, articles 66 and 69.]

[Footnote 6143: Proces-verbaux et papiers du conseil superior de l'Universite (in manuscript).—(Two memoirs submitted to the Emperor, Feb. 1, 1811, on the means of strengthening the discipline and spirit of the body in the University.)—The memoir requests that the sentences of the university authorities be executable on the simple exequatur of the courts; it is important to diminish the intervention of tribunals and prefects, to cut short appeals and pleadings; the University must have full powers and full jurisdiction on its domain, collect taxes from its taxpayers, and repress all infractions of those amenable to its jurisdiction. (Please not the exequatur is a French ordnance by which the courts gives a decision by a third party or an umpire executory force. SR.)]

[Footnote 6144: "Statut sur l'administration, l'ensignement et la police de l'Ecole normale," March 30, 1810, title II, articles 20-23.]

[Footnote 6145: Taine entered in L'Ecole Normale in October 1848, first in his year, having written an essay in philosophy (in Latin) with the title: Si animus cum corpore extinguitur, quid sit Deus? Quid homo? Quid societas? Quid philosophia? (If the soul dies with the body what happens to God? Man? Society? Philosophy?) And an essay in French imagining that he was Voltaire writing to his English friend Cedeville pretending to give his impressions on England. When he had arrived on 30 October 1848 Taine wrote to Cornelis de Witt: "Here I am in the convent and prisoner for three years." (SR.)]

[Footnote 6146: I note, however, that the Ecole Normale Superior produced Taine, and it seemed to have had the same effect upon him as by boarding school and its similar regime upon me, namely of making me informed and rebellious. I have also noted that the most uninteresting and smug young people I have met have followed school systems like that of the United States where no great effort is demanded but the peer pressure helps to produce ignorant, self-satisfied students. (SR.)]

[Footnote 6147: Villemain, "Souvenirs contemporaines," vol. I., 137-156. ("Une visite a l'Ecole normale en 1812," Napoleon's own words to M. de Narbonne.) "Tacitus is a dissatisfied senator, an Auteuil grumbler, who revenges himself, pen in hand, in his cabinet. His is the spite of the aristocrat and philosopher both at once.... Marcus Aurelius is a sort of Joseph II., and, in much larger proportions, a philanthropist and sectarian in commerce with the sophists and ideologues of his time, flattering them and imitating them.... I like Diocletian better."—"... Public education lies in the future and in the duration of my work after I am gone."]

[Footnote 6148: Decree of March 17, 1808, art. 110 and the following.]

[Footnote 6149: Circular of Nov. 13, 1813.]

[Footnote 6150: Decree of March 17, 1808, article 38.]

[Footnote 6151: Pelet de la Lozere, ibid., 158.]

[Footnote 6152: Id., ibid., 168. (Session of March 20, 1806.)]

[Footnote 6153: Hermann Niemeyer, "Beobactungen auf einer Deportation-Reise nach Frankreich im J. 1807" (Halle, 1824), II.,353.—Fabry, "Memoires pour servir a l'histoire de l'instruction publique," III., 120. (Documents and testimony of pupils showing that religion in the lycees is only ceremonial practice.)—Id., Riancey, "Histoire de l'instruction publique," II.,378. (Reports of nine chaplains in the royal colleges in 1830 proving that the same spirit prevailed throughout the Restoration: "A boy sent to one of these establishments containing 400 pupils for the term of eight years has only eight or ten chances favoring the preservation of his faith; all the others are against him, that is to say, out of four hundred chances, three hundred and ninety risk his being a man with no religion."]

[Footnote 6154: Fabry, ibid., III., 175. (Napoleon's own words to a member of his council.)—Pelet de la Lozere, ibid., 161: "I do not want priests meddling with public education."—167: "The establishment of a teaching corps will be a guarantee against the re-establishment of monks. Without that they would some day come back."]

[Footnote 6155: Fabry, ibid, III., 120. (Abstract of the system of lycees by a pupil who passed many years in two lycees.) Terms for board 900 francs, insufficiency of food and clothing, crowded lectures and dormitories, too many pupils in each class, profits of the principal who lives well, gives one grand dinner a week to thirty persons, deprives the dormitory, already too narrow, of space for a billiard-table, and takes for his own use a terrace planted with fine trees. The censor, the steward, the chaplain, the sub-director do the same, although to a less degree. The masters are likewise as poorly fed as the scholars. The punishments are severe, no paternal remonstrance or guidance, the under-masters maltreated on applying the rules, despised by their superiors and without any influence on their pupils.—"Libertinage, idleness self-interest animated all breasts, there being no tie of friendship uniting either the masters to the scholars nor the pupils amongst themselves."]

[Footnote 6156: Finding myself in charge of a numerous staff of technicians, artisans, operators and workers hired by the United Nations to serve a military mission in Lebanon I was faced with motivating everyone, not only when they would become eligible for promotion, but also during the daily humdrum existence. I one day coined the phrase that "everyone wants to be important" and tried to make them feel so by insisting that all tasks, even the most humble had to be done well. I gave preference to seniority by giving the most senior man the chance to prove himself once a higher post fell vacant. (SR.)]

[Footnote 6157: Hermann Niemeyer, "Beobachtungen," etc., II.,350. "A very worthy man, professor in one of the royal colleges, said to me: 'What backward steps we have been obliged to take! How all the pleasure of teaching, all the love for our art, has been taken away from us by this constraint!'"]

[Footnote 6158: Id., ibid., II.,339.—"Decree of November 15, 1811 art. 17."]

[Footnote 6159: Id., ibid., II.,353.]

[Footnote 6160: Hermann Niemeyer, ibid., 366, and following pages. On the character, advantages and defects of the system, this testimony of an eye-witness is very instructive and forms an almost complete picture. The subjects taught are reduced to Latin and mathematics; there is scarcely any Greek, and none of the modern languages, hardly a tinge of history and the natural sciences, while philology is null; that which a pupil must know of the classics is their "contents and their spirit" (Geist und Inhalt).—Cf. Guizot, "Essai sur l'histoire et l'etat actuel de l'instruction publique," 1816, p.103.]

[Footnote 6161: "Travels in France during the Years 1814 and 1815" (Edinburgh, 1816), vol. I., p. 152.]

[Footnote 6162: "Ambroise Rendu et l'Universite de France," by E. Rendu (1861), pp. 25 and 26. (Letter of the Emperor, Floreal 3, year XIII, and report by Fourcroy.)]

[Footnote 6163: "Recueil," etc., by de Beauchamp, I., 151. (Report to the Corps Legislatif by Fourcroy, May 6, 1806.)]

[Footnote 6164: "Proces-verbaux et papiers" (manuscripts) of the superior council of the University, session of March 12, 1811, note by the Emperor communicated by the Grand-Master: "The Grand-Master will direct that in all boarding-schools and institutions which may come into existence, the pupils shall wear a uniform, and that everything shall go on as in the lycees according to military discipline." In the decree in conformity with this, of Nov. 15, 1811, the word military was omitted, probably because it seemed too crude; but it shows the thought behind it, the veritable desire of Napoleon.—Quicherat," Histoire de Sainte-Barbe," III., 126. The decree was enforced "even in the smallest boarding-schools."]

[Footnote 6165: Testimony of Alfred de Vigny in "Grandeur et Servitude militaires." Same impression of Alfred de Musset in his "Confession d'un enfant du siecle."]

[Footnote 6166: Quicherat, ibid., p.126.]

[Footnote 6167: "The Modern Regime," I. (Laff. I. p. 550.)]

[Footnote 6168: Hermann Niemeyer, ibid., I., 153.]

[Footnote 6169: "Travels in France," etc., II.,123. (Testimony of a French gentleman.) "The rapid destruction of population in France caused constant promotions, and the army became the career which offered the most chances. It was a profession for which no education was necessary and to which all had access. There, Bonaparte never allowed merit to go unrecognized."]

[Footnote 6170: Veron, "Memoires d'un bourgeois de Paris," I., 127 (year 1806).]

[Footnote 6171: Guizot, ibid., pp.59 and 61.—Fabry, "Memoires pour servir a l'histoire de l'instruction publique," III., 102. (On the families of these favorites and on the means made use of to obtain these scholarships.)—Jourdain, "le Budget de l'instruction publique (1857)", p. 144.—In 1809, in the 36 lycees, there are 9,068 pupils, boarding and day scholars, of whom 4,199 are boursiers. In 1811, there are 10,926 pupils, of whom 4,008 are boursiers. In 1813, there are 14,992 pupils, of whom 3,500 are boursiers. At the same epoch, in private establishments, there are 30,000 pupils.]

[Footnote 6172: Fabry, ibid., II.,391 (1819). (On the peopling of the lycees and colleges.) "The first nucleus of the boarders was furnished by the Prytanee.... Tradition has steadily transmitted this spirit to all the pupils that succeeded each other for the first twelve years."— Ibid., III., 112 "The institution of lycees tends to creating a race inimical to repose, eager and ambitious, foreign to the domestic affections and of a military and adventurous spirit."]

[Footnote 6173: Quicherat, ibid., III., 126.]

[Footnote 6174: Hermann Niemeyer, ibid., II.,350.]

[Footnote 6175: Fabry, ibid., III., 109-112.]

[Footnote 6176: Ambroise Rendu, "Essai sur l'instruction publique," (1819), I., 221. (Letter of Napoleon to M. de Fontanes, March 24, 1808.)]

[Footnote 6177: "Memorial," June 17, 1816.]

[Footnote 6178: Pelet de la Lozere, ibid., 154, 157, 159.]

[Footnote 6179: "Memorial," June 17, 1816. "This conception of the University by Napoleon must be taken with another, of more vast proportions, which he sets forth in the same conversation and which clearly shows his complete plan. He desired "the military classing of the nation," that is to say five successive conscriptions, one above the other. The first, that of children and boys by means of the University; the second, that of ordinary conscripts yearly and effected by the drawing by lot; the third, fourth and fifth provided by three standards of national guard, the first one comprising young unmarried men and held to frontier service, the second comprising men of middle age, married and to serve only in the department, and the third comprising aged men to be employed only in the defense of towns—in all, through these three classes, two millions of classified men, enrolled and armed, each with his post assigned him in case of invasion. "In 1810 or 1811 up to fifteen or twenty drafts of this" proposal "was read to the council of State. The Emperor, who laid great stress on it, frequently came back to it." We see the place of the University in his edifice: from ten to sixty years, his universal conscription was to take, first, children, then adults, and, with healthy persons, the semi-invalids, as, for instance, Cambaceres, the arch-chancellor, gross, impotent, and, of all men, the least military. "There is Cambaceres," says Napoleon, "who must be ready to shoulder his gun if danger makes it necessary.... Then you will have a nation sticking together like lime and sand, able to defy time and man." There is constant repugnance to this by the whole Council of State, "marked disfavor, mute and inert opposition.... Each member trembled at seeing himself classed, transported abroad," and, under pretext of internal defense, used for foreign wars. "The Emperor, absorbed with other projects, saw this plan vanish."]



CHAPTER II.



I. Primary Instruction.

Primary instruction.—Additional and special restrictions on the teacher.—Ecclesiastical supervision.—Napoleon's motives.—Limitation of primary instruction.—Ignorant monks preferred.—The imperial catechism.

Such is secondary education, his most personal, most elaborate, most complete work; the other two stories of the educational system, under and over, built in a more summary fashion, are adapted to the middle story and form, the three together, a regular monument, of which the architect has skillfully balanced the proportions, distributed the rooms, calculated the service and designed the facade and scenic effect.

"Napoleon," says a contemporary adversary,[6201] "familiar with power only in its most absolute form, military despotism, tried to partition France in two categories, one composed of the masses, destined to fill the ranks of his vast army, and disposed, through the brutishness which he was willing to maintain; to passive obedience and fanatical devotion; the other, more refined by reason of its wealth, was to lead the former according to the views of the chief who equally dominated both, for which purpose it was to be formed in schools where, trained for a servile and, so to say, mechanical submission, it would acquire relative knowledge, especially in the art of war and with regard to a wholly material administration; after this, vanity and self-interest were to attach it to his person and identify it, in some way with his system of government."

Lighten this gloomy picture one degree and it is true.[6202] As to primary instruction, there was no State appropriation, no credit inscribed on the budget, no aid in money, save 25,000 francs, allotted in 1812, to the novices of the Freres Ignorantins and of which they received but 4,500 francs;[6203] the sole mark of favor accorded to the small schools is an exemption from the dues of the University.[6204] His councillors, with their habits of fiscal logic, proposed to exact this tax here as elsewhere; a shrewd politician, he thinks that its collection would prove odious and he is bound not to let his popularity suffer among villagers and common people; it is 200,000 francs a year which he abstains from taking from them; but here his liberalities in behalf of primary instruction stop. Let parents and the communes take this burden on themselves, pay its expenses, seek out and hire the teacher, and provide for a necessity which is local and almost domestic. The government, which invites them to do this, will simply furnish the plan, that is to say, a set of rules, prescriptions and restrictions.

At first, there is the authorization of the prefect, guardian of the commune, who, having invited the commune to found a school, has himself, through a circular, given instructions to this end, and who now interferes in the contract between the municipal council and the teacher, to approve of or to rectify its clauses—the name of the employee, duration of his engagement, hours and seasons for his classes, subjects to be taught, the sum total and conditions of his pay in money or in kind; the school grant must be paid by the commune, the school tax by the pupils, the petty fees which help pay the teacher's living expenses and which he gets from accessory offices such as mayor's clerk, clock-winder, sexton, bell-ringer and chorister in the church[6205]—At the same time, and in addition, there is the authorization of the rector; for the small as well as the average or larger schools are included in the University;[6206] the new master becomes a member of the teaching body, binds himself and belongs to it by oath, takes upon himself its obligations and submissions, comes under the special jurisdiction of the university authorities, and is inspected, directed and controlled by them in his class and outside of his class.—The last supervision, still more searching and active, which close by, incessantly and on the spot, hovers over all small schools by order and spontaneously, is the ecclesiastical supervision. A circular of the Grand-Master, M. de Fontanes,[6207] requests the bishops to instruct "messieurs les cures of their diocese to send in detailed notes on their parish schoolmasters;" "when these notes are returned," he says, "please address them to me with your remarks on them; according to these indications I will approve of the instructor who merits your suffrage and he will receive the diploma authorizing him to continue in his functions. Whoever fails to present these guarantees will not receive a diploma and I shall take care to replace him with another man whom you may judge to be the most capable."[6208]

If Napoleon thus places his small schools under ecclesiastical oversight, it is not merely to conciliate the clergy by giving it the lead of the majority of souls, all the uncultivated souls, but because, for his own interests, he does not want the mass of the people to think and reason too much for themselves.

"The Academy inspectors,"[6209] says the decree of 1811, "will see that the masters of the primary schools do not carry their teaching beyond reading, writing and arithmetic."

Beyond this limit, should the instructor teach a few of the children the first elements of Latin or geometry, geography or history, his school becomes secondary; it is then ranked as a boarding-school, while its pupils are subjected to the university recompense, military drill, uniform, and all the above specified exigencies; and yet more—it must no longer exist and is officially closed. A peasant who reads, writes and ciphers and who remains a peasant need know no more, and, to be a good soldier, he need not know as much; moreover, that is enough, and more too, to enable him to become an under and even a superior officer. Take, for instance, Captain Coignet, whose memoirs we have, who, to be appointed a second-lieutenant, had to learn to write and who could never write other than a large hand, like young beginners.—The best masters for such limited instruction are the Brethren of the Christian Schools and these, against the advice of his counselors, Napoleon supports:

"If they are obliged," he says, by their vows to refrain from other knowledge than reading, writing and the elements of arithmetic,... it is that they may be better adapted to their destiny."[6210] "In comprising them in the University, they become connected with the civil order of things and the danger of their independence is anticipated."

Henceforth, "they no longer have a stranger or a foreigner for their chief." "The superior-general at Rome has renounced all inspection over them; it is understood that in France their superior-general will reside at Lyons."[6211] The latter, with his monks, fall into the hands of the government and come under the authority of the Grand-Master. Such a corporation, with the head of it in one's power, is a perfect instrument, the surest, the most exact, always to be relied on and which never acts on one side of, or beyond, the limits marked out for it. Nothing pleases Napoleon more, who,

* in the civil order of things, wants to be Pope;

* who builds up his State, as the Pope his Church, on old Roman tradition;

* who, to govern from above, allies himself with ecclesiastical authority;

* who, like Catholic authorities, requires drilled executants and regimental maneuvers, only to be found in organized and special bodies of men.[6212]

The general inspectors of the University give to each rector the following instructions as a watchword "Wherever the Brethren of the Christian Schools can be found, they shall," for primary teaching, "be preferred to all others."[6213] Thus, to the three classes of subjects taught, a fourth must be added, one not mentioned by the legislator in his law, but which Napoleon admits, which the rectors and prefects recommend or authorize, and which is always inscribed in the contract made between the commune and the instructor. The latter, whether layman or 'frere ignorantin,' engages to teach, besides "reading, writing and decimal arithmetic," "the catechism adopted by the Empire." Consequently, as the first communion (of the pupil) draws near, he is careful, for at least two years, to have his scholars learn the consecrated text by heart, and to recite this text aloud on their benches, article by article; in this way, his school becomes a branch of the Church and, hence, like the Church, a reigning instrumentality. For, in the catechism adopted for the Empire, there is one phrase carefully thought out, full and precise in its meaning, in which Napoleon has concentrated the quintessence of his political and social doctrine and formulated the imperative belief assigned by him as the object of education. The seven or eight hundred thousand children of the lower schools recite this potent phrase to the teacher before reciting it to the priest:

"We especially owe to Napoleon I., our Emperor, love, respect, obedience, fidelity, military service, and the dues (tributs) prescribed for the preservation and defense of the Empire and the throne.... For it is he whom God has raised up in times of difficulty, to restore public worship and the holy religion of our forefathers, and to be its protector."[6214]



II. Higher Education.

Superior instruction.—Characters and conditions of scientific universities.—Motives for opposition to them. —In what respect adverse to the French system.—How he replaces them.—Extent of secondary instruction.—Meets all wants in the new social order of things.—The careers it leads to.—Special schools.—Napoleon requires them professional and practical.—The law school.

Superior instruction, the most important of all, remains. For, in this third and last stage of education, the minds and opinions of young people from eighteen to twenty-four years of age are fully formed. It is then that, already free and nearly ripe, these future occupants of busy careers, just entering into practical life, shape their first general ideas, their still hazy and half-poetic views of things, their premature and foregone conclusions respecting man, nature, society and the great interests of humanity.

If we want them to arrive at sound conclusions, a good many scales must be prepared for them, and these scales must be substantial, convergent, each with its own rungs of the ladder superposed, each with an indication of its total scope, each expressly designating the absent, doubtful, provisional or simply future and possible rungs, because they are in course of formation or on trial.[6215]—Consequently, these must all be got together in a designated place, in adjacent buildings, not alone the body of professors, the spokes-men of science, but collections, laboratories and libraries which constitute the instruments. Moreover, besides ordinary and regular courses of lectures, there must be lecture halls where, at appointed hours, every enterprising, knowledgeable person with something to say may speak to those who would like to listen. Thus, a sort of oral encyclopedia is organized, an universal exposition of human knowledge, a permanent exposition constantly renewed and open, to which its visitors, provided with a certificate of average instruction as an entrance ticket, will see with their own eyes, besides established science that which is under of formation, besides discoveries and proofs the way of discovering and proving, namely the method, history and general progress, the place of each science in its group, and of this group its place in the general whole. Owing to the extreme diversity of subjects taught there will be room and occupation for the extreme diversity of intelligences. Young minds can choose for themselves their own career, mount as high as their strength allows, climb up the tree of knowledge each on his own side, with his own ladder, in his own way, now passing from the branches to the trunk and again from the trunk to the branches, now from a remote bough to the principal branch and from that again back to the trunk.

And more than this, thanks to the co-ordination of lessons well classified, there is, for each course of lectures, the means for arriving at full details in all particulars; the young students can talk amongst themselves and learn from each other, the student of moral science from the student of the natural sciences, the latter from the student of the chemical or physical sciences, and another from the student of the mathematical sciences. Bearing still better fruit, the student, in each of these four circumscriptions, derives information from his co-disciples lodged right and left in the nearest compartments, the jurist from the historian, from the economist, from the philologist, and reciprocally, in such a way as to profit by their impressions and suggestions, and enable them to profit by his. He must have no other object in view for three years, no rank to obtain, no examination to undergo, no competition for which to make preparations, no outward pressure, no collateral preoccupation, no positive, urgent and personal interest to interfere with, turn aside or stifle pure curiosity. He pays something out of his own pocket for each course of lectures he attends; for this reason, he makes the best choice he can, follows it up to the end, takes notes, and comes there, not to seek phrases and distraction, but actualities and instruction, and get full value for his money. It is assumed that knowledge is an object of exchange, foodstuffs stockpiled and delivered by the masters; the student who takes delivery is concerned that it is of superior quality, genuine and nutritious; the masters, undoubtedly, through amour-propre and conscience, try to furnish it this; but it is up to the student himself to fetch it, just what he wants, in this particular storehouse rather than in others, from this or that lecture-stand, official or not. To impart and to acquire knowledge for itself and for it alone, without subordinating this end to another distinct and predominant end, to direct minds towards this object and in this way, under the promptings and restraints of supply and demand, to open up the largest field and the freest career to the faculties, to labor, to the preferences of the thinking individual, master or disciple,—such is (or ought to be) the spirit of the institution. And, evidently, in order that it may be effective according to this spirit, it needs an independent, appropriate body, that is to say, autonomous, sheltered against the interference of the State, of the Church, of the commune, of the province, and of all general or local powers, provided with rules and regulations, made a legal, civil personage, with the right to buy, sell and contract obligations, in short proprietorship.

This is no chimerical plan, the work of a speculative, calculating imagination, which appears well and remains on paper. All the universities of the middle ages were organized according to this type. It found life and activity everywhere and for a long time; the twenty- two universities in France previous to the Revolution, although disfigured, stunted and desiccated, preserved many of its features, certain visible externals, and, in 1811,[6216] Cuvier, who had just inspected the universities of lower Germany, describes it as he found it, on the spot, confined to superior instruction, but finished and complete, adapted to modern requirements, in full vigor and in full bloom.

There is no room in the France to which Cuvier returns for institutions of this stamp; they are excluded from it by the social system which has prevailed.—First of all, public law, as the Revolution and Napoleon comprehended it and enacted it, is hostile to them;[6217] for it sets up the principle that in a State there must be no special corporations permanent, under their own control, supported by mort main property, acting in their own right and conducting a public service for their own benefit, especially if this service is that of teaching; for the State has taken this charge upon itself, reserved it for itself and assumed the monopoly of it; hence, the unique and comprehensive university founded by it, and which excludes free, local and numerous universities. Thus, in its essence, it is the self-teaching State and not self-teaching science; thus defined, the two types are contradictory; not only are the two bodies different, but again the two spirits are incompatible; each has an aim of its own, which is not the aim of the other. In a special sense, the use to which the Emperor assigns his university is contrary to the aim of the German universities; it is founded for his own advantage, that he may possess "the means for shaping moral and political opinions." With this object in view it would be wrong for him to allow several establishments within reach of students in which they would be directed by science alone; it is certain that, in many points, the direction here given to youth would poorly square with the rigid, uniform, narrow lines in which Napoleon wishes to confine them. Schools of this kind would get to be centers of opposition; young men thus fashioned would become dissenters; they would gladly hold personal, independent opinions alongside, or outside, of "the national doctrine," outside of Napoleonic and civil orthodoxy; and worse still, they would believe in their opinions. Having studied seriously and at first sources, the jurist, the theologian, the philosopher, the historian, the philologist, the economist might perhaps cherish the dangerous pretension of considering himself competent even in social matters; being a Frenchman, he would talk with assurance and indiscretion; he would be much more troublesome than a German; it would soon be necessary to send him to Bicetre or to the Temple.[6218]—In the present state of things, with the exigencies of the reign, and even in the interests of the young themselves, it is essential that superior instruction should be neither encyclopedic nor very profound.

Were this a defect, Frenchmen would not perceive it; they are accustomed to it. Already, before 1789, the classes in the humanities were generally completed by the lesson in philosophy. In this course logic, morals and metaphysics were taught. Here the young persons handled, adjusted, and knocked about more or less adroitly the formula on God, nature, the soul and science they had learned by rote. Less scholastic, abridged, and made easy, this verbal exercise has been maintained in the lycees.[6219] Under the new regime, as well as under the old one, a string of abstract terms, which the professor thought he could explain and which the pupil thought he understood, involves young minds in a maze of high, speculative conceptions, beyond their reach and far beyond their experience, education and years. Because pupils play with words, they suppose that they grasp and master ideas, which fancy deprives them of any desire to obtain them. Consequently, in the great French establishment, young people hardly remark the lack of veritable Universities; a liberal, broad spirit of inquiry is not aroused in them; they do not regret their inability to have covered the cycle of varied research and critical investigation, the long and painful road which alone surely leads to profound general conceptions, those grand ideas which are verifiable and solidly based.—And, on the other hand, their quick, summary mode of preparation suffices for the positive and appreciable needs of the new society. The problem is to fill the gaps made in it by the Revolution and to provide the annual and indispensable quota of educated youth. Now, after as before the Revolution, this is understood as being all who have passed through the entire series of classes; under the system, subject to the drill in Latin and mathematics. The young men have here acquired the habit of using clear, connected ideas, a taste for close reasoning, the art of condensing a phrase or a paragraph, an aptitude for attending to the daily business of a worldly, civil life, especially the faculty of carrying on a discussion, of writing a good letter, even the talent for composing a good report or memorial.[6220] A young man with these skills, some scraps of natural philosophy, and with still briefer notions of geography and history, has all the general, preliminary culture he needs, all the information he requires for aspiring to one of the careers called liberal. The choice rests with himself; he will be what he wants to be, or what he is able to be—professor, engineer, physician, member of the bar, an administrator or a functionary. In each of his qualifications he renders an important service to the public, he exercises an honorable profession; let him be competent and expert, that concerns society. But that alone is all that society cares about; it is not essential that it should find in him additionally an erudite or a philosopher.

* Let him be competent and worthy of confidence in his particular profession,

* let him know how to teach classes or frame a course of lectures, how to build a bridge, a bastion, an edifice, how to cure a disease, perform an amputation, draw up a contract, manage a case in court, and give judgment;

* let the State, for greater public convenience, organize, check, and certify this special capacity,

* let it verify this by examinations and diploma,

* let it make of this a sort of coin of current value, duly minted and of proper standard;

* let this be protected against counterfeits, not only by its preferences but again by its prohibitions, by the penalties it enacts against the illegal practice of pharmacy and of medicine, by the obligations it imposes on magistrates, lawyers and ministerial officials not to act until obtaining this or that grade,—

such is what the interest of society demands and what it may exact. According to this principle, the State creates special schools, (today in 1998 called Grande Ecoles[6221]), and, through the indirect monopoly which it possesses, it fills them with listeners; henceforth, these are to furnish the youth of France with superior education.[6222]

From the start, Napoleon, as logician, with his usual lucidity and precision, lays it down that they shall be strictly practical and professional. "Make professors (regents) for me," said he one day in connection with the Ecole normale, "and not litterateurs, wits or seekers or inventors in any branch of knowledge." In like manner says he again,[6223]

"I do not approve of the regulation requiring a man to be bachelor (bachelier) in the sciences before he can be a bachelor in the medical faculty; medicine is not an exact and positive science, but a science of guess and observation. I should place more confidence in a doctor who had not studied the exact sciences than in one who possessed them. I preferred M. Corvisart to M. Halle, because M. Halle belongs to the Institute. M. Corvisart does not even know what two equal triangles are. The medical student should not be diverted from hospital practice, from dissections and studies relating to his trade."

There is the same subordination of science to the professions, the same concern for immediate or near application, the same utilitarian tendency to aim at a public function or a private career, the same contraction of studies in the law school, in that order of truths of which Montesquieu, a Frenchman, fifty years before, had first seized the entire body, marked the connections and delineated the chart. At issue are the laws and the "spirit of laws," unwritten or written, by which diverse human societies live, of whatever form, extent and kind,—the State, commune, Church, school, army, agricultural or industrial workshop, tribe or family. These, existing or fossilized, are realities, open to observation like plants or animals. One may, the same as with animals and plants, observe them, describe them, compare them together, follow their history from first to last, study their organization, classify them in natural groups, disengage the distinctive and dominant characteristics in each, note its ambient surroundings and ascertain the internal or external conditions, or "necessary relationships," which determine its failure or its bloom. For men who live together in society and in a State, no study is so important; it alone can furnish them with a clear, demonstrable idea of what society and the State are; and it is in the law schools that this capital idea must be sought by an educated student body. If they do not find it there, they invent one to suit themselves. As 1789 drew near, the antiquated, poor, barren, teaching of law, fallen into contempt and almost null,[6224] offered no sound, accredited doctrine which could impose itself on young minds, fill their empty minds and prevent the intrusion of utopic dreams. And intrude it did: in the shape of Rousseau's anti-social Utopia, in his anarchical and despotic Social Contract. To hinder it from returning, the best thing to do was not to repeat the same mistake, not to leave the lodging empty, to install in it a fixed occupant beforehand, and to see that this fixed occupant, which is science, may at all times represent its title of legitimate proprietor, its method analogous to that of the natural sciences, its studies of detail from life and in the texts, its restricted inductions, its concordant verifications, its progressive discoveries. This in order that, confronting every chance system and without these titles, minds may of themselves shut their doors, or only open them provisionally, and always with a care to make the intruder present his letters of credit: here we have the social service rendered by the instruction in Law as given in the German mode, as Cuvier had just described it. Before 1789, in the University of Strasbourg, in France, it was thus given; but, in this condition and to this extent, it is not suitable under the new regime, and still less than under the old one.

Napoleon, in his preparation of jurists, wants executants and not critics; his faculties must furnish him with men able to apply and not to give opinions on his laws. Hence, in the teaching of the law, as he prescribes it, there must be nothing of history, of political economy or of comparative law; there must be no exposition of foreign legislation, of feudal or custom law, or of canon law; no account of the transformations which governed public and private law in Rome down to the Digest[6225] and, after that, in France, down to the recent codes. But nothing on remote origins, on successive forms and the diverse and ever-changing conditions of labor, property and the family; nothing which, through the law, exposes to view and brings us in contact with the social body to which it is applied. That is to say, this or that active and human group, with its habits, prejudices, instincts, dangers and necessities; nothing but two dry, rigid codes, like two aerolites fallen from the sky ready-made and all of a piece at an interval of fourteen centuries. At first, the Institutes,[6226] "by cutting out[6227] what is not applicable to our legislation and replacing these matters by a comparison with much finer laws scattered through other books of Roman law," similar to the classes in the humanities, where Latin literature is reduced to the finest passages of the classic authors. Next, the French code, with the comments on it due to the decisions of the court of appeals and the court of cassation.[6228] All the courses of lectures of the school shall be obligatory and arranged as a whole, or tacked on to each other in a compulsory order; each step the student takes shall be counted, measured and verified every three months by a certificate, and each year by an examination; at these examinations there shall be no optional matters, no estimate of collateral studies or those of complimentary or superior importance. The student finds no attraction or benefit in studies outside of the programme, and, in this programme he finds only official texts, explained by the bill of fare, one by one, with subtlety, and patched together as well as may be by means of distinctions and interpretations, so as to provide the understood solution in ordinary cases and a plausible solution in disputed cases, in other terms, a system of casuistry.[6229]

And this is just the education which suits the future practitioner. As a celebrated professor of the second Empire says,[6230] "our young graduates need a system of instruction which enables them to pass without perplexity or discouragement from the school to the halls of justice;" to have the 2281 articles of the civil code at their fingers' ends, also the rest, hundreds and thousands of them, of the other four codes; to find at once in relation to each case the set of pertinent articles, the general rule, neither too broad nor too narrow, which fits the particular case in question. As for law taken in itself and as a whole, they have none of that clear, full conception of it to which a comprehensive and curious mind aspires. "I know nothing of the civil code," said another professor, older and in closer proximity with the primitive institution, "I teach only the Code Napoleon." Accordingly, with his clear-sightedness and his practical and graphic imagination, Napoleon could perceive in advance the future and certain products of his machine, the magistrates in their bonnets, seated or standing in their court-rooms, with the lawyers in their robes facing them pleading, and, farther on, the great consumers of stamped papers in their bureaus encumbered with files of documents with the attorneys and notaries engaged in drawing them up; elsewhere, prefects, sub-prefects, prefect councilors, government commissioners and other officials, all at work and doing pretty well, all of them useful organs but mere organs of the law. The chances were small, fewer than under the ancient regime, for an erudite and independent thinker, a Montesquieu, to issue from that school.



III. On Science, Reason and Truth.

Crowning point of the university edifice.—Faith based on criticism.—How it binds men together and forms a lay Church.—Social power of this Church.—Scientific and literary authorities.—How Napoleon enrolls them.—The Institute, an appendage of the State.

Everywhere else, the direction and reach of superior instruction are similar. In the Faculties of Science and Literature, much more than in the Faculties of Medicine and of Law, the principal employment of the professors is the awarding of grades.—They likewise confer the titles of bachelor, licentiate and doctor; but the future bachelor is not prepared by them; the lycee furnishes him for the examination, fresh from its benches; they have then no audience but future licentiates, that is to say a few schoolmasters and a licentiate at long intervals who wants to become a doctor in order to mount upward into the university hierarchy. Besides these, occasional amateurs, nearly all of ripe age, who wish to freshen their classic souvenirs, and idlers who want to kill time, fill the lecture-room. To prevent empty benches the lecture course becomes a conference d'Athenee, which is pleasant enough or sufficiently general to interest or, at least, not to repel people of society.[6231] Two establishments remain for teaching true science to the workers who wish to acquire it; who, in the widespread wreck of the ancient regime have alone survived in the Museum of Natural History, with its thirteen chairs, and the College of France, with nineteen. But here, too, the audience is sparse, mixed, disunited and unsatisfactory; the lectures being public and free, everybody enters the room and leaves as he pleases during the lecture. Many of the attendants are idlers who seek distraction in the tone and gestures of the professors, or birds of passage who come there to warm themselves in winter and to sleep in summer. Nevertheless, two or three foreigners and half a dozen Frenchmen thoroughly learn Arabic or zoology from Silvestre de Sacy, Cuvier or Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. That answers the purpose; they are quite enough, and, elsewhere too in the other branches of knowledge. All that is required is a small elite of special and eminent men—about one hundred and fifty in France in the various sciences,[6232] and, behind them, provisionally, two or three hundred others, their possible successors, competent and designated beforehand by their works and celebrity to fill the gaps made by death in the titular staff as these occur. The latter, representatives of science and of literature, provide the indispensable adornment of the modern State. But, in addition to this, they are the depositaries of a new force, which more and more becomes the principal guide, the influential regulator and even the innermost motor of human action. Now, in a centralized State, no important force must be left to itself; Napoleon is not a man to tolerate the independence of this one, allowing it to act apart and outside of limitations; he knows how to utilize it and turn it to his own advantage. He has already grasped another force of the same order but more ancient, and, in the same way, and with equal skill, he also takes hold of the new one.

In effect, alongside of religious authority, based on divine revelation and belonging to the clergy, there is now a lay authority founded on human reason, which is exercised by scientists, erudites, scholars and philosophers. They too, in their way, form a clergy, since they frame creeds and teach a faith; only, their preparatory and dominant disposition is not trust and a docile mind, but distrust and the need of critical examination. With them, nearly every source of belief is suspicious. At bottom, among the ways of acquiring knowledge, they accept but two, the most direct, the simplest, the best tested, and again on condition that one proves the other, the type of the first being that process of reasoning by which we show that two and two make four, and the second that experience by which we demonstrate that heat above a certain degree melts ice, and that cold below a certain degree freezes water. This is the sole process that is convincing; all others, less and less sure in proportion as they diverge from it, possess only a secondary, provisional and contestable value, that which it confers on them after verification and check.—Let us accordingly avail ourselves of this one, and not of another, to express, restrain or suspend our judgment. So long as the intellect uses it and only it, or its analogues, to affirm, set aside or doubt, it is called reason, and the truths thus obtained are definitive acquisitions. Acquired one by one, the truths thus obtained have for a long time remained scattered, in the shape of fragments; only isolated sciences have existed or bits of science. About the middle of the eighteenth century these separate parts became united and have formed one body, a coherent system. Out of this, formerly called philosophy, that is to say a view of nature as a whole, consisting of perfect order on lasting foundations, a sort of universal network which, suddenly enlarged, stretches beyond the physical world to the moral world, taking in man and men, their faculties and their passions, their individual and their collective works, various human societies, their history, customs and institutions, their codes and governments, their religions, languages, literatures and fine arts, their agriculture, industries, property, the family and the rest.[6233] Then also, in each natural whole the simultaneous or successive parts are connected together; a knowledge of their mutual ties is important, and, in the spiritual order of things, one accomplishes this, as in the material order, through scientific distrust, through critical examination, by credible experimentation and process.[6234]

Undoubtedly, in 1789, the work in common on this ground had resulted only in false conceptions; but this is because instead of credible processes another hasty, plausible, popular, risky and deceptive method was applied. People wanted to go fast, conveniently, directly, and, for guide, accepted unreason under the name of reason. Now, in the light of disastrous experience, there was a return to the narrow, stony, long and painful road which alone leads, both, in speculation, to truth and, in practice, to salvation.—Besides, this second conclusion, like the first one, was due to recent experience. Henceforth it was evident that, in political and social matters, ideas quickly descend from speculation to practice. When anybody talks to me about stones, plants, animals and the stars I must, to listen, be interested in these; if anybody talks to me about man and society, it suffices that I am a man and a member of that society; for then it concerns myself, my nearest, daily, most sensitive and dearest interests; by virtue of being a tax-payer and a subject, a citizen and an elector, a property-owner or a proletarian, a consumer or a producer, a free-thinker or a Catholic, a father, son or husband, the doctrine is addressed to me; to affect me it has only to be within reach, through interpreters and others that promulgate it.—This office appertains to writers great or small, particularly to the educated who possess wit, imagination or eloquence, a pleasing style, the art of finding readers or of making themselves understood. Owing to their interposition, a doctrine wrought out by the specialist or thinker in his study, spreads around through the novel, the theatre and the lecture-room, by pamphlets, the newspaper, dictionaries, manuals and conversation, and, finally, by teaching itself. It thus enters all houses, knocks at the door of each intellect, and, according as it works its way more or less forcibly, contributes more or less effectively to make or unmake the ideas and sentiments that adapt it to the social order of things in which it is comprised.

In this respect it acts like positive religions; in its way and on many accounts, it is one of them. In the first place, like religion, it is a living, principal, inexhaustible fountain-head, a high central reservoir of active and directing belief. If the public reservoir is not filled by an intermittent flow, by sudden freshets, by obscure infiltrations of the mystic faculty, it is regularly and openly fed by the constant contributions of the normal faculties. On the other hand, confronting faith, by the side of that beneficent divination which, answering the demands of conscience and the emotions, fashions the ideal world and makes the real world conform to this, it poses the testing process which, analyzing the past and the present, disengages possible laws and the probabilities of the future. Doctrine likewise has its dogmas, many definitive and others in the way of becoming so, and hence a full and complete conception of things, vast enough and clear enough, in spite of what it lacks, to take in at once nature and humanity. It, too, gathers its faithful in a great church, believers and semi believers, who, consequently or inconsequently, accept its authority in whole or in part, listen to its preachers, revere its doctors, and deferentially await the decisions of its councils. Wide-spread, still uncertain and lax under a wavering hierarchy, the new Church, for a hundred years past, is steadily in the way of consolidation, of progressive ascendancy and of indefinite extension. Its conquests are constantly increasing; sooner or later, it will be the first of social powers. Even for the chief of an army, even for the head of a State, even to Napoleon, it is well to become one of its great dignitaries; the second title, in modern society, adds a prestige to the first one: "Salary of His Majesty the Emperor and King as member of the Institute, 1500 francs;" thus begins his civil list, in the enumeration of receipts. Already in Egypt, intentionally and for effect, he heads his proclamations with "Bonaparte, commander-in chief, member of the Institute." "I am sure," he says, "that the lowest drummer will comprehend it!"

Such a body, enjoying such credit, cannot remain independent. Napoleon is not content to be one of its members. He wants to hold it in his grasp, have it at his own disposition, and use it the same as a member or, at least, contrive to get effective control of it. He has reserved to himself an equally powerful one in the old Catholic Church; he has reserved to himself like equivalents in the young lay Church; and, in both cases, he limits them, and subjects them to all the restrictions which a living body can support. In relation to science and religion he might repeat word for word his utterances in relation to religion and to faith. "Napoleon has no desire to change the belief of his populations; he respects spiritual matters; he wishes simply to dominate them without touching them, without meddling with them; all he desires is to make them square with his views, with his policy, but through the influence of temporalities." To this end, he negotiated with the Pope, reconstructed, as he wanted it, the Church of France, appointed bishops, restrained and directed the canonical authorities. To this end, he settles matters with the literary and scientific authorities, gets them together in a large hall, gives them arm-chairs to sit in, gives by-laws to their groups, a purpose and a rank in the State, in brief, he adopts, remakes, and completes the "National Institute" of France.[6235]



IV. Napoleon's stranglehold on science.

Hold of the government on the members of the Institute.—How he curbs and keeps them down.—Circle in which lay power may act.—Favor and freedom of the mathematical, physical and natural sciences.—Disfavor and restrictions on the moral sciences.—Suppression of the class of moral and political sciences.—They belong to the State, included in the imperial domain of the Emperor.—Measures against Ideology, philosophic or historic study of Law, Political Economy and Statistics.—Monopoly of History.

This "National Institute," is the Government's tool and an appendage of the State. This is in conformity with the traditions of the old monarchy and with the plans, sketched out and decreed by the revolutionary assemblies,[6236] in conformity with the immemorial principle of French law which enlarges the interference of the central power, not only in relation to public instruction but to science, literature and the fine arts. It is the State which has produced and shaped it, which has given to it its title, which assigns it its object, its location, its subdivisions, its dependencies, its correspondences, its mode of recruitment, which prescribes its labors, its reports, its quarterly and annual sessions, which gives it employment and defrays its expenses. Its members receive a salary, and "the subjects elected[6237] must be confirmed by the First Consul." Moreover, Napoleon has only to utter a word to insure votes for the candidate whom he approves of, or to blackball the candidate whom he dislikes. Even when confirmed by the head of the State, an election can be cancelled by his successor; in 1816,[6238] Monge, Carnot, Guyton de Morveau, Gregoire, Garat, David and others, sanctioned by long possession and by recognized merit, are to be stricken off the list. By the same sovereign right, the State admits and excludes them, the right of the creator over his creation, and, without pushing his right as far as that, Napoleon uses it.

He holds the members of his Institute in check with singular rigidity, even when, outside of the Institute and as private individuals, they fail to observe in their writings the proper rules imposed on every public body. The rod falls heavily on Jerome de Lalande, the mathematician and astronomer who continues the work of Montucla, publicly and in a humiliating way, the blow being given by his colleagues who are thus delegated for the purpose. "A member of the Institute," says the imperial note,[6239] "well known for his attainments, but now fallen into an infantile state, is not wise enough to keep his mouth shut, and tries to have himself talked about, at one time by advertisements unworthy of his old reputation as well as of the body to which he belongs, and again by openly professing atheism, the great enemy of all social organization." Consequently, the presidents and secretaries of the Institute, summoned by the minister, notify the Institute "that it must send to M. de Lalande and enjoin him not to print anything, not cast a shadow in his old age over what he has done in his vigorous days to obtain the esteem of savants." M. de Chateaubriand, in the draft for his admission address, alluding to the revolutionary role of his predecessor, Marie Chenier, observed that he could eulogize him only as the man of letters,[6240] and, in the reception committee, six out of twelve academicians had accepted the draft. Thereupon, Fontanes, one of the twelve, prudently abstains from going to Saint-Cloud. M. de Segur, however, president of the committee, he goes. In the evening, at the coucher, Napoleon advances to him before the whole court and, in that terrifying tone of voice which, even today, vibrates from the dead lines of the silent page,

"Sir," says he to him, "do the literary people really desire to set France ablaze?... How dare the Academy speak of regicides?... I ought to put you and M. de Fontanes, as Councillor of State and Grand-Master, in Vincennes.... You preside over the second division of the Institute. I order you to inform it that I will not allow politics at its sessions.... If the class disobeys I will put an end to it as an objectionable club!"

Thus warned, the members of the Institute remain within the circle traced out for them and, for many, the circle is sufficiently large. Let the first division of the Institute, in the mathematical, physical and natural sciences, Lagrange, Laplace, Legendre, Carnot, Biot, Monge, Cassini, Lalande, Burckardt and Arago, Poisson, Berthollet, Gay-Lussac, Guyton de Morveau, Vauquelin, Thenard and Hauey, Duhamel, Lamarck, Jussieu, Mirbel, Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier, pursue their researches; let Delambre and Cuvier, in their quarterly reports, sum up and announce discoveries; let, in the second division of the Institute, Volney, Destutt de Tracy, Andrieux, Picard, Lemercier and Chateaubriand, if the latter desires to take part in its sittings, give dissertations on language, grammar, rhetoric, rules of style and of taste; let, in the third division of the Institute, Sylvestre de Sacy publish his Arabic grammar; let Langles continue his Persian, Indian and Tartar studies; let Quatremere de Quincy, explaining the structure of the great chryselephantine statues, reproduce conjecturally the surface of ivory and the internal framework of the Olympian Jupiter; let D'Ansse de Villoison discover in Venice the commentary of the Alexandrian critics on Homer; let Larcher, Boissonade, Clavier, alongside of Coray publish their editions of the old Greek authors—all this causes no trouble, and all is for the honor of the government. Their credit reflects on the avowed promoter, the official patron and responsible director of science, erudition and talent therefore, in his own interest, he favors and rewards them. Laurent de Jussieu and Cuvier are titular councillors of the University, Delambre is its treasurer, and Fontanes its Grand-Master. Delille, Boissonade and Royer-Collard and Guizot teach in the faculty of letters; Biot, Poisson, Gay-Lussac, Hauey, Thenard, Brongniart, Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire in the faculty of the sciences; Monge, Berthollet, Fourier, Andrieux in the Ecole Polytechnique; Pinel, Vauquelin, Jussieu, Richerand, Dupuytren in the Ecole de Medecine. Fourcroy is councillor of State, Laplace and Chaptal, after having been ministers, become senators; in 1813, there are twenty-three members of the Institute in the Senate; the zoologist Lacepede is grand-chancellor of the Legion of Honor; while fifty-six members of the Institute, decorated with an imperial title, are chevaliers, barons, dukes, and even princes.[6241]—This is even one more lien, admirably serving to bind them to the government more firmly and to in-corporate them more and more in the system. In effect, they now derive their importance and their living from the system and the government; having become dignitaries and functionaries they possess a password in this twofold capacity; henceforth, they will do well to look upward to the master before expressing a thought and to know how far the password allows them to think.