5359 (return)[ Th.-W. Allies, "Journal," etc., p.240 (Aug. 2, 1848, conversation with Abbé Petitot):" In 1830, the priests were obliged for two years to abandon wearing their costume in the street, and only recovered their popularity by their devotion to the sick at the time of the cholera."—In 1848, they had won back respect and sympathy; "the people came and begged them to bless their liberty-poles."—Abbé Petitot adds: "The church gains ground every day, but rather among the upper than the lower classes."]
5360 (return)[ Émile Keller, "Les Congrégations," etc., p.362 (with the figures in relation to Schools).—"Débats" of April 27, 1890 (with the figures in relation to hospitals. Deaths increased in the eighteen secularized hospitals at the rate of four per cent).]
5361 (return)[ Fournier de Flaix, "Journal de la Société de Statistique," number for Sep. 1890, p.260. (According to registers kept in the archiepiscopal archives in Paris)—"Compte-rendu des operations du Conseil d'administration des pompes funèbres à Paris" (1889): funerals wholly civil in 1882, 19.33 per cent; in 1888, 19.04 per cent; in 1889, 18.63 per cent.—"Atlas de statistique municipale." ("Débats" of July 10, 1890:) The poorer the arrondissement, the greater the number of civil funerals; Ménilmontant wins hands down, one third of the funerals here being civil.]
5362 (return)[ Abbé Joseph Roux (curé at first of Saint-Silvain, near Tulle, and then in a small town of Corrèze), "Pensées," p. 132 (1886): "There is always something of the pagan in the peasant. He is original sin in all its brutish simplicity."—"The peasant passed from paganism to Christianity mostly through miracles; he would go back at less cost from Christianity to paganism.... It is only lately that a monster exists, the impious peasant.... The rustic, in spite of school-teachers, even in spite of the curés, believes in sorcerers and in sorcery the same as the Gauls and Romans."—Therefore the means employed against him are wholly external. ("Vie de Mgr. Dupanloup," by Abbé Lagrange, pastoral notes of Mgr. Dupanloup, I., 64.) "What has proved of most use to you in behalf of religion in your diocese during the last fifteen years? Is it through this—is it through that? No, it is through medals and crosses. Whatever is given to these good people affords them pleasure; they like to have presents of Our Lord and the Blessed Virgin. These objects, with them, stand for religion. A father who comes with his child in his arms to receive the medal will not die without confessing himself."—The reader will find on the clergy and peasantry in the south of France details and pictures taken from life in the novels of Ferdinand Fabre ("L'abbé Tigrane," "les Courbezons," "Lucifer,," "Barnabé," "Mon Oncle Célestin," "Xavière," "Ma Vocation").]
Public instruction and its three effects.—Influences of themaster, of the pupils on each other, and of discipline.—Case in which all three tend towards producing a particulartype of man.
AT fixed intervals a man, in a room, gathers around him children, youths, a group of young people, ten, twenty, thirty or more; he talks to them for one or two hours and they listen to him. They sit alongside of each other, look in each other's faces, touch each other's elbows, feel that they are class-mates, of the same age and occupied with the same tasks. They form a society and in two ways, one with another and all with the master. Hence they live under a statute: every society has one of its own, spontaneous or imposed on it; as soon as men, little or big, come together in any number, in a drawing-room, in a café, in the street, they find themselves subject to a local charter, a sort of code which prescribes to them, or interdicts a certain sort of conduct. And so with the school: positive rules along with many tacit rules are here observed and these form a mould which stamps on minds and souls a lasting imprint. Whatever a public lesson may be, whatever its object, secular or ecclesiastic, whether its subject-matter is religious or scientific, from the bottom to the top of the scale, from the primary school and the catechism up to the great seminary, in upper schools and in the faculties, we find in abridgment the academic institution. Of all social engines, it is probably the most powerful and the most efficient; for it exercises three kinds of influence on the young lives it enfolds and directs, one through the teacher, another through the fellow students and the last through rules and regulations.
On the one hand, the master, considered a scholar, teaches with authority and the pupils, who feel that they are ignorant, learn with confidence.—On the other hand, outside of his family and the domestic circle, the student finds in his group of comrades a new, different and complete world which has its own ways and customs, its own sense of honor and its own vices, its own view of things (esprit de corps), in which independent and spontaneous judgments arise, precocious and haphazard presentiments, expressions of opinion on all things human and divine. It is in this environment that he begins to think for himself, in contact with others like himself and his equals, in contact with their ideas, much more intelligible and acceptable to him than those of mature men, and therefore much more persuasive, contagious and exciting; these form for him the ambient, penetrating atmosphere in which his thought arises, grows and shapes itself; he here adopts his way of looking at the great society of adults of which he is soon to become a member, his first notions of justice and injustice, and hence an anticipated attitude of respect or of rebellion, in short, a prejudice which, according as the spirit of the group is reasonable or unreasonable, is either sound or unsound, social or antisocial.—Finally, the discipline of the school has its effect. Whatever its rules and regulations may be, whether liberal or despotic, lax or strict, monastic, military or worldly, whether a boarding or a day school, mixed or exclusive, in town or in country, with predominance of gymnastic training or intellectual efforts, with the mind given to the study of things or to the study of words, the pupil enters into a ready-made setting. According to the diversities of this setting or framework he practices different exercises; he contracts different habits; he is developed or stunted physically or morally, in one sense or in a contrary sense. Hence, just as the system is good or bad, he becomes more or less capable or incapable of bodily or mental effort, of reflection, of invention, of taking the initiative, of starting an enterprise, of subordinating himself to a given purpose, of willing, persistent association, that is to say, in sum, of playing an active and useful part on the stage of the world he is about to enter upon. Observe that this apprenticeship in common, sitting on benches according to certain regulations and under a master, lasts six, ten, fifteen years and often twenty; that girls are not exempt from it; that not one boy out of a hundred is educated to the end at home by a private teacher; that, in secondary and even in superior instruction, the school wheel turns uniformly and without stopping ten hours a day if the scholar boards outside, and twenty-four hours a day if he boards within; that at this age the human clay is soft, that it has not yet received its shape, that no acquired and resistant form yet protects it from the potter's hand, against the weight of the turning-wheel, against the friction of other morsels of clay kneaded alongside of it, against the three pressures, constant and prolonged, which compose public education.
Evidently, there is here an enormous force, especially if the three pressures, instead of opposing each other, as often happens, combine and converge towards the production of a certain finished type of man; if, from infancy to youth and from youth to adult age, the successive stages of preparation are superposed in such a way as to stamp the adopted type deeper and with more exactness; if all the influences and operations that impress it, near or far, great or small, internal or external, form together a coherent, defined, applicable and applied system. Let the State undertake its fabrication and application, let it monopolize public education, let it become its regulator, director and contractor, let it set up and work its machine throughout the length and breadth of the land, let it, through moral authority and legal constraint, force the new generation to enter therein—it will find twenty years later in these minors who have become major, the kind and number of ideas it aimed to provide, the extent, limit and form of mind it approves of, and the moral and social prejudice that suits its purposes.
Napoleon's aim.—University monopoly.—Revival and multitudeof private schools.—Napoleon regards them unfavorably.—Hismotives.—Private enterprises compete with publicenterprise.—Measures against them.—Previous authorizationnecessary and optional suppression of them.—Taxes on freeeducation in favor of the university.—Decree of November,1811.—Limitation of secondary teaching in private schools.—How the university takes away their pupils.—Day-schools asprescribed.—Number of boarders limited.—Measures for therestriction or assimilation of ecclesiastical schools.—Recruits forcibly obtained in prominent and ill-disposedfamilies.—Napoleon the sole educator in his empire.
Such is the aim of Napoleon:6101
"In the establishment of an educational corps," he says to himself,6102"my principal aim is to secure the means for directing political and moral opinions."
Still more precisely, he counts on the new institution to set up and keep open for inspection a universal and complete police registry. "This registry must be organized in such a way as to keep notes on each child after age of nine years."6103Having seized adults he wants to seize children also, watch and shape future Frenchmen in advance; brought up by him, in his hands or in sight, they become ready-made a assistants, docile subjects and more docile than their parents.6104Amongst the latter, there are still to many unsubmissive and refractory spirits, too many royalists and too many republicans; domestic traditions from family to family contradict each other or vary, and children grow up in their homes only to clash with each other in society afterwards. Let us anticipate this conflict; let us prepare them for concord; all brought up in the same fashion, they will some day or other find themselves unanimous,6105not only apparently, as nowadays through fear or force, but in fact and fundamentally, through inveterate habit and by previous adaptation of imagination and affection. Otherwise, "there will be no stable political state" in France;6106"so long as one grows up without knowing whether to be a republican or monarchist, Catholic or irreligious, the State will never form a nation; it will rest on uncertain and vague foundations; it will be constantly exposed to disorder and change."—Consequently, he assigns to himself the monopoly of public instruction; he alone is to enjoy the right to manufacture and sell this just like salt and tobacco; "public instruction, throughout the Empire, is entrusted exclusively to the university. No school, no establishment for instruction whatever," superior, secondary, primary, special, general, collateral, secular or ecclesiastic, "may be organized outside of the imperial university and without the authorization of its chief."6107
Every factory of educational commodities within these boundaries and operating under this direction is of two sorts. Some of them, in the best places, interconnected and skillfully grouped, are national units founded by the government, or at its command, by the communes,— faculties, lycées, colleges, and small communal schools; others, isolated and scattered about, are private institutions founded by individuals, such as boarding-schools and institutions for secondary instruction, small free schools. The former, State undertakings, ruled, managed, supported and turned to account by it, according to the plan prescribed by it and for the object it has proposed, are simply a prolongation of itself; it is the State which operates in them and which, directly and entirely, acts through them: they enjoy therefore all its favor and the others all its disfavor. The latter, during the Consulate, revived or sprung up by hundreds, in all directions, spontaneously, under the pressure of necessity, and because the young need instruction as they need clothes, but haphazard, as required according to demand and supply, without any superior or common regulation—nothing being more antipathetic to the governmental genius of Napoleon:
"It is impossible,"6108he says, "to remain longer as we are, since everybody can start an education shop the same as a cloth shop"
and furnish as he pleases, or as his customers please, this or that piece of stuff, even of poor quality, and of this or that fashion, even extravagant or out of date: hence so many different dresses, and a horrible medley. One good obligatory coat, of stout cloth and suitable cut, a uniform for which the public authority supplies the pattern, is what should go on the back of every child, youth or young man; private individuals who undertake this matter are mistrusted beforehand. Even when obedient, they are only half-docile; they take their own course and have their own preferences, they follow their own taste or that of parents. Every private enterprise, simply because it exists and thrives, constitutes a more or less independent and dissenting group, Napoleon, on learning that Sainte-Barbe, restored under the direction of M. de Lanneau, had five hundred inmates, exclaims:6109"How does it happen that an ordinary private individual has so many in his house?" The Emperor almost seems jealous; it seems as if he had just discovered a rival in one corner of his university domain; this man is an usurper on the domain of the sovereign; he has constituted himself a centre; he has collected around him clients and a platoon; now, as Louis XIV. said, the State must have no "platoons apart." Since M. de Lanneau has talent and is successful, let him enter the official ranks and become a functionary. Napoleon at once means to get hold of him, his house and his pupils, and orders M. de Fontaines, Grand-Master of the University, to negotiate the affair; M. de Lanneau will be suitably compensated; Sainte-Barbe will be formed into a lycée, and M. de Lanneau shall be put at the head of it. Let it be noted that he is not an opponent, an irregular: M. de Fontaines himself praises his teaching, his excellent mind, his perfect exactitude, and calls him the universitarian of the university. But he does not belong to it, he stands aloof and stays at home, he is not disposed to become a mere cog-wheel in the imperial manufactory. Therefore, whether he is aware of it or not, he does it harm and all the more according to his prosperity; his full house empties the lycées; the more pupils he has the less they have. Private enterprises in their essence enter into competition with public enterprise.
For this reason, if tolerated by the latter, it is reluctantly and because nothing else can be done; there are too many of them; the money and the means to replace them at one stroke would be wanting. Moreover, with instruction, the consumers, as with other supplies and commodities, naturally dislike monopoly; they must be gradually brought to it; resignation must come to them through habit. The State, accordingly, may allow private enterprises to exist, at least for the time being. But, on condition of their being kept in the strictest dependence, of its arrogating to itself the right over them of life and death, of reducing them to the state of tributaries and branches, of utilizing them, of transforming their native and injurious rivalry into a fruitful and forced collaboration. Not only must private schools obtain from the State its express consent to be born, for lack of which they are closed and their principals punished,6110but again, even when licensed, they live subject to the good-will of the Grand-Master, who can and must close them as soon as he recognizes in them "grave abuses and principles contrary to those professed by the University." Meanwhile, the University supports itself with their funds; since it alone has the right to teach, it may profit by this right, concede for money the faculty of teaching or of being taught alongside of it, oblige every head of an institution to pay so much for himself and so much for each of his pupils; in sum, here as elsewhere, in derogation of the university blockade, as with the continental blockade, the state sells licenses to certain parties. So true is this that, even with superior instruction, when nobody competes with it, it sells them: every graduate who gives a course of lectures on literature or on science must pay beforehand, for the year, 75 francs at Paris and 50 francs in the provinces. Every graduate who begin to lecture on law or medicine must pay beforehand 150 francs at Paris and 100 francs in the provinces.6111There is the same annual duty on the directors of secondary schools, boarding-schools and private institutions. Moreover, to obtain the indispensable license, the master of a boarding-school at Paris must pay 300 francs, and in a province 200 francs; the principal of an institution in Paris pays 600 francs, and in the provinces 400 francs; besides that, this license, always revocable, is granted only for ten years; at the end of the ten years the titular must obtain a renewal and pay the tax anew. As to his pupils, of whatever kind, boarding scholars, day scholars, or even gratis,6112the University levies on each a tax equal to the twentieth of the cost of full board; the director himself of the establishment is the one who fixes and levies the tax; he is the responsible collector of it, book-keeper and the debtor. Let him not forget to declare exactly the terms of his school and the number of his pupils; otherwise, there is investigation, verification, condemnation, restitution, fine, censure, and the possible closing of his establishment.
Regulations, stricter and stricter, tighten the cord around his neck and, in 1811, the rigid articles of the last decree draw so tight as to insure certain strangling at short date. Napoleon counts on that.6113For his lycées, especially at the start, have not succeeded; they have failed to obtain the confidence of families;6114the discipline is too military, the education is not sufficiently paternal, the principals and professors are only indifferent functionaries, more or less egoist or worldly. Only former subaltern officers, rude and foul-mouthed, serve as superintendents and assistant-teachers. The holders of State scholarships bring with them "habits fashioned out of a bad education," or by the ignorance of almost no education at all,6115so that "for a child that is well born and well brought up," their companionship is lopsided and their contact as harmful as it is repulsive. Consequently, the lycées during the first years,6116solely filled with the few holders of scholarships, remain deserted or scarcely occupied, whilst "the élite of the young crowd into more or less expensive private schools."
This élite of which the University is thus robbed must be got back. Since the young do not attend the lycée because they like it, they must come through necessity; to this end, other issues are rendered difficult and several are entirely barred; and better still, all those that are tolerated are made to converge to one sole central outlet, a university establishment, in such a way that the director of each private school, changed from a rival into a purveyor, serves the university instead of injuring it and gives it pupils instead of taking them away. In the first place, his high standard of instruction is limited;6117even in the country and in the towns that have neither lycée nor college, he must teach nothing above a fixed degree; if he is the principal of an institution, this degree must not go beyond the class of the humanities; he must leave to the faculties of the State their domain intact, differential calculus, astronomy, geology, natural history and superior literature. If he is the master of a boarding-school, this degree must not extend beyond grammar classes, nor the first elements of geometry and arithmetic; he must leave to State lycées and colleges their domain intact, the humanities properly so called, superior lectures and means of secondary instruction.—In the second place, in the towns possessing a lycée or college, he must teach at home only what the University leaves untaught;6118he is not deprived, indeed, of the younger boys; he may still instruct and keep them; but he must conduct all his pupils over ten years of age to the college or lycée, where they will regularly follow the classes as day-scholars. Consequently, daily and twice a day, he marches them to and fro between his house and the university establishment; before going, in the intermission, and after the class is dismissed he examines them in the lesson they have received out of his house; apart from that, he lodges and feeds them, his office being reduced to this. He is nothing beyond a watched and serviceable auxiliary, a subaltern, a University tutor and "coach," a sort of unpaid, or rather paying, schoolmaster and innkeeper in its employ.
All this does not yet suffice. Not only does the State recruit its day-scholars in his establishment but it takes from him his boarding-scholars. "On and after the first of November 1812,6119the heads of institutions and the masters of boarding-schools shall receive no resident pupils in their houses above the age of nine years, until the lycée or college, established in the same town or place where there is a lycée, shall have as many boarders as it can take." This complement shall be 300 boarders per lycée; there are to be "80 lycées in full operation "during the year 1812, and 100 in the course of the year 1813, so that, at this last date, the total of the complement demanded, without counting that of the colleges, amounts to 30,000 boarding-scholars. Such is the enormous levy of the State on the crop of boarding-school pupils. It evidently seizes the entire crop in advance; private establishments, after it, can only glean, and through tolerance. In reality, the decree forbids them to receive boarding-scholars; henceforth, the University will have the monopoly of them.
The proceedings against the small seminaries, more energetic competitors, are still more vigorous. "There shall be but one secondary ecclesiastical school in each department; the Grand-Master will designate those that are to be maintained; the others are to be closed. None of them shall be in the country. All those not situated in a town provided with a lycée or with a college shall be closed. All the buildings and furniture belonging to the ecclesiastic schools not retained shall be seized and confiscated for the benefit of the University. "In all places where ecclesiastical schools exist, the pupils of these schools shall be taken to the lycée or college and join its classes." Finally, "all these schools shall be under the control of the University; they must be organized only by her; their prospectus and their regulations must be drawn up by the council of the University at the suggestion of the Grand Master. The teaching must be done only by members of the University at the disposition of the Grand Master." In like manner, in the lay schools, at Sainte-Barbe for example,6120every professor, private tutor, or even common superintendent, must be provided with a special authorization by the University. Staff and discipline, the spirit and matter of the teaching, every detail of study and recreation,6121all are imposed, conducted and restrained in these so-called free establishments; whatever they may be, ecclesiastic or secular, not only does the University surround and hamper them, but again it absorbs and assimilates them; it does not even leave them any external distinctive appearance. It is true that, in the small seminaries, the exercises begin at the ringing of a bell, and the pupils wear an ecclesiastic dress; but the priest's gown, adopted by the State that adopts the Church, is still a State uniform. In the other private establishments, the uniform is that which it imposes, the lay uniform, belonging to colleges and lycées "under penalty of being closed "; while, in addition, there is the drum, the demeanor, the habits, ways and regularity of the barracks. All initiative, all invention, all diversity, every professional or local adaptation is abolished.6122M. de Lanneau thus wrote6123: "I am nothing but a sergeant-major of languid and mangled classes... to the tap of a drum and under military colors."
Against the encroachments of this institutional university there is no longer neither public nor private shelter, since even domestic education at home, is not respected. In 1808,6124"among the old and wealthy families which are not in the system," Napoleon selects ten from each department and fifty at Paris of which the sons from sixteen to eighteen must be compelled to go to Saint-Cyr and, on leaving it, into the army as second lieutenants.6125In 1813, he adds 10,000 more of them, many of whom are the sons of Conventionalists or Vendéans, who, under the title of guards of honor, are to form a corps apart and who are at once trained in the barracks. All the more necessary is the subjection to this Napoleonic education of the sons of important and refractory families, everywhere numerous in the annexed countries. Already in 1802, Fourcroy had explained in a report to the legislative corps the political and social utility of the future University.6126Napoleon, at his discretion, may recruit and select scholars among his recent subjects; only, it is not in a lycée that he places them, but in a still more military school, at La Fléche, of which the pupils are all sons of officers and, so to say, children of the army. Towards the end of 1812, he orders the Roman prince Patrizzi to send his two sons to this school, one seventeen years of age and the other thirteen6127; and, to be sure of them, he has them taken from their home and brought there by gendarmes. Along with these, 90 other Italians of high rank are counted at La Fléche, the Dorias, the Paliavicinis, the Alfieris, with 120 young men of the Illyrian provinces, others again furnished by the countries of the Rhine confederation, in all 360 inmates at 800 per annum. The parents might often accompany or follow their children and establish themselves within reach of them. This privilege was not granted to Prince Patrizzi; he was stopped on the road at Marseilles and kept there.—In this way, through the skilful combination of legislative prescriptions with arbitrary appointments, Napoleon becomes in fact, directly or indirectly, the sole head-schoolmaster of all Frenchmen old or newcomers, the unique and universal educator in his empire.
His machinery.—The educating body.—How its members cometo realize their union.—Hierarchy of rank.—How ambitionand amour-propre are gratified.—The monastic principle ofcelibacy.—The monastic and military principle ofobedience.—Obligations contracted and discipline enforced.—The École Normale and recruits for the future university.
To effect this purpose, he requires a good instrument, some great human machine which designed, put together and set up by himself, henceforth works alone and of its own accord, without deviating or breaking down, conformably to his instructions and always under his eye, but without the necessity of his lending a hand and personally interfering in its predetermined and calculated movement. The finest engines of this sort are the religious orders, masterpieces of the Catholic, Roman and governmental mind, all managed from above according to fixed rules in view of a definite object, so many kinds of intelligent automatons, alone capable of working indefinitely without loss of energy, with persistency, uniformity and precision, at the minimum of cost and the maximum of effect, and this through the simple play of their internal mechanism which, fully regulated beforehand, adapts them completely and ready-made to this special service, to the social operations which a recognized authority and a superior intelligence have assigned to them as their function.—Nothing could be better suited to the social instinct of Napoleon, to his imagination, his taste, his political policy and his plans, and on this point he loftily proclaims his preferences.
"I know," says he to the Council of State, "that the Jesuits, as regards instruction, have left a very great void. I do not want to restore them, nor any other body that has its sovereign at Rome."6128
Nevertheless, one is necessary. "As for myself, I would rather confide public education to a religious order than leave it as it is to-day," which means free and abandoned to private individuals. "But I want neither one nor the other." Two conditions are requisite for the new establishment. First of all,
"I want a corporation because a corporation never dies"; it alone, through its perpetuity, maintains teaching in the way marked out for it, brings up "according to fixed principles" successive generations, thus assuring the stability of the political State, and "inspires youth with a spirit and opinions in conformity with the new laws of the empire." And this corporation must be secular. Its members are to be State and not Church "Jesuits";6129they must belong to the Emperor and not to the Pope, and will form, in the hands of the government, a civil militia composed of "ten thousand persons," administrators and professors of every degree, comprehending schoolmasters, an organized, coherent and lasting militia
As it must be secular, there must be no hold on it through dogma or faith, paradise or hell, no spiritual incitements; consequently, temporal means are to be employed, not less effective, when one knows how to manage them,—self-esteem, pride, (amour propre), competition, imagination, ambition, magnificent hopes and vague dreams of unlimited promotion, in short, the means and motives already maintaining the temper and zeal of the army. "The educational corps must copy the classification of military grades; "an order of promotion," a hierarchy of places is to be instituted; no one will attain superior rank without having passed through the inferior; "no one can become a principal without having been a teacher, nor professor in the higher classes without having taught in the lower ones."—And, on the other hand, the highest places will be within reach of all; "the young, who devoted themselves to teaching, will enjoy the perspective of rising from one grade to another, up to the highest dignities of the State." Authority, importance, titles, large salaries, pre-eminence, precedence,—these are to exist in the University as in other public careers and furnish the wherewithal for the most magnificent dreams.6130"The feet of this great body6131will be on the college benches and its head in the senate." Its chief, the Grand-Master, unique of his species, less restricted, with freer hands than the ministers themselves, is to be one of the principal personages of the empire; his greatness will exalt the condition and feeling of his subordinates. In the provinces, on every festive occasion or at every public ceremony, people will take pride in seeing their rector or principal in official costume seated alongside of the general or prefect in full uniform.6132
The consideration awarded to their chief will reflect on them; they will enjoy it along with him; they will say to themselves that they too, like him and those under him, all together, form an élite; by degrees, they will feel that they are all one body; they will acquire the spirit of the association and attach themselves to the University, the same as a soldier to his regiment or like a monk to his brethren in a monastery.
Thus, as in a monastic order, one must join the University by "going into the orders."6133—"I want," says Napoleon, "some solemnity attached to this act. My purpose is that the members of the corps of instruction should contract, not as formerly, a religious engagement, but a civil engagement before a notary, or before the justice of the peace, or prefect, or other (officer).... They will espouse education the same as their forerunners espoused the Church, with this difference, that the marriage will not be as sacred, as indissoluble.6134... They will engage themselves for three, six, or nine years, and not resign without giving notice a certain number of years beforehand." To heighten the resemblance, "the principle of celibacy must be established, in this sense, that a man consecrated to teaching shall not marry until after having passed through the first stages of his career; "for example, "the schoolmasters shall not marry before the age of twenty-five or thirty years, after having obtained a salary of three or four thousand francs and economized something." But, at bottom, marriage, a family, private life, all natural and normal matters in the great world of society, are causes of trouble and weakness in a corps where individuals, to be good organs, must give themselves up wholly and without reserve. "In future,6135not only must schoolmasters, but, again, the principals and censors of the lycées, and the principals and rulers of the colleges, be restricted to celibacy and a life in common."—The last complementary and significant trait, which gives to the secular institution the aspect of a convent, is this: "No woman shall have a lodging in, or be admitted into, the lycées and colleges."
Now, let us add to the monastic principle of celibacy the monastic and military principle of obedience; the latter, in Napoleon's eyes, is fundamental and the basis of the others; this principle being accepted, a veritable corporation exists; members are ruled by one head and command becomes effective.6136"There will be," says Napoleon, "a corps of instructors, if all the principals, censors and professors have one or several chiefs, the same as the Jesuits had their general and their provincial," like the soldiers of a regiment with their colonel and captain. The indispensable link is found; individuals, in this way, keep together, for they are held by authorities, under one regulation. As with a volunteer in a regiment, or a monk who enters a convent, the members of the University will accept its total régime in advance, present and future, wholly and in detail, and will subject themselves under oath. "They are to take an engagement6137to faithfully observe the statutes and regulations of the University. They must promise obedience to the Grand-Master in everything ordered by him for the service of the Emperor, and for the advantage of education. They must engage not to quit the educational corps and abandon their functions before having obtained the Grand-Master's consent. They are to accept no other public or private salaried function without the authentic permission of the Grand-Master. They are bound to give notice to the Grand-Master and his officers of whatever comes to their knowledge that is opposed to the doctrine and principles of the educational corps in the establishments for public instruction." There are many other obligations, indefinite or precise,6138of which the sanction is not only moral, but, again, legal, all notable and lasting, an entire surrender of the person who suffers more or less profoundly at having accepted them, and whose compulsory resignation must be assured by the fear of punishment. "Care must be taken6139to insure severe discipline everywhere: the professors themselves are to be subject in certain cases to the penalty of arrest; they will lose no more consideration on this account than the colonels who are punished in the same manner."6140It is the least of all penalties; there are others of greater and greater gravity,6141"the reprimand in presence of an academical board, censure in presence of the University board, transfer to an inferior office, suspension with or without entire or partial deprivation of salary, half-pay or put on the retired list, or stricken off the University roll," and, in the latter case, "rendered incapable of obtaining employment in any other public administration."—"Every member of the University6142who shall fail to conform to the subordination established by the statutes and regulations, or in respect due to superiors, shall be reprimanded, censured or suspended from his functions according to the gravity of the case." In no case may he withdraw of his own accord, resign at will, and voluntarily return to private life; he is bound to obtain beforehand the Grand-Master's assent; and, if the latter refuses this, he must renew his application three times, every two months, with the formalities, the delays and the importunacy of a long procedure; failing in which, he is not only stricken from the rolls, but again "condemned to a confinement proportioned to the gravity of the circumstances," and which may last a year.
A system of things ending in a prison is not attractive, and is established only after great resistance. "We were under the necessity," says the superior council,6143"of taking candidates as they could be found, differing infinitely in methods, principles and sentiments, accustomed to almost unlimited pardon or, at least, to being governed by the caprices of parents and nearly all disliking the régime attempted to be enforced on them." Moreover, through this intervention of the State, "the local authorities find one of their most cherished prerogatives wrested from them." In sum, "the masters detested the new duties imposed on them; the administrators and bishops protested against the appointments not made at their suggestion; fathers of families complained of the new taxes they had to pay. It is said that the University is known only by its imposts and by its forced regulations; again, in 1811, most of its masters are incompetent, or intractable, and of a bad spirit.—There is still another reason for tightening the cord that binds them into a corporation. "The absolute subordination of every individual belonging to the University is its first necessity; without discipline and without obedience, no University could exist. This obedience must be prompt, and, in grave cases, where recourse must be had to the authority of the government, obedience must always be provisional." But, on this incurably refractory staff, pressure is not enough; it has grown old and hardened; the true remedy, therefore, consists in replacing it with a younger one, more manageable, expressly shaped and wrought out in a special school, which will be for the University what Fontainebleau is for the army, what the grand seminaries are for the clergy, a nursery of subjects carefully selected and fashioned beforehand.
Such is the object of the "École Normale."6144Young students enter it at the age of seventeen and bind themselves to remain in the University at least ten years.6145Young 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 1812,6147the Normal School is still a small one, scarcely housed, lodged in the upper stories of the lycée 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 "Éloge de Marc Aurèle," by Thomas, on the "Annales" of Tacitus: "Let the young read Cæsar'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 lycées and in the colleges. Nevertheless, the first decree states that it is "intended to receive as many as three hundred youths."6148The 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 lycées 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 1813,6149a 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."