.
THE ORIGINS OF CONTEMPORARY FRANCE, VOLUME 6
THE MODERN REGIME, VOLUME 2
by Hippolyte A. Taine
Contents
After Taine's death in March 1893, his nephew André
Chevrillon arranged his last manuscripts on the Church
and Education for publication and wrote the following
introduction which also tells us much about Taine and
his works.
PREFACE By André Chevrillon.
"To treat of the Church, the School, and the Family, describe the modern milieu and note the facilities and obstacles which a society like our own encounters in this milieu, such was the program of the last5101 section of the "Origins of Contemporary France." The preceding volume is a continuation of the first part of this program; after the commune and the department, after local societies, the author was to study moral and intellectual bodies in France as organized by Napoleon. This study completed, this last step taken, he was about to reach the summit. He was about to view France as a whole, to comprehend it no longer through a detail of its organs, in a state of formation, but its actual existence; no longer isolated, but plunged, along with other occidental nations, into the modern milieu, experiencing with them the effects of one general cause which changed the physical and intellectual condition of men; which dissolved sentiments formerly grouping them together, more or less capable at length of adapting themselves to new circumstances and of organizing according to a new type suited to the coming age that now opens before us.
Only a part of this last volume was written, that which relates to the Church and to public instruction. Death intervened and suddenly arrested the pen. M. Taine, at this moment, was about completing his analysis of subordinate societies in France.—For those who have followed him thus far it is already clear that the great defect of the French community is the fragmentation of the individuals, who isolated, dwindling, and prostrate at the feet of the all-powerful State, who, due to remote historical causes, and yet more so by modern legislation, have been made incapable of "spontaneously grouping around a common interest." Very probably—and of this we may judge by two sketches of a plan, undoubtedly provisional, but the ideas of which were long settled in his mind—M. Taine would have first described this legislation and defined its principles and general characteristics. He meant to show it more and more systematic, deliberately hostile to collective enterprise, considering secondary bodies not as "distinct, special organs," endowed with a life of their own, "maintained and stimulated by private initiation," but as agents of the State "which fashions them after a common pattern, imposes on them their form and prescribes their work."—This done, this defect pointed out, the author was to enumerate the consequences flowing from it, the social body entirely changed, "not only in its proportions but in its innermost texture," every tendency weakened by which individuals form groups that are to last longer than themselves, each man reduced to his own self, the egoistic instinct enhanced while the social instinct wastes away for want of nourishment, his daily imagination solely concerned with life-long aims, incapacitated for politics as he is "lacking spheres of action in which he may train himself according to his experiences and faculties", his mind weakening in idleness and boredom or in a thirst for pleasure and personal success,—in short, an organic impoverishment of all faculties of cohesion, leading to the destruction of the natural centers of grouping and, consequently, to political instability.5102
One association of special import remains, the most spontaneous, the deepest rooted, so old that all others derive from it, so essential that in any attack upon it we see even the substance of the social body decaying and diminishing. On the nature of the Family; on its profound physiological origins; on its necessary role in the prolongation and "perpetuation of the individual" by affording him "the sole remedy for death"; on its primitive constitution among men of our own race; on its historic organization and development "around the family home"; on the necessity of its subsistence and continuance in order to insure the duration of this home; on its other needs, M. Taine, with his knowledge of man and of his history, had given a good deal of thought to fundamental ideas analogous to those which he has consecrated to the classic spirit, to the origin of honor and conscience, to the essence of local society, so many stones, as it were, shaped by him from time to time and deeply implanted as the foundations of his criticism of institutions. Having set forth the proper character and permanent wants of the Family he was able to study the legislation affecting it, and, first, "the Jacobin laws on marriage, divorce, paternal authority and on the compulsory public education of children; next, the Napoleonic laws, those which still govern us, the Civil Code" with that portion of it in which the equality and leveling spirit is preserved, along with "its tendency to regard property as a means of enjoyment" instead of the starting-point and support of "an enduring institution."—Having exposed the system, M. Taine meant to consider its effects, those of surrounding institutions, and to describe the French family as it now exists. He had first studied the "tendency to marriage"; he had considered the motives which, in general, weaken or fortify it, and appreciated those now absent and now active in France. According to him, "the healthy ideal of every young man is to found a family, a house of infinite duration, to create and to rule." Why in modern France does he give his thoughts to "pleasure and of excelling in his career"? Why does he regard marriage "without enthusiasm, as a last measure, as a 'settling-down,' and not as a beginning, the commencement of a veritable career, subordinating all others to it and regarding these, pecuniary and professional, as auxiliary and as means?"—After the tendency to marriage, "the tendency to paternity." How does the shrunken family come to live only for itself? In what way, in default of other interests,—homestead, domain, workshop, lasting local undertakings,—how does the heart, now deprived of its food by the lack of invisible posterity, fall back on affection for visible progeny?5103 In a country where there are few openings, where careers are overcrowded, what are the effects of this paid idolatry5104, and, to sum up in one phrase, in what way does the French system of to-day tend to develop the most fatal of results, the decline in the birth rate?
Here the study of institutions on a grand scale terminated. Formerly, M. Taine had contemplated a completion of his labors by a description of contemporary France, the product of origins scrutinized by him and of which he had traced the formation. Having disengaged his factors he meant to combine them, to show them united and acting in concert, all centering on the great actual facts which dominate the rest and which determine the order and structure of modern society. As he had given a picture of old France he aimed to portray France as it now is, with its various groups,—village, small town and large city,—with its categories of men, peasants, workmen, bourgeois, functionaries and capitalists; with the forces that impel each class along, their passions, their ideas, their desires. Besides the numerical statistics of person he meant to have set forth the moral statistics of souls. According to him, psychological conditions exist which render the social activity of men possible or impossible. And, especially, "in a given society, there is always a psychological state which provokes the state of that society." It was his aim to seek out in the novel, in poetry, in the arts since 1820, that is to say in all works that throw light on the various and successive kinds of the reigning ideal—in philosophy, in religion, in industry, in all branches of French action and thought—the signs of the psychological tendencies of modern Frenchman in this or that social condition. What would this book have been? M. Taine had sketched it out so far back, he had abandoned it for so long a time and never alluded to it, that nothing remains by which we can form any idea of it. But, in this undertaking demanding so much science, so much intuition, so much experience of accurate observation, of general views and precise generalization—in this vast study requiring such profound knowledge, not alone of France but of societies offering points of comparison with her, we may be certain that the author of Notes sur Paris, Notes sur l'Angleterre, of the Ancien Régime, the critic accustomed to interpret civilizations, literature and works of art, the thinker, in fine, who, to prepare himself for the greatest tasks he undertook, traveled five times over France, studying its life with the eyes of an artist, in the light of history and of psychology, ever preceding his philosophic study with visual investigation, would have been equal to the task.5105
Already for several years, M. Taine, aware that his time was short, had narrowed the limits of the work he was engaged upon. But what his work lost in breadth and in richness of detail it would have gained in depth and in power. All his master ideas would have been found in it, foreshortened and concentrated. Always seeking in this or that group of them what he called his generators, intellectual and moral as well as political, he would have described all those which explain the French group. Unfortunately, here again the elements are wanting which allow one to foreshadow what this final analysis and last construction might have been. M. Taine did not write in anticipation. Long before taking the pen in hand he had derived his most significant facts and formed his plan. He carried them in his brain where they fell into order of themselves. Ten lines of notes, a few memoranda of conversations—faint reflections, to us around him, of the great inward light—are all that enable one to attempt an indication of the few leading conceptions were to complete "Les Origines de la France Contemporaine."
"Le Milieu Moderne", was to have been the title of the last book. The question here is how to discover the great characteristics of the period into which European societies entered and about were to live. Rising to a higher point of view than that to which he had confined himself in studying France, M. Taine regarded its metamorphosis as a case of transformation as general as the passage of the Cité antique over to the Roman Empire over to the feudal State. Now, as formerly, this transformation is the effect of a "change in the intellectual and physical condition of men"; that is to say, in other words, in the environment that surrounds them. Such is the advent of a new geological period, of a glacial period, for example, or, more precisely, "the very slow and then accelerated upheaval of a continent, forcing the submarine species which breathe by gills to transform themselves into species which breathe by lungs." It is impossible to divine in what sense this adaptation takes place if we do not comprehend the event, that is to say if we do not perceive its starting-point and the innate force which produces it. According to Taine, this force, in the present case, is the progress the increasing authority of positive, verifiable science. What a definition he would have given of science and its essence! What a tableau of its progress, the man whose thought was matured at the moment when the scientific spirit entered into history and literature; who breathed it in his youth with the fervid and sacred enthusiasm of a poet seeing the world grow brighter and intelligible to him, and who, at the age of twenty-five, demanded of it a method and introduced this into criticism and psychology in order to give these new life—the mechanical equivalent of heat, natural selection, spectroscopic analysis, the theory of the microbes, recent discoveries in physics and the constitution of matter, research into historic origins, psychological explanation of texts, extension of oriental researches, discoveries of prehistoric conditions, comparative study of barbaric communities—every grand idea of the century to which he has himself contributed, all those by which science embraces a larger and larger portion of the universe, he saw them containing the same essence; all combining to change the conception of the world and substitute another, coherent and logical in the best minds, but then confused and disfigured as it slowly descends to the level of the crowd.—He would have described this decent, the gradual diffusion, the growing power of the new Idea, the active ferment which it contains after the manner of a dogma, beneficent or pernicious according to the minds in which it lodges, capable of arming men and of driving them on to pure destruction when not fully comprehended, and capable of reorganizing them if they can grasp its veritable meaning.
Its first effects are simply destructive, for, through Darwinism, through experimental psychology, through the physiology of the brain, through biblical exegesis, through the comparative study of savage communities and their moral systems, the new concepts at first shocks the religious idea which it tends to replace; even, with the half- cultivated and in the minds of novices, it tends to pure negation, to hostility against existing religions. To every social gathering around the religious idea that explains and sustains it, what a disturbance in the secular system formed by the co-ordination and mutual adaptation of laws, customs, morality, and institutions! What a rupture of the inward equilibrium which maintains man passive and tranquil! The consequent mental agitation will lead to agitation, impulsion, ambitions, lassitude, despondency, and disorder in all the sentiments which had thus far maintained every species of society, the family, the commune, the Church, free association and the State!—Now, along with the immediate effects of science on the intellectual habits of men consider the effects of its application to their material condition; at first, their increased well-being, their power increased, then the rupture of the ties that bind them to their birthplace, the concentration of masses of workmen in the towns to which they are attracted by great and rapid industrial development, the influx of new ideas, of every species of information, the gradual decline of the old hereditary prejudices of caste and parish which act automatically as instincts, and are useful as instincts to the small groups in which the individual is born and in which he lives. How could such a profound change in the condition of humanity fail to undermine everywhere the order of things which group men together? Why should not the new milieu at once attack all ancient forms of society? For, at the moment of its establishment, there exists in Europe a general form of society manifest through features in common; a monarchy—hereditary royalty, dynastic but frequently limited, at least in fact,—a privileged nobility performing military service as a special function, a clergy organized as a Church, proprietary and more or less privileged, local or special bodies also proprietary— provinces, communes, universities, brotherhoods, corporations—laws and customs which base the family on paternal authority, perpetuating it on the natal soil and by social rank; in brief, institutions which modern ideas disturb in every direction, the first effect of which is, while developing the spirit of doubt and investigation, to break down subordination to the king, to the gentleman, to the noble, and, in general, to dissolve society founded on heredity. Such phenomena are already observable everywhere, the ruin of feeble corporations by the state, its constant tendency to interference, to the absorption of every special service and the descent of power into the hands of a numerical majority.—What plan, then, governs these societies in the way of reorganization, and, since they all belong to a common type, what are the common resources and difficulties of adaptation? On what lines must the metamorphosis be effected in order to arrive at a viable creations? And, abandoning the general problem in order to return to contemporary France, grown up and organized under our own eyes, how does the great modern event affect it? How does "this common factor combine with special factors, permanent and temporary," belong to our system? With the French, whose hereditary spirit and character are easily defined, in this society founded on Napoleonic institutions moved by our "administrative mechanism," what are the peculiar tendencies of a leveling democracy which seeks immediate establishment? Among the maladies which are special with us—feeble birth-rate, political instability, absence of local life, slow industrial and commercial development, despondency and pessimism—can an aptitude for transformation which we do not possess be distinguished in the sense demanded by the new milieu? The knowledge we have of our origins, of our psychology, of our present constitution, of our circumstances, what hopes are warranted?
M. Taine could not have replied to all these questions. If, twenty years ago, on the morrow after our disasters, just as we once more set about a new organization, putting aside literature, art, and philosophy, noble contemplation and pure speculation, abandoning works already projected, he gave himself up to the technical study of law, political economy and administrative history; if, for twenty years, he secluded himself and devoted himself to his task—at what a cost of prolonged effort, with what a strain his mental faculties, with what weariness and often with what dissatisfaction!—if he shortened his life, it was to discharge what he deemed a duty to that suffering France which he loved with tender and silent passion, the duty of aiding in her cure by establishing the general diagnosis which a philosopher-historian was warranted in presenting after a profound study of its vital constitution. The examination finished, he felt that he had a right to offer the diagnosis. Not that his modesty permitted him to foretell the future or to dictate reforms. When his opinion was asked in relation to any reform he generally declined giving it. "I am merely a consulting physician," he would reply; "I do not possess sufficient details on that particular question—I am not sufficiently familiar with circumstances which vary from day to day." In effect, according to him, there is no general principle from which one can deduce a series of reforms. On the contrary, his first recommendation would have been not to try to find simple solutions in political and social matters, but to proceed by experiments, according to temperaments, and accepting the irregular and the incomplete.—One becomes resigned to this course by a study of history and by acquiring "the sense of surrounding facts and developments." Here do we find the general remedy for the destructive effects produced by the brusque progress of science, and she herself furnishes this remedy, when, from the hasty and the theoretical, she becomes experimental and builds on the observation of facts and their relations. "Through psychological narration, through the analysis of psychological conditions which have produced, maintained, or modified this or that institution, we may find a partial solution to each question of reform," gradually discovering laws and establishing the general conditions that render possible or impossible any given project. When constituted and then developed, reorganized, respected and applied to human affairs, the sciences of humanity may become a new instrument of power and civilization, and, just as the natural sciences have taught us to derive profit from physical forces, they may teach us to benefit by moral forces. M. Taine believed that the French were very well qualified for this order of study: if any other people possess superior mental faculties in respect of memory or a better knowledge of philology, he thought we had in our favor a superiority of the psychological sense.
Except for such beneficial generalities which may provide general hygienic guidelines, could M. Taine have suggested immediate remedies? It is scarcely probable. In any even, he was not a partisan for hasty decentralization. When, under the influence of a bad system, an organization has contracted a vice that reaches its vital organs, the following treatment nearly becomes mandatory;5106 in any event, no sudden modification of it must be thought of; all that can be done is to lessen its pernicious effect by resorting to make-shift or short term measures. Taking advantage of unforeseen circumstances, using great circumspection, noting favorable symptoms that had impressed him—for example a certain new birth of the spirit of association under the Third Republic—leaving to political authorities the care "of adjusting means" to the diversity and mobility of things, we may believe that M. Taine would have confined himself to indicating in what sense we could, with prudence, lay our course. To do this, it sufficed for him to sum up his diagnosis and lay down the conditions of duration and progress. In a matter of such vital import nobody can speak for him. Accordingly, if the conclusion is not written, whoever knows how to read his thought may divine it. The work, such as it is, is finished; it already contains his ideas in full; the intelligent eye has only to follow them and to note their consequences and combination.
André Chevrillon
Menthon, St-Bernard, October, 1893.
BOOK FIFTH. THE CHURCH.
CHAPTER I. MORAL INSTITUTIONS
I. Napoleon's Objectives.
Centralization and moral institutions—Object of the State
in absorbing Churches.—Their influence on civil society.
After the centralizing and invading State has taken hold of local societies there is nothing left for it but to cast its net over moral societies5107, and this second haul is more important than the first one; for, if local societies are based on the proximity of physical bodies and habitations, the latter are formed out of the accord which exists between minds and souls; in possessing these, the hold is no longer on the outside but on the inside of man, his thought, his will; the incentive within is laid hold of, and this directly; then only can he be fully mastered, and disposed of at discretion. To this end, the main purpose of the conquering State is the possession of the Churches; alongside as well as outside of itself, these are the great powers of the nation; not only does their domain differ from its own but, again it is vaster and lies deeper. Beyond the temporal patrimony and the small fragment of human history which the eyes of the flesh perceive, they embrace and present to mental vision the whole world and its first cause, the total ordinance of things, the infinite perspective of a past eternity and that of an eternity to come. Underneath the corporeal and intermittent actions which civil power prescribes and regulates, they govern the imagination, the conscience and the affections, the whole inward being, that mute, persistent effort of which our visible acts are simply the incomplete expressions and rare outbursts. Indeed, even when they set limits to these, voluntarily, conscientiously, there is no limit; in vain do they proclaim, if Christian, that their kingdom is not of this world; nevertheless, it is, since they belong to it; masters of dogma and of morals, they teach and command in it. In their all-embracing conception of divine and human things, the State, like a chapter in a book, has its place and their teachings in this chapter are for it of capital importance. For, here do they write out its rights and duties, the rights and duties of its subjects, a more or less perfect plan of civil order. This plan, avowed or dissimulated, towards which they incline the preferences of the faithful, issues at length, spontaneously and invincible from their doctrine, like a plant from its seed, to vegetate in temporal society, flower and fructify therein and send its roots deeper down for the purpose of shattering or of consolidating civil and political institutions. The influence of a Church on the family and on education, on the use of wealth or of authority, on the spirit of obedience or of revolt, on habits of initiation or of inertia, of enjoyment or of abstention, of charity or of egoism, on the entire current train of daily practice and of dominant impulses, in every branch of private or public life, is immense, and constitutes a distinct and permanent social force of the highest order. Every political calculation is unsound if it is omitted or treated as something of no consequence, and the head of a State is bound to comprehend the nature of it if he would estimate its grandeur.
II. Napoleon's opinions and methods.
Napoleon's opinions on religion and religious belief.—His
motives in preferring established and positive religions.
—Difficulty in defining the limit between spiritual and
temporal authority.—Except in Catholic countries, both
united in one hand.—Impossible to effect this union in
France arbitrarily.—Napoleon's way of attaining this end by
another process.—His intention of overcoming spiritual
authority through temporal interests.
This is what Napoleon does. As usual with him, in order to see deeper into others, he begins by examining himself:
"To say from whence I came, what I am, or where I am going, is above my comprehension. I am the watch that runs, but unconscious of itself."
These questions, which we are unable to answer,
"drive us onward to religion; we rush forward to welcome her, for that is our natural tendency. But knowledge comes and we stop short. Instruction and history, you see, are the great enemies of religion, disfigured by the imperfections of humanity.... I once had faith. But when I came to know something, as soon as I began to reason, which happened early, at the age of thirteen, my faith staggered and became uncertain."5108
This double personal conviction is in the back-ground of his thinking, when he drafted the Concordat:
"It will be said that I am a papist.5109 I am nothing. In Egypt I was a Moslem; here I shall be a Catholic, for the good of the people. I do not believe in religions. The idea of a God!" (And then, pointing upward:) "Who made all that?"
Imagination has already decorated this great name with its legends. Let us content ourselves with those already existing; "the restlessness of man" is such that he cannot do without them; in default of those already made he would fashion others, haphazard, and still more strange. The positive religions keep man from going astray; it is these which render the supernatural definite and precise;5110 "he had better catch it there than pick it up at Mademoiselle Lenormand's, or with some fortune-teller or a passing charlatan." An established religion
"is a kind of vaccination which, in satisfying our love of the marvelous, protects us against quacks and sorcerers;5111 the priests are far better than the Cagliostros, Kants, and the rest of the German mystics."
In sum illuminism and metaphysics,5112 speculative inventions of the brain or of a contagious overexcitement of the nervous system, all these illusions of gullible men, are basically unhealthy, and, in general, anti-social. Nevertheless, since they are part of human nature, let us accept them like so many streams tumbling down a slope, but on condition that they remain in their own beds and that they have many but no new ones and never one bed alone for itself.
"I do not want a dominant religion, nor the establishment of new ones. The Catholic, Reformed, and Lutheran systems, established by the Concordat, are sufficient."5113
Their direction and force are intelligible, and their irruptions can be guarded against. Moreover, the present inclinations and configurations of the human soil favor them; the child follows the road marked out by the parent, and the man follows the road marked out when a child.
"Listen,5114 last Sunday, here at Malmaison, while strolling alone in the solitude enjoying the repose of nature, my ear suddenly caught the sound of the church-bell at Rueil. I was moved, so strong is the force of early habits and education! I said to myself, What an impression this must make on simple, credulous people!"
Let us gratify them; let us give back these bells and the rest to the Catholics. After all, the general effect of Christianity is beneficial.
"As far as I am concerned,5115 I do not see in it the mystery of the incarnation, but the mystery of social order, the association of religion with paradise, an idea of equality which keeps the rich from being massacred by the poor."
"Society5116 could not exist without an inequality of fortunes, and an inequality of fortunes without religion.5117 A man dying of starvation alongside of one who has abundance would not yield to this difference unless he had some authority which assured him that God so orders it that there must be both poor and rich in the world, but that in the future, and throughout eternity, the portion of each will be changed.5118"
Alongside of the repressive police exercised by the State there is a preventive police exercised by the Church. The clergy, in its cassock, is an additional spiritual gendarmerie, much more efficient than the temporal gendarmerie in its stout boots, while the essential thing is to make both keep step together in concert.
Between the two domains, between that which belongs to civil authority and that which belongs to religious authority, is there any line of separation?
"I look in vain5119 where to place it; its existence is purely chimerical. I see only clouds, obscurities, difficulties. The civil government condemns a criminal to death; the priest gives him absolution and offers him paradise."
In relation to this act, both powers operate publicly in an inverse sense on the same individual, one with the guillotine and the other with a pardon. As these authorities may clash with each other, let us prevent conflicts and leave no undefined frontier; let us trace this out beforehand; let us indicate what our part is and not allow the Church to encroach on the State.—The Church rally wants all; it is the accessory which she concedes to us, while she appropriates the principal to herself.
"Mark the insolence of the priests5120 who, in sharing authority with what they call the temporal power, reserve to themselves all action on the mind, the noblest part of man, and take it on themselves to reduce my part merely to physical action. They retain the soul and fling me the corpse!"
In antiquity, things were much better done, and are still better done now in Moslem countries.
"In the Roman republic,5121 the senate was the interpreter of heaven, and this was the incentive of the force and strength of that government. In Turkey, and throughout the Orient, the Koran serves as both a civil and religious bible. Only in Christianity do we find the pontificate distinct from the civil government."
And even this has occurred only in one branch of Christianity. Everywhere, except in Catholic countries,
"in England,5122 in Russia, in the northern monarchies, in one part of Germany, the legal union of the two powers, the religious control in the hands of the sovereign, 'is an accomplished fact.' One cannot govern without it; otherwise, the repose, dignity, and independence of a nation are disturbed at every moment."
It is a pity that "the difficulty5123 cannot be overcome as with Henry VIII. in England. The head of the French government would then, by legislative statute, be the supreme head of the French Church."
Unfortunately, this is repugnant to France. Napoleon often tries to bring it about, but is satisfied that in this matter "he would never obtain national cooperation"; once embarked," fully engaged in the enterprise, "the nation would have abandoned him." Unable to take this road, he takes another, which leads to the same result. As he himself afterwards states, this result "was, for a long time and always, the object of his wishes and mediations.... It is not his aim5124 to change the faith of his people; he respects spiritual objects and wants to rule them without meddling with them; his aim is to make these square with his views, with his policy, but only through the influence of temporal concerns." That spiritual authority should remain intact; that it should operate on its own speculative domain, that it to say, on dogmas, and on its practical domain, namely, on the sacraments and on worship; that is should be sovereign on this limited territory, Napoleon admits, for such is the fact. We have only to open our eyes to see it; right or wrong, spiritual authority on this distinct domain is recognized sovereign, obeyed, effective through the persistent, verified loyalty of believers. It cannot be done away with by supposing it non-existent; on the contrary, a competent statesman will maintain it in order to make use of it and apply it to civil purposes. Like an engineer who comes across a prolific spring near his factory, he will not try to dry it up, nor let the water be dispersed and lost; he has no idea of letting it remain inactive; on the contrary, he collects it, digs channels for it, directs and economizes the flow, and renders the water serviceable in his workshops. In the Catholic Church, the authority to be won and utilized is that of the clergy over believers and that of the sovereign pontiff over the clergy.
"You will see," exclaimed Bonaparte, while negotiating the Concordat, "how I will turn the priests to account, and, first of all, the Pope!"5125
III. Dealing with the Pope.
Services which he obliges the Pope to render.—Resignation
or dismissal of the old bishops.—End of the constitutional
Church.—Right of appointing bishops and of sanctioning
curés given to the First Consul.
"Had no Pope existed," he says again,5126 "it would have been necessary to create him for the occasion, in the same way that the Roman consuls appointed a dictator for difficult circumstances." Only such a dictator could effect the coup d'état which the First Consul needed, in order to constitute the head of the new government a patron of the Catholic Church, to bring independent or refractory priests under subjection, to sever the canonical cord which bound the French clergy to its exiled superiors and to the old order of things, "to break the last thread by which the Bourbons still communicated with the country." "Fifty émigré5127 bishops in the pay of England now lead the French clergy. Their influence must be got rid of, and to do this the authority of the Pope is essential; he can dismiss or make them resign." Should any of them prove obstinate and unwilling to descend from their thrones, their refusal brings them into discredit, and they are "designated5128 as rebels who prefer the things of this world, their terrestrial interests to the interests of heaven and the cause of God." The great body of the clergy along with their flocks will abandon them; they will soon be forgotten, like old sprouts transplanted whose roots have been cut off; they will die abroad, one by one, while the successor, who is now in office, will find no difficulty in rallying the obedient around him, for, being Catholic, his parishioners are so many sheep, docile, taken with externals, impressionable, and ready to follow the pastoral croisier, provided it bears the ancient trademark, consists of the same material, is of the same form, conferred from on high and sent from Rome. The bishops having once been consecrated by the Pope, nobody save a Gregory or some antiquarian canonist will dispute their jurisdiction.
The ecclesiastical ground is thus cleared through the interposition of the Pope. The three groups of authorities thereon which contend with each other for the possession of consciences5129—the refugee bishops in England, the apostolic vicars, and the constitutional clergy— disappear, and now the cleared ground can be built on. "The Catholic religion being declared5130 that of the majority of the French people, its services must now be regulated. The First Consul nominates fifty bishops whom the Pope consecrates. These appoint the curés, and the state pays their salaries. The latter may be sworn, while the priests who do not submit are sent out of the country. Those who preach against the government are handed over to their superiors for punishment. The Pope confirms the sale of clerical possessions; he consecrates the Republic." The faithful no longer regard it askance. They feel that they are not only tolerated, but protected by it, and they are grateful.5131 The people recover their churches, their curés, the forms of worship to which they are almost instinctively accustomed, the ceremonial which, to their imagination, belongs to every important act of their lives, the solemn rites of marriage, baptism, burial, and other sacramental offices.—Henceforth mass is said every Sunday in each village, and the peasants enjoy their processions on Corpus-Christi day, when their crops are blessed. A great public want is satisfied. Discontent subsides, ill-will dies out, the government has fewer enemies; its enemies, again, lose their best weapon, and, at the same time, it acquires an admirable one, the right of appointing bishops and of sanctioning the curés. By virtue of the Concordat and by order of the Pope, not only, in 1801, do all former spiritual authorities cease to exist, but again, after 1801, all new titularies, with the Pope's assent, chosen, accepted, managed, disciplined,5132 and paid by the First Consul, are, in fact, his creatures, and become his functionaries.
IV. The Pope, Napoleon's employee.
Other services expected of the Pope.—Coronation of Napoleon
at Notre-Dame.—Napoleonic theory of the Empire and the Holy
See.—The Pope a feudatory and subject of the Emperor.
—The pope installed as a functionary at Paris, and
arch-chancellor on spiritual matters.—Effect of this for Italy.
Over and above this positive and real service obtained from the sovereign pontiff, he awaits others yet more important and undefined, and principally his future coronation in Notre Dame. Already, during the negotiations for the Concordat, La Fayette had observed to him with a smile:5133 "You want the holy oil dropped on your head"; to which he made no contradictory answer. On the contrary, he replied, and probably too with a smile: "We shall see! We shall see!" Thus does he think ahead, and his ideas extend beyond that which a man belonging to the ancient régime could imagine or divine, even to the reconstruction of the empire of the west as this existed in the year 800. "I am not Louis XIV.'s successor," he soon declares,5134 "but of Charlemagne.... I am Charlemagne, because, like Charlemagne, I unite the French crown to that of the Lombards, and my empire borders on the Orient." In this conception, which a remote history furnishes to his boundless ambition, the terrible antiquitarian finds the gigantic and suitable framework, the potent, specious terms, and all the verbal reasons he requires. Under Napoleon, the successor of Charlemagne, the Pope can be only a vassal: "Your Holiness is the sovereign of Rome, but I am its emperor," the legitimate suzerain. "Provided with "fiefs and counties" by this suzerain, the Pope owes him political fealty and military aid; failing in this, the endowment, which is conditional, lapses and his confiscated estates return to the imperial domain to which they have never ceased to belong.5135 Through this reasoning and this threat, through the rudest and most adroit moral and physical pressure, the most insidious and most persevering, through spoliation, begun, continued and completed by the abduction, captivity and sequestration of the Holy Father himself, he undertakes the subjection of the spiritual power: not only must the Pope be like any other individual in the empire,5136 subject by his residence to territorial laws, and hence to the government and the gendarmerie, but again he must come within the administrative lines; he will no longer enjoy the right of refusing canonical investiture to bishops appointed by the emperor,5137 "he will, on his coronation, swear not to take any measures against the four propositions of the Gallican Church,"5138 he will become a grand functionary, a sort of arch-chancellor like Cambacérès and Lebrun, the arch chancellor of the Catholic cult.—Undoubtedly, he resists and is obstinate, but he is not immortal, and if he does not yield, his successor will: it suffices to choose one that is manageable, and to this end things work in the next conclave.
"With my influence and our forces in Italy," Napoleon says afterwards,5139 "I did not despair, sooner or later, by one means or another, of obtaining for myself the control of the Pope, and, thenceforward, what an influence, what a lever on the opinion of the rest of the world!"
"Had I returned victorious from Moscow, I intended to exalt the Pope beyond measure, to surround him with pomp and deference. I would have brought him to no longer regretting his temporality; I would have made him an idol. He would have lived alongside of me. Paris would have become the capital of Christendom, and I would have governed the religious world the same as the political world.... I would have had my religious as well as legislative sessions; my councils would have represented Christianity; the Popes would have been merely their presidents. I would have opened and closed these assemblies, sanctioned and published their decrees, as was done by Constantine and Charlemagne." In 1809, the restoration of the great Carlovingian and Roman edifice had begun; its physical foundations were laid. By virtue of a decree,5140 "the expenses of the Sacred College and of the Propaganda were declared imperial." The Pope, like the new dukes and marshals, was endowed with a landed income on "property in different parts of the empire, two millions of rural revenue free of all taxation. "Necessarily" the Pope must have two palaces, one at Paris and the other at Rome. He is already nearly fully installed in Paris, his person being all that was lacking. On arriving from Fontainebleau, two hours off, he would find everything belonging to his office; "the papers5141 of the missions and the archives of Rome were already there." "The Hôtel Dieu was entirely given up to the departments of the court of Rome. The district around Notre Dame and the Ile Saint-Louis was to be the headquarters of Christendom!" Rome, the second center of Christendom, and the second residence of the Pope, is declared5142 "an imperial and free city, the second city of the empire"; a prince of the empire, or other grand dignitary, is to reside there and "hold the court of the emperor." "After their coronation in the cathedral of Notre Dame at Paris, the emperors" will go to Italy before the tenth year of their reign, and be "crowned in the church of St. Peter at Rome." The heir to the imperial throne "will bear the title and receive the honors of the King of Rome." Observe the substantial features of this chimerical construction. Napoleon, far more Italian than French, Italian by race, instinct, imagination, and souvenirs, considers in his plan the future of Italy, and, on casting up the final accounts of his reign, we find that the net profit is for Italy and the net loss is for France. "Napoleon wanted to create the Italian kingdom over again,5143 combining Piedmont, Tuscany, etc., in one united independent nation, bounded by the Alps and the sea.... This was to be the immortal trophy erected in his honor.... He awaited impatiently the birth of a second son that he might take him to Rome, crown him King of Italy and proclaim the independence of the great peninsula under the regency of Prince Eugene." Since Theodoric and the Lombard kings, it is the Pope who, in preserving his temporal sovereignty and spiritual omnipotence, has maintained the sub-divisions of Italy; let this obstacle be removed and Italy will once more become a nation. Napoleon prepares the way, and constitutes it beforehand by restoring the Pope to his primitive condition, by withdrawing from him his temporal sovereignty and limiting his spiritual omnipotence, by reducing him to the position of managing director of Catholic consciences and head minister of the principal cult authorized in the empire.
V. State domination of all religion.
Services which Napoleon desires or expects from the French
clergy.—His Roman idea of civil power.—Development of this
conception by the jurists.—Every religious association must
be authorized.—Legal statutes which fix the doctrine and
discipline of the four authorized Churches.—Legal
organization of the Catholic Church.—Its doctrine and
discipline to be that of the old Gallican Church.—New
situation of the French Church and new rôle of civil power.
—It sets aside its ancient obligations.—It retains and
augments its regalian rights.—The Church of France before
1789 and after 1802.—Increased preponderance and complete
dominion of the civil power.
In carrying out this plan, he will use the French clergy in mastering the Pope, as the Pope has been made use of in mastering the French clergy. To this end, before completing the Concordat and decreeing the Organic Articles, he orders for himself a small library, consisting of books on ecclesiastical law. The Latin works of Bossuet are translated for him, and he has drawn up an exposition of the Gallican parliamentary doctrine. The first thing is to go down to the roots of the subject, which he does with extraordinary facility, and then, recasting and shaping all theories to suit himself, he arrives at an original, individual conception, at once coherent, precise, and practical; one which covers the Cæsar and which he applies alike to all churches, Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, and even Jewish, to every religious community now existing and in time to come. His master-idea is that of the Roman legists and of ancient imperial jurisprudence; here, as elsewhere, the modern Cæsar goes back beyond his Christian predecessors to Constantine, and farther still, to Trajan and Augustus.5144 So long as belief remains silent and solitary, confined within the limits of individual conscience, it is free, and the State has nothing to do with it. But let it transgress these limits, address the public, bring people together in crowds for a common purpose, manifest itself openly, it is subject to control; forms of worship, ceremonies, preaching, instruction and propaganda, the donations it calls forth, the assemblies it convenes, the organization and maintenance of the bodies it engenders, all the positive applications of the inward reverie, are temporal works. In this sense, they form a province of the public domain, and come within the competency of the government, of the administration and of the courts. The State has a right to interdict, to tolerate, or to authorize them, and always to give them proper direction. Sole and universal proprietor of the outward realm in which single consciences may communicate with each other, it intervenes, step by step, either to trace or to bar the way; the road they follow passes over its ground and belongs to it; its watch, accordingly, over their proceedings is, and should be, daily; and it maintains this watch for its own advantage, for the advantage of civil and political interests, in such a way that concern for the other world may be serviceable and not prejudicial to matters which belong to this one. In short, and as a summary, the First Consul says, in a private conversation:
"The people want a religion, and this religion should be in the hands of the government!"5145
On this theme, his jurists, old parliamentarians or conventionalists, his ministers and counselors, Gallicans or Jacobins, his spokesmen in the legislative assembly or the tribunate, all imbued with Roman law or with the Contrat Social are capital megaphones for proclaiming the omnipotence of the State in polished sentences. "The unity of public power and its universality," says Portalis,5146 "are a necessary consequence of its independence." "Public power must be self-sufficient; it is nothing if not all..." Public power cannot tolerate rivals; it cannot allow other powers to establish themselves alongside of it without its consent, perhaps to sap and weaken it. "The authority of a State might become precarious if men on its territory exercise great influence over minds and consciences, unless these men belong to it, at least in some relation." It is careless "if it remains unfamiliar or indifferent to the form and the constitution of the government which proposes to govern souls," if it admits that the limits within which the faith and obedience of believers "can be made or altered without its support, if it has not, in its legally recognized and avowed superiors, guarantees of the fidelity of inferiors." Such was the rule in France for the Catholic cult previous to 1789, and such is to be the rule, after 1801, for all authorized cults. If the State authorizes them, it is "to direct such important institutions with a view to the greatest public utility." Solely because it is favorable to "their doctrine and their discipline" it means to maintain these intact and prevent "their ministers from corrupting the doctrine entrusted to their teaching, or from arbitrarily throwing off the yoke of discipline, to the great prejudice of individuals and the State."5147 Hence, in the legal statute by which a Church is incorporated and realizes what she is, it states in precise terms what it exacts or permits her to be; henceforward she shall be this or that and so remain; her dogmas and her canons, her hierarchy and her internal regime, her territorial subdivisions and circumscriptions, her regular or casual sources of income, her teachings and her liturgy are definite things and fixed limitations. No ecclesiastical assembly, Protestant, Catholic, or Israelite, shall formulate or publish any doctrinal or disciplinary decision without the government's approbation.5148 No ecclesiastical assembly, Protestant, Catholic, or Israelite, shall be held without the approval of the government. All sacerdotal authorities, bishops and curés, pastors and ministers of both Protestant confessions, consistorial inspectors and presidents of the Augsbourg Confession, notables of each Israelite circumscription, members of each Israelite consistory, members of the central Israelite consistory, rabbis and grand-rabbis, shall be appointed or accepted by the government and paid by it through an executory" decision of its prefects. All the professors of Protestant or Catholic seminaries shall be appointed and paid by the government. Whatever the seminary, whether Protestant or Catholic, its establishment, its regulations, its internal management, the object and spirit of its studies, shall be submitted to the approval of the government. In each cult, a distinct, formulated, official doctrine shall govern the teaching, preaching, and public or special instruction of every kind; this, for the Israelite cult, is" the doctrine expressed by the decisions of the grand Sanhedrin";5149 for the two Protestant cults, the doctrine of the Confession of Augsbourg, taught in the two seminaries of the East, and the doctrine of the Reformed Church taught in the Genevan seminary;5150 for the Catholic cult, the maxims of the Gallican Church, the declaration, in 1682, of the assembly of the clergy5151 and the four famous propositions depriving the Pope of any authority over sovereigns in temporal matters, subordinating the Pope to ecumenical councils in ecclesiastical and spiritual concerns, and which, in the government of the French Church, limit the authority of the Pope to ancient usages or canons inherited by that Church and accepted by the State.
In this way, the ascendancy of the State, in ecclesiastical matters, increases beyond all measure and remains without any counterpoise. Instead of one Church, it maintains four, while the principal one, the Catholic, comprising 33 million followers, and more dependent than under the old monarchy, loses the privileges which once limited or compensated it for its subjection.—Formerly the prince was its temporal head, on condition that he should be its exterior arm, that it should have the monopoly of education and the censorship of books, that he should use his strong arm against heretics, schismatics and free-thinkers. Of all these obligations which kings accepted, the new sovereign frees himself, and yet, with the Holy See, he holds on to the same prerogatives and, with the Church, the same rights as his predecessors. He is just as minutely dictatorial as formerly with regard to the details of worship. Sometimes he fixes the fees and perquisites of the priests for administering the sacraments: "This charge is a purely civil and temporal operation, since it resolves itself into a levy of so many pence on the citizen. Bishops and priests should not be allowed to decide here.5152 The government alone must remain the arbiter between the priest who receives and the person who pays." Sometimes, he intervenes in the publication of plenary indulgence: "It is essential5153 that indulgences should not be awarded for causes which might be contrary to public order or to the welfare of the country; the political magistrate is equally interested in knowing what the authority is that grants indulgences; if its title to act is legal, to what persons indulgences are granted, what persons are entrusted with their distribution, and what persons are to fix the term and duration of extraordinary prayers."—Thus bound and held by the State, the Church is simply one of its appendices, for its own free roots by which, in this close embrace, it still vegetates and keeps erect have all been cut off short; torn from the soil and grafted on the State, they derive their sap and their roots from the civil powers. Before 1789, the clergy formed a distinct order in temporal society and, above all others, a body possessing property and exempt from taxes, a tax-payer apart which, represented in periodical assemblies, negotiated every five years with the King himself, granted him subsidies and, in exchange for this "disinterested gift," secured for itself concessions or confirmations of immunities, prerogatives and favors. Today, it is merely a collection of ordinary individuals and subjects, even less than that—an administrative staff similar to that of the university, of the magistrature, of the treasury, and of the woods and forests, even more closely watched and bridled, with more detailed precautions and stricter interdictions. Before 1789, the curés and other second-class officials were, for the most part, selected and installed without the prince's intervention, sometimes by the bishop of the diocese or a neighboring abbé, sometimes by independent collators, by the titular himself,5154 by a lay patron or a chapter, by a commune, by an indultaire, by the pope, while the salary of each titular, large or small, was his private property, the annual product of a piece of land or of some indebtedness attached to his office and which he administered. Nowadays, every incumbent, from the cardinal-archbishop down to a canon, cantonal curé, and director or teacher in a seminary, is appointed or accepted by the civil power to which he swears fidelity. His salary, set down in the budget, is simply that of a public employee, so many francs and centimes for which he comes monthly to the office of the treasury paymaster, along with others of his colleagues who are employed by the State in non-Catholic cults, together with others, his quasi-colleagues, whom the State employs in the university, in the magistrature, in the gendarmerie, and in the police.5155 Such, in all branches of social life, is the universal and final effect of the Revolution. In the Church, as elsewhere, it has extended the interference and preponderance of the State, not inadvertently but intentionally, not accidentally but on principle.5156 "The Constituent" (Assembly), says Siméon, "had rightly recognized that, religion being one of the oldest and most powerful means of government, it was necessary to bring it more than it had been under the control of the government." Hence, the civil constitution of the clergy; "its only mistake was not to reconcile itself with the Pope." At present, thanks to the agreement between Pope and government (Napoleon, First Consul), the new régime completes the work of the ancient régime and, in the Church as elsewhere, the domination of the centralizing State is complete.
VI. Napoleon Executes the Concordat.
Reasons for suppressing the regular clergy.—Authorized
religious associations.—The authorization revocable.
These are the grand lines of the new ecclesiastical establishment, and the general connections by which the Catholic Church, like an apartment in a building, finds itself included in and incorporated with the State. It need not disconnect itself under the pretext of making itself more complete; there it is, built and finished; it cannot add to or go beyond this; no collateral and supplementary constructions are requisite which, through their independence, would derange the architectural whole, no monastic congregations, no body of regular clergy; the secular clergy suffices. "Never5157 has it been contested that the public power had the right to dissolve arbitrary institutions which do not insist on the essence of religion and which are judged suspicious or troublesome to the State." As a principle, all religious communities should be judged in this way; for they are spontaneous bodies; they form their own organization, and without the aid of the State, through the free will of their members; they live apart, according to the proper and peculiar statute which they adopt, outside of lay society, alongside of the established Church, under distinct chiefs chosen by themselves, sometimes under foreign ones, all more or less independent, all, through interest and by instinct, gathered around the Holy See, which, against diocesan authority and episcopal jurisdiction, serves them as protector. Formerly, the monks5158 formed the Pope's militia; they recognized no other sovereign, and thus were they more to be feared by governments than the secular clergy. The latter, without them, "would never have caused embarrassment;" henceforth there will be no other body.5159 "I want bishops, curés, vicars, and that's all! Religious communities have been allowed to re-establish themselves against my instructions;—I am informed that, at Beauvais, the Jesuits have formed establishments under the name of the Fathers of Faith. It should not be allowed"—and he prohibits it by decree.5160 He dissolves "all associations formed under the pretext of religion and unauthorized." He decides that, in future, "no aggregation or association of men or of women shall be formed under pretext of religion unless formally authorized;" he enjoins the prosecuting attorneys of his courts "to prosecute even by extra proceedings all persons of both sexes who directly or indirectly violate this decree." He reserves to himself, however, the faculty of authorizing communities by which he can profit, and, in fact, he authorizes several of these as instruments which society needs, or which are useful to the State, especially nursing or teaching sisters of charity,5161 the brethren of Christian schools,5162 and, first in rank, the Lazarists and the Fathers of foreign missions.5163 "These monks," he says,5164 will be of great service in Asia, in Africa, and in America. I will send them to procure information on the state of the country. Their robe protects them, while it is a cover to political and commercial designs.... I will allow them a capital to start with of 15,000 francs rental.... They cost little, are respected by savages, and, having no official character, can not compromise the government." Moreover, "religious zeal leads them to undertake work and to face perils which are beyond the strength of a civil agent."—Of course, as they are "secret diplomatic agents," the government must keep them in hand and direct them. Consequently, "their superior must no longer reside in Rome, but at Paris." The same precaution is taken with reference to other congregations, which, in teaching or in charity, become regular auxiliaries of the lay power. "The general-superior of the Sisters of Charity will live in Paris5165; the entire body will then be in the hands of the government." As to the brethren of the Christian schools, Napoleon absorbs these in his university.5166 "They must be licensed by the grand-master,5167 who will certify to their internal regulations, accept their oaths, prescribe a special costume, and superintend their schools." Observe the exigencies of the government at this point, its measures for controlling the religious orders authorized by it. Abbé Hanon,5168 the common superior of the Sisters of Saint-Vincent de Paul, having refused to place Madame Lætitia (Napoleon's mother) at the head of the council of the order, is carried off at night and shut up at Fenestrelles,5169 while the Sisters, who, following the instructions of their founder, refuse to recognize a superior appointed by the civil power, are treated in the same manner as formerly the nuns of Port-Royal.5170
"It is time to put an end to this scandal of the Sisters of Charity in rebellion against their superiors. It is my intention to suppress all the houses which, in twenty-four hours after the notice you give them, do not return to subordination. You will replace the houses suppressed, not by Sisters of the same order, but by those of another order of charity. The Sisters at Paris will lose their influence, which will be a good thing."
Whatever the communities may be, the authorization by which they organize is merely a favor, and every favor granted may be withdrawn.
"I will have no more missions of any kind.5171 I established missionaries in Paris and gave them a house: I cancel it all. I am content with religion at home; I do not care to spread it abroad... . I make you responsible if (in a month from this) on the first of October there are any missions or congregations still existing in France."—
Thus does the regular clergy live, under a revocable title, by toleration, despotically, suspended by a thread which, perhaps to- morrow, may be cut at the masters pleasure.
VII. System to which the regular clergy is subject.
System to which the regular clergy is subject.—Restoration
and application of Gallican doctrines.—Gallicanism and
submission of the new ecclesiastical staff.—Measures taken
to insure the obedience of the existing clergy and that of
the clergy in the future.—Seminaries.—Small number of
these allowed.—Conditions granted to them.—Proceedings
against suspicious teachers and undisciplined pupils.
The secular clergy remains, better protected, it seems, and by a less precarious statute, for this statute is an international and diplomatic act, a solemn and bilateral treaty which binds the French government, not only to itself but to another government, to an independent sovereign and the recognized head of the whole Catholic Church.—Consequently, it is of prime importance to rebuild and raise higher the barriers which, in ancient France, separated the secular clergy from the Pope, the customs and regulations which constituted the Gallican Church a province apart in the Church universal, the ecclesiastic franchises and servitudes which restricted the Pope's jurisdiction in order that the jurisdiction of the king might be extended. All these servitudes to the advantage of the lay sovereign, and all these franchises to the prejudice of the ecclesiastic sovereign, are maintained and increased by the new statute. By virtue of the Concordat and by consent of the Pope, the First Consul acquires the same rights and privileges in relation to the Holy See as the old government,"5172 that is to say the same exclusive right to nominate future French cardinals and to have as many as before in the sacred college, the same right to exclude in the sacred conclave, the same faculty of being the unique dispenser in France of high ecclesiastical places and the prerogative of appointing all the bishops and archbishops on French territory. And better still, by virtue of the Organic Articles and in spite of the Pope's remonstrances, he interposes, as with the former kings, his authority, his Council of State and his tribunals between the Holy See and the faithful. "No bull, brief, rescript, decree... of the court of Rome, even when bearing only on individuals, shall be received, published, printed or otherwise executed without permission of the government. No person, bearing the title of apostolic nuncio, legate, vicar or commissioner, ... shall, without the same authorization, exercise on the French soil or elsewhere any function in relation to the interests of the Gallican Church.... All cases of complaint by ecclesiastical superiors and other persons shall be brought before the Council of State."5173 Every minister of a cult5174 who shall have carried on a correspondence with a foreign court on religious matters or questions without having previously informed the Minister of Worship and obtained his sanction shall, for this act alone, be subject to a penalty of from one hundred to five hundred francs and imprisonment during a term of from one month to two years. Every communication from high to low and from low to high between the French Church and its Roman head, cut off at will, intervention by a veto or by approval of all acts of pontifical authority, to be the legal and recognized head of the national clergy,5175 to become for this clergy an assistant, collateral, and lay Pope—such was the pretension of the old government, and such, in effect, is the sense, the juridical bearing, of the Gallican maxims.5176 Napoleon pro-claims them anew, while the edict of 1682, by which Louis XIV. applied them with precision, rigor and minuteness, "is declared the general law of the empire."5177
There are no opponents to this doctrine, or this use of it, in France. Napoleon counts on not encountering any, and especially among his prelates. Gallican before 1789, the whole clergy were more or less so through education and tradition, through interest and through pride; now, the survivors of this clergy are those who provide the new ecclesiastical staff, and, of the two distinct groups from which it is recruited, neither is predisposed by its antecedents to become ultramontane. Some among these, who have emigrated, partisans of the ancient régime, find no difficulty in thus returning to old habits and doctrines, the authoritative protectorate of the State over the Church, the interference of the Emperor substituted for that of the King, and Napoleon, in this as in other respects, the legitimate, or legitimated, successor of the Bourbons. The others, who have sworn to the civil constitution of the clergy, the schismatics, the impenitent and, in spite of the Pope, reintegrated by the First Consul in the Church,5178 are ill-disposed towards the Pope, their principal adversary, and well-disposed towards the First Consul, their unique patron. Hence, "the heads5179 of the Catholic clergy, that is to say, the bishops and grand-vicars,... are attached to the government;" they are "enlightened" people, and can be made to listen to reason.
"But we have three or four thousand curés or vicars, the progeny of ignorance and dangerous through their fanaticism and their passions."
If these and their superiors show any undisciplined tendencies, the curb must be tightly drawn. Fournier, a priest, having reflected on the government from his pulpit in Saint-Roch, is arrested by the police, put in Bicêtre as mad,5180 and the First Consul replies to the Paris clergy who claim his release "in a well-drawn-up petition,":
"I wanted5181 to prove to you, when I put my cap on the wrong side out, that priests must obey the civil power."
Now and then, a rude stroke of this sort sets an example and keeps the intractable on the right path who would otherwise be tempted to leave it. At Bayonne, concerning a clerical epistle in which an ill-sounding phrase occurs, "the grand-vicar who drew it up is sent to Pignerol for ten years, and I think that the bishop is exiled."5182
At Séez, when constitutional priests are in disfavor, the bishop is compelled to resign on the instant, while Abbé Langlois, his principal counsellor, taken by the gendarmes, led to Paris from police station to police station, is shut up in La Force, in secret confinement, with straw for a bed, during fourteen days, then imprisoned in Vincennes for nine months, so that, finally, seized with paralysis, he is transferred to an insane retreat, where he remains a prisoner up to the end of the reign.
Let us provide for the future as well as for the present, and, beyond the present clergy, let us train the future clergy. The seminaries will answer this purpose: "Public ones must be organized5183 so that there may be no clandestine seminaries, such as formerly existed in the departments of Calvados, Morbihan and many others;... the formation of young priests must not be left to ignorance and fanaticism."—"Catholic schools need the surveillance of the government."—There is to be one of these in each metropolitan district, and "this special school must be in the hands of the authorities."—"The directors and teachers shall be appointed by the First Consul"; men will be placed there who are "cultivated, devoted to the government and friendly to toleration; they will not confine themselves to teaching theology, but will add to this a sort of philosophy and correct worldliness."—A future curé, a priest who controls laymen and belongs to his century, must not be a monk belonging to the other world, but a man of this world, able to adapt himself to it, do his duty in it with propriety and discretion, accept the legal establishment of which he is a part, not damn his Protestant neighbors, Jews or freethinkers too openly, be a useful member of temporal society and a loyal subject of the civil power; let him be a Catholic and pious, but within just limits; he shall not be an ultramontanist or a bigot.—Precautions are taken to this effect. No seminarist may become subdeacon without the consent of the government, and the list of ordinations each year, sent to him at Paris by the bishop, is returned, cut down to the strictly necessary.5184 From the very beginning, and in express terms,5185 Napoleon has reserved all curacies and vicarages for "ecclesiastics pensioned by virtue of the laws of the Constituent Assembly." Not only, through this confusion between pension and salary, does he lighten a pecuniary burden, but he greatly prefers old priests to young ones; many of them have been constitutionnels, and all are imbued with Gallicanism; it is he who has brought them back from exile or saved them from oppression, and they are grateful for it; having suffered long and patiently, they are weary, they must have grown wiser, and they will be manageable. Moreover, he has precise information about each one; their past conduct is a guarantee of their future conduct; he never chooses one of them with his eyes shut. On the contrary, the candidates for ordination are strangers, the government which accepts them knows nothing about them except that, at the age when the fever of growth or of the imagination takes a fixed form, they have been subject for five years to a theological education and to a cloistral life. The chances are that, with them, the feverishness of youth will end in the heat of conviction and in the prejudices of inexperience; in this event, the government which exempts them from the conscription to admit them in the Church exchanges a good military recruit for a bad ecclesiastical recruit; in place of a servant it creates an opponent. Hence, during the fifteen years of his reign, Napoleon authorizes only six thousand new ordinations,5186 in all four hundred per annum, one hundred for each diocese or six or seven per annum. Meanwhile, by his university decrees, he lets lay daylight into clerical enclosures5187 and shuts the door of all ecclesiastical dignities to suspicious priests.5188 For more security, in every diocese in which "the principles of the bishop" do not give him full satisfaction, he prohibits all ordination, nomination, promotion, or favor whatever. "I have stricken off5189 all demands relating to the bishoprics of Saint-Brieuc, Bordeaux, Ghent, Tournay, Troyes and the Maritime Alps.... My intention is that you do not, for these dioceses, propose to me any exemption of service for conscripts, no nominations for scholarships, for curacies, or for canonries. You will send in a report on the dioceses which it would be well to strike with this ban." Towards the end, the Gallicism of Bossuet no longer suffices for him; he allowed it to be taught at Saint-Sulpice, and M. Emery, director of this institution, was the priest in France whom he esteemed the most and most willingly consulted; but a pupil's imprudent letter had been just intercepted, and, accordingly, the spirit of that association is a bad one. An order of expulsion of the director is issued and the installation in his place of a new one "day after to-morrow," as well as new administrators of whom none shall be Sulpician.5190 "Take measures to have this congregation dissolved. I will have no Sulpicians in the seminary of Paris.5191 Let me know the seminaries that are served by Sulpicians in order that they too may be sent away from these seminaries."5192—And let the seminarists who have been badly taught by their masters take heed not to practice in their own behalf the false doctrines which the State proscribes; especially, let them never undertake, as they do in Belgium, to disobey the civil power in deference to the Pope and their bishop. At Tournay,5193 all those over eighteen years of age are sent to Magdebourg; at Ghent, the very young or those not fit for military service are put in Saint-Pelagie; the rest, two hundred and thirty-six in number, including forty deacons or sub-deacons, incorporated in an artillery brigade, set out for Wesel, a country of marshes and fevers, where fifty of them soon die of epidemics and contagion.—There is ever the same terminal procedure; to Abbé d'Astros, suspected of having received and kept a letter of the Pope, Napoleon, with threats, gave him this ecclesiastical watchword:
"I have heard that the liberties of the Gallican Church are being taught: but for all that, I wear the sword, so watch out!"
So behind all his institutions one discovers the military sanction, the arbitrary punishment, physical constraint, the sword ready to strike; involuntarily, the eyes anticipates the flash of the blade, and the flesh is feels in advance the rigid incision of the steel.
VIII. Administrative Control.
Changes in the ecclesiastical hierarchy.—Motives for
subordinating the lesser clergy.—The displacement of
assistant priests.—Increase of episcopal authority.—Hold
of Napoleon over the bishops.
Thus is a conquered country treated. He is, in relation to the Church, as in a conquered country.5194 Like Westphalia or Holland, she is a naturally independent country which he has annexed by treaty, which he has been able to include but not absorb in his empire, and which remains invincibly distinct. The temporal sovereign, in a spiritual society, especially such a sovereign as he is,—nominally Catholic, scarcely Christian, at best a deist and from time to time as it suits,—will never be other than an external suzerain and a foreign prince. To become and remain master in such an annexed country it is always advisable to exhibit the sword. Nevertheless, it would not be wise to strike incessantly; the blade, used too often, would wear out; it is better to utilize the constitution of the annex, rule over it indirectly, not by an administrative bureau (régie), but by a protectorate, in which all indigenous authorities can be employed and be made responsible for the necessary rigors. Now, by virtue of the indigenous constitution, the governors of the Catholic annex—all designated beforehand by their suitable and indelible character, all tonsured, robed in black, celibates and speaking Latin—form two orders, unequal in dignity and in number; one inferior, comprising myriads of curés and vicars, and the other superior, comprising some dozens of prelates.
Let us turn this ready-made hierarchy to account; and, the better to use it, let us tighten the strings. In agreement with the upper clergy and the Pope, we will increase the subjection of the lower clergy; we will govern the inferiors through the superiors; whoever has the head has the body; it is much easier to handle sixty bishops and archbishops than forty thousand vicars and curés; in this particular we need not undertake to restore primitive discipline; we must not be either antiquaries or Gallicans. Let us be careful not to give back to the second-class clergy the independence and stability they enjoyed before 1789, the canonical guarantees which protected them against episcopal despotism, the institution of competition, the rights conferred by theological grades, the bestowal of the best places on the wisest, the appeal to the diocesan court in case of disgrace, the opposing plea before the officialité, the permanent tie by which the titular curé, once planted in his parish, took root there for life, and believed himself bound to his local community like Jesus Christ to the universal Church, indissolubly, through a sort of mystic marriage. "The number of curés," says Napoleon,5195 "must be reduced as much as possible, and the number of assistants (desservans) multiplied who can be changed at will," not only transferable to another parish, but revocable from day to day, without formalities or delay, without appeal or pleading in any court whatsoever. Henceforth, the sole irremovable curés are the four thousand; the rest, under the name of succursalists, numbering thirty thousand,5196 are ecclesiastical clerks, surrendered to the discretionary power of the bishop. The bishop alone appoints, places and displaces all belonging to his diocese at his pleasure, and with a nod, he transfers the most competent from the best to the worst post, from the large borough or small town, where he was born and has lived at ease near his family, to some wretched parish in this or that village buried in the woods or lost on a mountain, without income or presbytery; and still better, he cuts down his wages, he withdraws the State salary of five hundred francs, he turns him out of the lodgings allowed him by the commune, on foot on the highway, with no viaticum, even temporary, excluded from ecclesiastical ministries, without respect, demeaned, a vagabond in the great lay world whose ways are unknown to him and whose careers are closed to him. Henceforth, and forever, bread is taken out of his mouth; if he has it to-day, it is lacking on the morrow. Now, every three months, the list of succursalists at five hundred francs drawn up by the bishop, must be countersigned by the prefect. In his upper cabinet, near the mantelpiece on which the visiting-cards of every considerable personage in the department are displayed, facing the emperor's bust, the two delegates of the emperor, his two responsible and judicial managers, the two superintended overseers of the conscription, confer together on the ecclesiastical staff of the department. In this as in other matters, they are and feel themselves kept in check from on high, curbed and forced, willingly or not, to come to some agreement. Compulsory collaborators by institution, each an auxiliary of the other in the maintenance of public order, they read over article by article the list of appointments of their common subordinates; should any name have bad notes, should any succursalist be marked as noisy, undesirable, or suspect, should there be any unfavorable report by the mayor, gendarmerie or upper police, the prefect, about to sign, lays down his pen, quotes his instructions and demands of the bishop against the delinquent some repressive measure, either destitution, suspension or displacement, removal to an inferior parish, or, at least, a comminatory reprimand, while the bishop, whom the prefect may denounce to the minister, does not refuse to the prefect this act of complacency.
Some months after the publication of the Concordat,5197 Mademoiselle Chameron, an opera-dancer, dies, and her friends bear her remains to the church of Saint-Roch for internment. They are refused admittance, and the curé, very rigid, "in a fit of ill-humor," orders the doors of the church to be shut; a crowd gathers around, shouts and launches threats at the curé; an actor makes a speech to appease the tumult, and finally the coffin is borne off to the church of Les Filles-Saint-Thomas, where the assistant priest, "familiar with the moral of the gospel," performs the funeral service. Incidents of this kind disturb the tranquility of the streets and denote a relaxation of administrative discipline. Consequently the government, doctor in theology and canon law, intervenes and calls the ecclesiastical superior to account. The first Consul, in an article in the Moniteur, haughtily gives the clergy their instructions and explains the course that will be pursued against them by his prelates. "The Archbishop of Paris orders the curé of Saint-Roch into retirement for three months, in order that he may bear in mind the injunction of Jesus Christ to pray for one's enemies, and, made sensible of his duties by meditation, may become aware that these superstitious customs..., which degrade religion by their absurdities, have been done away with by the Concordat and the law of Germinal 18." From now on all priests and curés are prudent, circumspect, obedient, and reserved,5198 because their spiritual superiors are so as well, and could not be otherwise. Each prelate, posted in his diocese, is maintained there in isolation; a watch is kept on his correspondence; he may communicate with the Pope only through the Minister of Worship; he has no right to act in concert with his colleagues; all the general assemblies of the clergy, all metropolitan councils, all annual synods are suppressed. The Church of France has ceased to exist as one corps, while its members, carefully detached from each other and from their Roman head, are no longer united, but juxtaposed. Confined to a circumscription, like the prefect, the bishop himself is simply an ecclesiastical prefect, a little less uncertain of his tenure of office; undoubtedly, his removal will not be effected by order, but he can be forced to send in his resignation. Thus, in his case, as well as for the prefect, his first care will be not to excite displeasure, and the next one, to please. To stand well at court, with the minister and with the sovereign, is a positive command, not only on personal grounds, but for the sake of Catholic interests. To obtain scholarships for the pupils of his seminary,5199 to appoint the teachers and the director that suits him, to insure the acceptance of his canons, cantonal curés, and candidates for the priesthood, to exempt his sub-deacons from military service, to establish and to defray the expenses of the chapels of his diocese, to provide parishes with the indispensable priest, with regular services and the sacraments, requires favors, which favors cannot be enjoyed without an affectation of obedience and zeal and, more important still, devotion. Moreover, he is only a human being. If Napoleon has selected him, it is on account of his intelligence, knowing what he is about, open to human motives, not too rigid and of too easy conscience; in the eyes of the master, the first quality is an obedient personality attached to his system and person.51100 Moreover, with his candidates, he has always taken into consideration the hold they give him through their weaknesses, vanity and needs, their ostentatious ways and expenditure, their love of money, titles and precedence, their ambition, desire for promotion, enjoyment of credit, and right of obtaining places for protégés and relations. He avails himself of all these advantages and finds that they answer his purpose. With the exception of three or four saints, like Monsignor d'Aviau51101 or Monsignor Dessolles, who he has inadvertently put into the episcopate, the bishops are content to be barons, and the archbishops counts. They are glad to rank higher and higher in the Legion of Honor; they loudly assert, in praise of the new order of things, the honors and dignities it confers on these or those prelates who have become members of the legislative corps or been made senators.51102 Many of them receive secret pay for secret services, pecuniary incentives in the shape of this or that amount in ready money. In sum, Napoleon has judged accurately; with hesitation and remorse, nearly the whole of his episcopal staff, Italian and French, 66 prelates out of 80, are open to "temporal influences". They yield to seductions and threats; they accept or submit, even in spiritual matters, to his positive ascendancy.51103
Moreover, among these dignitaries, nearly all of whom are blameless, or, at least, who behave well and are generally honorable, Napoleon51104 finds a few whose servility is perfect, unscrupulous individuals ready for anything that an absolute prince could desire, like Bishops Bernier and De Pancemont, one accepting a reward of 30,000 francs and the other the sum of 50,000 francs51105 for the vile part they have played in the negotiations for the Concordat; a miserly, brutal cynic like Maury, archbishop of Paris, or an intriguing, mercenary skeptic like De Pradt, archbishop of Malines; or an old imbecile, falling on his knees before the civil power, like Rousseau, bishop of Orleans, who writes a pastoral letter declaring that the Pope is as free in his Savona prison as on his throne at Rome. After 1806,51106 Napoleon, that he may control men of greater suppleness, prefers to take his prelates from old noble families—the frequenters of Versailles, who regard the episcopate as a gift bestowed by the prince and not by the Pope, a lay favor reserved for younger sons, a present made by the sovereign to those around his person, on the understood condition that the partisan courtier who is promoted shall remain a courtier of the master. Henceforth nearly all his episcopal recruits are derived from "members of the old noble stock." "Only these," says Napoleon, "know how to serve well."
IX. The Imperial Catechism
Political use of the episcopacy.—The imperial catechism.
—Pastoral letters.
From the first year the effect arrived at is better than could be expected. "Look at the clergy,"51107 said the First Consul to Roederer; "every day shows that in spite of themselves their devotion to the government is increasing, and much beyond their anticipation. Have you seen the pastoral declaration of Boisgelin, archbishop of Tours?... He says that the actual government is the legitimate government, that God disposes of thrones and kings as he pleases and that he adopts the chiefs whom the people prefer. Your yourself could not have said that better." But notwithstanding that this is said in the pastoral letter, it is again said in the catechism. No ecclesiastical publication is more important: all Catholic children are to learn this by heart, for the phrases they recite will be firmly fixed in their memories. Bossuet's catechism is good enough, but it may be improved,—there is nothing that time, reflection, emulation, and administrative zeal cannot render perfect! Bossuet teaches children "to respect all superiors, pastors, kings, magistrates, and the rest." "But these generalities," says Portalis,51108 "no longer suffice. They do not give the proper tendency to the subject's submission. The object is to center the popular conscience on the person of Your Majesty." Accordingly, let us be precise, make appointments and secure support.
The imperial catechism, a great deal more explicit than the royal catechism, adds significant development to the old one, along with extra motives:
"We specially owe to our Emperor, Napoleon the First, love, respect, obedience, fidelity, military service, and tributes ordained for the preservation of the empire and his throne... For God has raised him up for us in times of peril that he might restore public worship and the holy religion of our fathers and be its protector."
Every boy and girl in each parish recite this to the vicar or curé after vespers in their tiny voices as a commandment of God and of the Church, as a supplementary article of the creed. Meanwhile the officiating priest in the pulpit gravely comments on this article, already clear enough, at every morning or evening service;51109 by order, he preaches in behalf of the conscription and declares that it is a sin to try to escape from it, to be refractory; by order, again, he reads the army bulletins giving accounts of the latest victories; always by order, he reads the last pastoral letter of his bishop, a document authorized, inspired and corrected by the police. Not only are the bishops obliged to submit their pastoral letters and public instructions to the censorship; not only by way of precaution, are they forbidden to print anything except on the prefecture presses, but again, for still greater security, the bureau of public worship is constantly advising them what they must say. First and foremost, they must laud the Emperor. But in what terms, and with what epithets, without indiscretion or mistake, in order not to meddle with politics, not to appear as a party managed from above, not to pass for megaphones, is not explained, and is therefore a difficult matter. "You must praise the Emperor more in your pastoral letters," said Réal, prefect of police, to a new bishop. "Tell me in what measure." "I do not know," was the reply. Since the measure cannot be prescribed, it must be ample enough. There is no difficulty as regards other articles.—On every occasion the Paris offices take care to furnish each bishop with a ready-made draft of his forthcoming pastoral letter—the canvas on which the customary flowers of ecclesiastical amplification are to be embroidered. It differs according to time and place. In La Vendée and in the west, the prelates are to stigmatize "the odious machinations of perfidious Albion," and explain to the faithful the persecutions to which the English subject the Irish Catholics. When Russia is the enemy, the pastoral letter must dwell on her being schismatic; also on the Russian misunderstanding of the supremacy of the Pope. Inasmuch as bishops are functionaries of the empire, their utterances and their acts belong to the Emperor. Consequently he makes use of them against all enemies, against each rival, rebel or adversary, against the Bourbons, against the English and the Russians, and, finally, against the Pope.
X. The Council of 1811.—The Concordat of 1813.
Similar to the Russian expedition, this is the great and last throw of the dice, the decisive and most important of his ecclesiastical undertakings, as the other is in political and military affairs. Just as, under his leadership, he forces by constraint and, under his lead, a coalition of the political and military powers of his Europe against the Czar,—Austria, Prussia, the Confederation of the Rhine, Holland, Switzerland, the kingdom of Italy, Naples, and even Spain,—so does he by constraint and under his lead coalesce all the spiritual authorities of his empire against the Pope. He summons a council, consisting of eighty-four bishops that are available in Italy and in France. He takes it upon himself to drill them, and he makes them march. To state what influences he uses would require a volume51110—theological and canonical arguments, appeals to Gallican souvenirs and Jansenist rancors, eloquence and sophisms, preparatory maneuvers, secret intrigues, public acting, private solicitations, steady intimidation, successful pressures, thirteen cardinals exiled and deprived of their insignia, two other cardinals confined in Vincennes, nineteen Italian bishops conveyed to France under escort, without bread or clothes. Fifty priests of Parma, fifty of Plaisance, besides one hundred other Italian priests, sent away or confined in Corsica. All congregations of men in France—Saint-Lazare, Mission, Christian Doctrine, Saint-Sulpice—dissolved and suppressed. Three bishops of the council seized in bed at daylight, put into a cell and kept in close confinement, forced to resign and to promise in writing not to carry on correspondence with their dioceses; arrest of their adherents in their dioceses; the Ghent seminarists turned into soldiers, and, with knapsack on their backs, leaving for the army; professors at Ghent, the canons of Tournay, and other Belgian priests shut up in the citadels of Bouillon, Ham and Pierre-Chatel.51111 Near the end, the council suddenly dissolved because scruples arise, because it does not yield at once to the pressure brought to bear on it, because its mass constitutes its firmness, because men standing close together, side by side, stand all the longer. "Our wine in the cask is not good," said Cardinal Maury; "you will find that it will be better in bottles." Accordingly, to make it ready for bottling, it must be filtered and clarified, so as to get rid of the bad elements which disturb it and cause fermentation. Many Opponents are in prison, many have retired from their dioceses, while the rest are brought to Paris and cunningly worked upon, each member in turn, apart and confined, téte-à-téte with the Minister of Worship, until all, one by one, are brought to sign the formula of adhesion. On the strength of this, the council, purged and prepared, is summoned afresh to give its vote sitting or standing, in one unique session; through a remnant of virtue it inserts a suspensive clause in the decree, apparently a reservation,51112 but the decree is passed as ordered. Like the foreign regiment in an army corps which, enlisted, forced into line, and goaded on with a sharp sword, serves, in spite of itself, against its legitimate prince, unwilling to march forward to the attack, meaning at the last moment to fire in the air, so does it finally march and fire its volley notwithstanding.
Napoleon, on the other hand, treats the Pope in the same fashion, and with like skill and brutality. As with the Russian campaign, he has prepared himself for it long beforehand. At the outset there is an alliance, and he concedes great advantages to the Pope as to the Czar, which will remain to them after his fall; but these concessions are made only with a mental reservation, with the instinctive feeling and predetermination to profit by the alliance, even to making an independent sovereign whom he recognizes as his equal, his subordinate and a tool; hence, quarrels and war. This time also, in the expedition against the Pope, his strategy is admirable,—the entire ecclesiastical territory studied beforehand, the objective point selected,51113 all disposable forces employed and directed by fixed marches to where the victory is to be decisive, the conquest extended and the seat of the final dominion established; the successive and simultaneous use of every kind of means—cunning, violence, seduction and terror. Calculation of the weariness, anxiety and despair of the adversary; at first menaces and constant disputes, and then flashes of lightning and multiplied claps of thunder, every species of brutality that force can command; the States of the Church invaded in times of peace, Rome surprised and occupied by soldiers, the Pope besieged in the Quirinal, in a year the Quirinal taken by a nocturnal assault, the Pope seized and carried off by post to Savona and there confined as a prisoner of state almost in cellular seclusion,51114 subject to the entreaties and manoeuvres of an adroit prefect who works upon him, of the physician who is a paid spy, of the servile bishops who are sent thither, alone with his con-science, contending with inquisitors relieving each other, subject to moral tortures as subtile and as keen as old-time physical tortures, to tortures so steady and persistent that he sinks, loses his head, "no longer sleeps and scarcely speaks," falling into a senile condition and even more than senile condition, "a state of mental alienation."51115 Then, on issuing from this, the poor old man is again beset; finally, after waiting patiently for three years, he is once more brusquely conducted at night, secretly and incognito, over the entire road, with no repose or pity though ill, except stopping once in a snow-storm at the hospice on Mount Cenis, where he comes near dying; put back after twenty-four hours in his carriage, bent double by suffering and in constant pain; jolting over the pavement of the grand highway until almost dead and landed at Fontainebleau, where Napoleon wishes to have him ready at hand to work upon. "Indeed," he himself says, "he is a lamb, an excellent, worthy man whom I esteem and am very fond of."51116
An improvised tête-a-tête may probably prove effective with this gentle, candid and tender spirit. Pius VII., who had never known ill-will, might be won by kindly treatment, by an air of filial respect, by caresses; he may feel the personal ascendency of Napoleon, the prestige of his presence and conversation, the invasion of his genius. Inexhaustible in arguments, matchless in the adaptation of ideas to circumstances, the most amiable and most imperious of interlocutors, stentorian and mild, tragic and comic by turns, the most eloquent of sophists and the most irresistible of fascinators, as soon as he meets a man face to face, he wins him, conquers him, and obtains the mastery.51117 In effect, after seeing the Pope for six days, Napoleon obtains by persuasion what he could not obtain afar by constraint. Pius VII. signs the new Concordat in good faith, himself unaware that, on regaining his freedom and surrounded by his cardinals, who inform him on the political situation, he will emerge from his bewilderment, be attacked by his conscience, and, through his office, publicly accuse himself, humbly repent, and in two months withdraw his signature.
Such, after 1812 and 1813, is the duration of Napoleon's triumphs and the ephemeral result of his greatest military and ecclesiastical achievements—Moskow, Lutzen, Bautzen and Dresden, the Council of 1811 and the Concordat of 1813. Whatever the vastness of his genius may be, however strong his will, however successful his attacks, his success against nations and churches never is, and never can be, other than temporary. Great historical and moral forces elude his grasp. In vain does he strike, for their downfall gives them new life, and they rise beneath the blow. With Catholic institutions,51118 as with other powers, not only do his efforts remain sterile, but what he accomplishes remains inverse to the end he has in view. He aims to subjugate the Pope, and he led the Pope on to omnipotence He aims at the maintenance and strength of the Gallican spirit among the French clergy, and yet brings them under the rule of the ultramontane spirit.51119 With extraordinary energy and tenacity, with all his power, which was enormous, through the systematic and constant application of diverse and extreme measures, he labored for fifteen years to rend the ties of the Catholic hierarchy, take it to pieces, and, in sum, the final result of all is to tie them faster and hasten its completion.
5101 (return)
[ Se preface to "The Modern Régime," Vol. I.]
5102 (return)
[ On some of the ideas above indicated see "The Modern Régime," Vol. I. p.120.]
5103 (return)
[ An allusion to Malthusianism, practiced by many heads of families in France. M. Taine would probably have shown this practice contrary to national welfare.—Tr.]
5104 (return)
[ Idolizing of children. (SR.)]
5105 (return)
[ Cf. "Les carnets de voyage."]
5106 (return)
[ On this idea see Volume I of "The Modern Régime," page 332, to the end of the chapter. (Ed. Laff. II. pp. 592 to 605).]
5107 (return)
[ Today this would probably be the media especially television.]
5108 (return)
[ Memorial, IV.,259 (June 7 and 8, 1816); V., 323 (Aug. 17, 1816).]
5109 (return)
[ Thibaudeau, p. 152 (Prairial 21, year X.]
5110 (return)
[ Idem, IV.,259, (June 7 and 8, 1816).—Pelet de la Lozere, "Opinions de Napoléon au conseil d'état," p 223, (March 4, 1806).]
5111 (return)
[ "Discours, rapports et travaux sur le Concordat de 1801," by Portalis (published by Fréderick Portalis), p.10.—In his speech on the organization of cults (Germinal 15, year X), Portalis, although a good Catholic, adopts the same idea, because he is a legist and one of the ancient Régime. "Religions, even false, have this advantage, that they are an obstacle to the introduction of arbitrary doctrines. Individuals have a center of faith; governments have no fear of dogmas once known and which do not change. Superstition, so to say, is regulated, circumscribed and kept within bounds which it cannot, or dare not, go outside of."]
5112 (return)
[ Thibaudeau, p. 151 (Prairial 21, year X). "The First Consul combated at length the different systems of the philosophy on cults, natural religions, deism, etc. All that according to him, was mere ideology."]
5113 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, p. 208 (May 22, 1804).]
5114 (return)
[ Thibaudeau, p. 152 (Prairial 21, year X).]
5115 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, p, 223 (March 4, 1806).]
5116 (return)
[ Roederer, "Oevres complètes," III., 334 (Aug. 18, 1800).]
5117 (return)
[ What impression could this have made on Lenin? Could he not have felt: "Perhaps Napoleon's logic was good at that time but now with electricity, the steam engine and modern industrialism it will be possible to do without the efficiency of capitalism and hence with its inequalities and egoism? If so then we can recreate the equality dreamt of by Babeuf, Robespierre, Saint Just and the other ancient revolutionaries!!"]
5118 (return)
[ Ref.: "Where some people are very wealthy and others have nothing, the result will either be extreme democracy or absolute oligarchy, and despotism will come from either of these excesses." Aristotle. (SR.)]
5119 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, p. 205 (February 11, 1804).]
5120 (return)
[ Ibid., p. 201.]
5121 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, p. 206, (Feb. 11, 1804).]
5122 (return)
[ Mémorial, V., 323 (Aug. 17, 1816).]
5123 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, p 201.]
5124 (return)
[ Mémorial, V., 353 (Aug. 17, 1816). Notes on "Les Quatre Concordants," by M. de Pradt (Correspondence of Napoleon I., xxx., p.557).]
5125 (return)
[ Bourrienne, "Mémoires," V., 232.]
5126 (return)
[ Notes on "Les Quatre Concordats," by M. de Pradt (Correspondence of Napoleon I., XXX., 638 and 639).]
5127 (return)
[ Thibaudeau, p. 152 (Prairial 21, year X).]
5128 (return)
[ Notes on "Les Quatre Concordats," by M. de Pradt (correspondence, XXX., 638).]
5129 (return)
[ Count Boulay de La Meurthe, "Négotiations du concordat." (Extract from the correspondant, "1882, on the religious state of France in November, 1800, and particularly on, the condition of the constitutional church, the latter being very poor, disunited, with no credit and no future.) The writer estimates the number of active priests at 8000, of which 2000 are constitutionnels and 6000 orthodox."]
5130 (return)
[ Thibaudeau, p.152.]
5131 (return)
[ Thibaudeau, p. 154 (words of the First consul) "What makes the government liked is its respect for worship.... The priests must be connected with the government."]
5132 (return)
[ Ibid., p.154: "Is it not better to organize worship and discipline the priests rather than let things go on as they are?"]
5133 (return)
[ La Fayette, "Mémoires, II.", 200. ("Mes rapports avec le Premier consul.")]
5134 (return)
[ D'Haussonville, "l'Église romaine et la Premier Empire," II.. 78 and 101. Napoleon's letters to Cardinal Fesch, Jan. 7, 1806; to the Pope, Feb.22, 1806 and to cardinal Fesch, of the same date. "His Holiness will have the same consideration for me in temporal matters as I have for him in spiritual matters.... My enemies will be his enemies."—"Tell people (in Rome) that I am Charlemagne, the sword of the church, their emperor; that I must be treated the same; that they should not know that there was a Russian empire.... If the Pope does not accept my conditions, I shall reduce him to the condition he was in before Charlemagne."]
5135 (return)
[ Decree, May 17, 1809. "Whereas, when Charlemagne, emperor of the French, and out august predecessor, donated several counties to the bishops of Rome, he gave them only under the title of fiefs and for the welfare of his own states, and as by the said donation Rome did not thereby cease to form part of his empire,... the states of the Pope are now reunited to the French empire."]
5136 (return)
[ Sénatus-consulte, Feb. 17, 1810, title II., article XII. "Any foreign sovereignty is incompatible with the exercise of any spiritual sovereignty within the empire."]
5137 (return)
[ D'Haussonville, ibid., IV.,344. (Decree of the National Council, Aug. 5, 1811.—Concordat of Fontainebleau, Jan. 25, 1813, article 14.—Decree on the execution of this Concordat, March 23, 1813, art. 4.)]
5138 (return)
[ Sénatus-consulte, Feb.17, 1810, articles 13 and 14.]
5139 (return)
[ Mémorial, Aug.17, 1816.]
5140 (return)
[ Sénatus-consulte, Feb.17, 1810.]
5141 (return)
[ Notes by Napoleon on the "Les Quatre Concordats de M. de Pradt" (correspondence, XXX., 550). Lanfrey, "Histoire de Napoléon," V., 214. (Along with the Vatican archives, there were brought to Paris the tiara and other insignia or ornaments of Pontifical dignity.)]
5142 (return)
[ Sénatus-consulte, Feb. 17, 1810.]
5143 (return)
[ Notes by Napoleon on "Les Quatre Concordats" (Correspondence, XXX., 548).]
5144 (return)
[ Cf. Roman laws on the Collegia illicita, the first source of which is the Roman conception of religion, the political and practical use of augurs, auspices and sacred fowls.—It is interesting to trace the long life and survivorship of this important idea from antiquity down to the present day; it reappears in the Concordat and in the Organic Articles of 1801, and still later in the late decrees dissolving unauthorized communities and closing the convents of men.— French jurists, and in particular Napoleon's jurists, are profoundly imbued with the Roman idea. Portalis, in his exposition of the motives for establishing metropolitan seminaries (March 14, 1804), supports the decree with Roman law. "The Roman laws," he says, "place every thing concerning the cult in the class of matters which belong essentially to public rights."]
5145 (return)
[ Thibaudeau, p.152.]
5146 (return)
[ "Discours, rapports et travaux sur le Concordat de 1801," by Portalis, p.87 (on the Organic Articles), p.29 (on the organization of cults). "The ministers of religion must not pretend to share in or limit public power.... Religious affairs have always been classed by the different national codes among matters belonging to the upper police department of the State... The political magistrate may and should intervene in everything which concerns the outward administration of sacred matters.... In France, the government has always presided, in a more or less direct way, over the direction of ecclesiastical affairs."]
5147 (return)
[ "Discours, rapports, etc.," by Portalis, p. 31.—Ibid., p.143: "To sum up: The Church possesses only a purely spiritual authority; the sovereigns, in their capacity of political magistrates, regulate temporal and mixed questions with entire independence, and, as protectors, they have even the right to see to the execution of canons and to repress, even in spiritual matters, the infractions of pontiffs."]
5148 (return)
[ Articles Organiques. 1st. Catholic cult, articles 3, 4, 23, 24, 35, 39, 44, 62. 2nd. Protestant cults, articles 4, 5, 11, 14, 22, 26, 30, 31, 32, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43.—Israelite cult, decree of March 17, 1808, articles 4, 8, 9, 16, 23. Decree of execution, samedate, articles 2 to 7.]
5149 (return)
[ Decree of March 17, 1808, articles 12, 21.]
5150 (return)
[ Articles Organiques (Protestant cults), 12 and 13.]
5151 (return)
[ Articles Organiques (Catholic cult), 24. Teachers selected for the seminaries "will subscribe the declaration made by the clergy of France in 1682; they will submit to teaching the doctrine therein set forth."]
5152 (return)
[ "Dsicours, rapports, etc," by Portalis, p. 101.]
5153 (return)
[ Ibid, p. 378.]
5154 (return)
[ Abbé Sicard, "Les Dispensateurs des bénéfices ecclésiastiques" (in the "Correspondant," Sep.10, 1889, p.883). A benefice was then a sort of patrimony which the titulary, old or ill, often handed over to one of his relatives. "A canonist of the eighteenth century says that the resignation carried with it one third of the income."]
5155 (return)
[ "Souvenirs", by Pasquier (Etienne-Dennis, duc), Librarie Plon, Paris 1893. Vol. I. p. 415.: "The nomination of Cardinal Maury as arch-bishop of Paris was published on the same day that I had been appointed prefect of police. The new arch-bishop had made too much noise in the past for him not to have become known to me. He was as happy with his appointment as I was unhappy with mine. I met him in the chateau Fontainebleau and I have ever since been haunted by the noisy expression of his happiness. He constantly repeated this sentence: "The Emperor has just satisfied the two greatest requirements of his capital. With a good police and a good clergy he can always be sure of public order, since an arch-bishop is also a prefect of the police."]
5156 (return)
[ Report of Siméon to the tribunat on presenting to it the Concordat and Organic Articles, Germinal 17, year X.—Henceforth "the ministers of all cults will be subject to the influence of the government which appoints or confirms them, to which they are bound by the most sacred promises, and which holds them in its dependence by their salaries."]
5157 (return)
[ "Discours, rapports, etc.," by Portalis, p. 40.—Emile Ollivier, "Nouveau manuel de droit ecclésiastique," P.193. (Reply by Portalis to the protests of the Holy See, Sep. 22, 1803.) Before 1789 Portalis writes: "The spectacle presented by the monks was not very edifying.. .. The legislature having decided that religious vows could not be taken up to twenty-one years of age,... this measure keeps novices away; the monastic orders, sapped by the state of morals and by time, could obtain no recruits; they languished in a state of inertia and of disfavor which was worse than annihilation.... The era for monastic institutions had passed."]
5158 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, p.146. (Words of Napoleon, March 11, 1806.)]
5159 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, p.207 (May 22, 1804).]
5160 (return)
[ Decree of Messidor 3, year XII (June 22, 1804).—Letter of Napoleon to the King of Naples, April 14, 1807, on the suppression of convents at Naples: "You know that I don't like monks, as I have uprooted them everywhere." To his sister Elisa, May 17, 1806: "Keep on and suppress the convents."]
5161 (return)
[ "État des congrégations, communantés et associations religieuses," drawn up in execution of article 12 of the law of Dec. 12, 1876 (Imprimerie nationale, 1878): 1st. congregations of women with a general superior, nurses and teachers, authorized from Prairial 28, year XI, to January 13, 1813, total, 42; 2nd. communities of women without a general superior, nurses and teachers, authorized from April 9, 1806, to Sept. 28, 1813, total, 205.]
5162 (return)
[ Ibid., Brethren of the Christian Schools, namely, of Saint Yon, authorized March 17, 1808.]
5163 (return)
[ Ibid., congregation of the Mission of Saint-Lazare, authorized Prairial 17, year XI.—Congregation of the Seminary of Foreign Missions, authorized Germinal 2, year XIII.]
5164 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, p.208 (May 22, 1804).]
5165 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, P.209]
5166 (return)
[ Decree of March 17, 1808, article 109.]
5167 (return)
[ Alexis Chevalier, "Les Frères des écoles chrétiennes après la Révolution," p. 93. (Report by Portalis approved by the First consul, Frimaire to, year XII.) "Henceforth," says Portalis, "the superior-general at Rome abandons all inspection of the Christian Brothers. In France, it is understood that the Brothers will have a superior general resident at Lyons."]
5168 (return)
[ D'Haussonville, V., p. 148.]
5169 (return)
[ Fortress in the Italian Alps. (SR.)]
5170 (return)
[ D'Haussonville, V., p. 148. Letter of Napoleon to the Minister of Worship, March 3, 1811 (omitted in the published correspondence).]
5171 (return)
[ Ibid., IV.,p.133. (Letter by Napoleon, Sep. 2, 1809, omitted in the "Correspondence.")]
5172 (return)
[ Concordat, articles 4, 5, 16.]
5173 (return)
[ Articles Organiques, I., pp. 2, 6.]
5174 (return)
[ Code pénal, decree of Feb. 16-20, 1810, article 207.]
5175 (return)
[ Napoleon's own expressions: "I may regard myself as the head of the Catholic ministry, since the Pope has crowned me." (Pelet de la Lozère, p. 210, July 17, 1806.)—Note the word crowned (sacré). Napoleon, as well as former kings, considers himself as clothed with ecclesiastical dignity.]
5176 (return)
[ On the sense and bearing of Gallican maxims cf. the whole of the answer by Portalis to Cardinal Caprara. (Émile Ollivier, "Nouveau manuel de droit ecclésiastique," p.150.)]
5177 (return)
[ Decree of Feb.25, 1810. (The edict of Louis XIV. is attached to it.) Prohibition to teach or write "anything opposed to the doctrine contained" in the declaration of the French clergy. "Every professor of theology must sign and submit to teaching the doctrine therein set forth."—In establishments where there are several professors "one of them will be annually directed to teach the said doctrine."—In colleges where there is but one professor "he will be obliged to teach it one of three consecutive years."—The professors are required to hand in to the competent authority "their minutes dictated to the pupils."—None of them can be "licensed, whether in theology or in canon law, nor graduated as doctor, without having maintained the said doctrine in one of his theses."]
5178 (return)
[ Cf., for details, d'Haussonville, I., p.200 et seq.]
5179 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, p. 205. (Words of Napoleon, Feb. 4, 1804.)]
5180 (return)
[ A procedure used by Stalin and copied by all his satellite states. (SR.)]
5181 (return)
[ Thibaudeau, p.157 (Messidor 2, year X).]
5182 (return)
[ Roederer, III., pp. 535, 567.]
5183 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, p.203. (Napoleon's words, Feb. 4, 1804.)—Law of March 14, 1804.]
5184 (return)
[ Cf. "Letters of Mgr. Claude Simon, bishop of Grenoble, April 18, 1809, and October 6, 1811."]
5185 (return)
[ Articles Organiques, p.68.]
5186 (return)
[ Bercastel and Henrion, "Histoire générale de l'Église," XIII., p.32. (Speech by M. Roux-Laborie, deputy in 1816.)—At the present day, the ordinations oscillate between 1200 and 1700 per annum.]
5187 (return)
[ Decree of November 15, 1811, articles 28, 29, 32. "On and after July 1, 1812, all secondary ecclesiastical schools (small seminaries) which may not be situated in towns possessing a lycée or college shall be closed. No secondary ecclesiastical school shall be placed in the country. In all places where there are ecclesiastical schools the pupils of these schools shall pursue their studies in the lycée or college classes."]
5188 (return)
[ "Correspondence of Napoleon (notes for the Minister of Worship), July 30, 1806." In order to be curé of the first class, chanoin, vicar-general or bishop one must henceforth be bachelor, licencié, doctor in the university grades, "which the university may refuse in case the candidate shall be known to entertain ultramontane ideas or ideas dangerous to authority."]
5189 (return)
[ D'Haussonville, V., p.144 et seq. (Letter of Napoleon to the Minister of Worship, Oct.22, 1811, omitted in the "correspondence.") The letter ends with these words: "This mode of working must be kept secret."]
5190 (return)
[ "Histoire de M. Emery," by Abbé Elie Méric, II., p. 374. The order of expulsion (June 13, 1810) ends with these words: "Immediate possession is to be taken of the house which might belong to some domain and which, at least in this case, could be considered as public property, since it might belong to a congregation. If it is found to be private property belonging to M. Emery or to any other person, the rents might first be paid and then afterwards it might be required, save indemnity, as useful for the public service." This shows in full the administrative and fiscal spirit of the French State, its heavy hand being always ready to fall imperiously on every private individual and on all private property.]
5191 (return)
[ Letter of Napoleon, Oct. 8, 1811.]
5192 (return)
[ Ibid. Nov. 22, 1811.]
5193 (return)
[ D'Haussonville, V., p.282. (Letter of Napoleon, Aug. 14, 1813, omitted in the correspondence.)—"Mémoires" du Chancelier Pasquier, II." pp. 88-91.]
5194 (return)
[ Roederer, III., p.430 (Germinal 19, year X): "The legate was received today in the consular palace; in making his speech, he trembled like a leaf."]
5195 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, p.206 (May 22, 1804).]
5196 (return)
[ Decrees of May 31, 1804, Dec.26, 1804, and Sep.30. 1807, with the list of succursals by departments.—Besides the succursalists paid by the State, there were vicars not less dependent on the bishop and maintained by allowances from the communes or by private donations. (Bercastel et Henrion, XIII., p.32, speech by M. Roux-Laborie in the chamber of Deputies, 1816.) "In his re-composition of the Church of France the usurper established 12,000 vicars dependent on alms, and it will not surprise you that, instead of 12,000, there were only 5000 who were courageous enough to die of starvation or implore public charity.... Thus are 4000 country churches without worship or minister."]
5197 (return)
[ Thibaudeau, p. 166, and article of Brumaire 30, in the Moniteur.]
5198 (return)
[ Roederer, III., p. 479 et seq. (Report on the Senatorerie of Caen.) The priests everywhere feel that they are watched and set aside. "Most of those I encounter exclaim, Poor curé, an unfortunate curé. The functionaries are devoted to the Emperor as their sole support against the nobles, whom they dread, and against the priests, whom they slightly esteem.... The military, the judges, the administrators when alluding to the priests or to religion merely smile; the priests, on the other hand, express very little confidence in the functionaries."]
5199 (return)
[ Decree of Sept. 30, 1804 (with allotment of 800 scholarships and 1600 demi-scholarships to each diocesan seminary). These will be allowed us on being presented by the bishops.]
51100 (return)
[ D'Haussonville, II., p. 227.]
51101 (return)
[ Idem. IV. Order of arrest of M. d'Avian, archbishop of Bordeaux, as one of the opponents of the Council (July 11, 1811). Savary himself, Minister of Justice, raises objections. "Sire, do nothing with M. d'Avian. He is a saint and we shall have everybody against us."]
51102 (return)
[ Idem., IV. p. 58. Address of the ecclesiastical commission enumerating the favors granted to religion, "the legion of Honor, conferred on many prelates, the titles of baron and count assigned to bishops and archbishops of the Empire, the admission of several of these to the legislative assembly and senate."]
51103 (return)
[ D'Haussonville, IV.,p. 366. (Last session of the national council, August 5, 1811.)]
51104 (return)
[ Reading this, as Lenin must have done, could he help but dream of the day, when he could become head of a state, head of a foreign service, of a secret police force and hence be able to subvert the entire world including the religious organizations, the political parties, diplomatic services not to speak of international organizations in New York or Brussels. (SR.)]
51105 (return)
[ Idem., I., pp. 203-205.]
51106 (return)
[ Idem., p. 228. Cf. the "Almanach impérial de 1806-1814."—Lanfrey, "Histoire de Napoléon,"V., p. 208. The Prince de Rohan, head chaplain, writes in a request he makes, The great Napoleon is my tutelary divinity. On the margin of this request Napoleon attaches the following decision: "The Duc de Frioul will pay to the head chaplain 12,000 francs,—tax on receipts of the theatres." (Feb. 15, 1810.) Another example of the same type is M. Roquelaure, archbishop of Malines, who addresses Josephine with a little ancient-régime speech, at once episcopal and gallant. The First Consul, therefore, makes him Member of the Institute. (Bourrienne, V., p. 130.) This archbishop, in the administration of his diocese, zealously applies the policy of the First Consul. "We have seen him suspend from his functions a priest who had exhorted a dying man to restore ecclesiastical property which he had taken." ("Dictionnaire biographique," published at Leipsic by Eymery, 1806, 1808.)]
51107 (return)
[ Roederer, III., p. 459 (December 30, 1802).]
51108 (return)
[ D'Haussonville, II., 257. (Report by Portalis to the Emperor, Feb. 13, 1806.)—Idem., II., 226.]
51109 (return)
[ D'Haussonville, II., 237, 239, 272.—Pelet de la Lozère, 201: "At other times Napoleon praised the priests, wanted their services, largely attributing the departure of conscripts and the submission of the people to their influence."—Idem, 173 (May 20, 1806, words of Napoleon): "The Catholic priests behave very well and are of great service. It is owing to them that the conscription this year has been better than in former years... No branch of the State speaks so well of the government."]
51110 (return)
[ D'Haussonville, III, IV.,and V., passim.]
51111 (return)
[ "Mémoires," by the Chancelier Pasquier, IV.,358.]
51112 (return)
[ D'Haussonville, IV.,366 (last phrase of the text): "A deputation of six bishops will go and beg His Holiness to confirm this decree."]
51113 (return)
[ To an ordinary reader, even Catholic, if not versed!in canon law, Napoleon's exactions seem mediocre and even acceptable; they reduce themselves down to fixing a delay and seeming to add to the competency of councils and the authority of bishops. (D'Haussonville, IV.,366, session of the council, Aug. 5, 1811, propositions adopted and decree. Cf. the Concordat of Fontainebleau, Jan. 25, 1813, article 4.)]
51114 (return)
[ Comte D'Haussonville, IV.,121 and following pages. (Letters of the prefect, M. de Chabrol, letters of Napoleon not inserted in the "Correspondence," narration of Dr. Claraz.) 6000 francs, a present to the bishop of Savona, 12,000 francs salary to Dr. Porta, the Pope's physician. "Dr. Porta," writes the prefect, "seems disposed to serve us indirectly with all his power.... Efforts are made to affect the Pope either by all who approach him or by all the means in our power."]
51115 (return)
[ Ibid. (Letters of M. de Chabrol, May 14 and 30, 1811.) "The Pope has fallen into a state of stupor.... The physician fears a case of hypochondria;... his health and reason are affected." Then, in a few days: "The state of mental alienation has passed."]
51116 (return)
[ Mémorial (Aug.17, 1816).]
51117 (return)
[ D'Haussonville, V., 244. Later, the Pope keeps silent about his interviews with Napoleon. "He simply lets it be understood that the emperor spoke to him haughtily and contemptuously, even treating him as an ignoramus in ecclesiastical matters."—Napoleon met him with open arms and embraced him, calling him his father. (Thiers, XV., 295.)—It is probable that the best literary portrayal of these tête-à-tête conversations is the imaginary scene in "Grandeurs et Servitudes Militaires," by Alfred de Vigny.]
51118 (return)
[ Comte Chaptal, "Notes": "No, in the course of sixteen years of a stormy government, Bonaparte never met with so much resistance and never suffered so many disappointments as were caused by his quarrel with the Pope. There is no event in his life which more alienated the people as his proceedings and conduct towards the Pope."]
51119 (return)
[ Ultramontanism; a set of doctrines establishing the pope's absolute authority.]
CHAPTER II. THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.
I. The Catholic System.
The effects of the system.—Completion of the ecclesiastical
hierarchy.—Omnipotence of the Pope in the Church.
—Influence of the French Concordat and other precedents from
1801 to 1870.—Why the clergy becomes ultramontane.—The
dogma of Infallibility.
In 1801, at Rome, pending the negotiations for the Concordat, when Pius VII. still hesitated about the deposition in mass of the survivors of the ancient French episcopacy, clear-sighted observers already remarked, "Let this Concordat which the First Consul desires be completed,5201 and you will see, on its ratification, its immense importance and the power it will give to Rome over the episcopacy throughout the universe."—In effect, through this "extraordinary, nearly unexampled" act of authority, and certainly unequaled "in the history of the Church,"5202 the ultramontane theory, contested up to this time, maintained in the speculative region of abstract formulae, comes down to solid ground, into practical and lasting use. Willingly or not, "the Pope acts as if universal bishop;" urged and constrained by the lay power, attached to a dictatorship,5203 he entered upon it and so installed himself, and, ten years later, Napoleon, who had impelled him on, regretted that he had done so. Warned by his Gallican jurists, he saw the ecclesiastical import of his work; but it was too late to retreat—the decisive step had been taken.—For, in fact, the Pope had deprived all the chieftains of a great church of their thrones, "his colleagues and co-bishops,"5204 successors of the apostles under the same title as himself, members "of the same order and stamped "with the same "character," eighty-five legitimate incumbents5205 and, still better, as admitted by himself, blameless, worthy, persecuted because they had obeyed him, banished from France on account of their unwillingness to quit the Roman Church. He had ordered them to resign; he had withdrawn apostolic powers from the thirteen who had refused to tender their resignations; to all, even to those who refused, he had appointed their successors. He assigned to the new titularies dioceses of a new pattern and, to justify novelties of such gravity,5206 he could allege no other reasons than circumstances, the exigencies of lay power, and the welfare of the Church. After that the Gallicans themselves, unless accepting the risk of a schism and of separating forever from the Holy See, were obliged to allow the Pope above and beyond the ordinary powers exercised by him within the old limits of canons and of custom, an extraordinary power unlimited by any canon or by any custom,5207 a plenary and absolute authority, a right above all other rights, by virtue of which, in cases determined by himself, he provided in a discretionary way for all Catholic interests, of which he thus becomes the supreme judge, the sole interpreter and the court of last appeal. An indestructible precedent was set up; it was the great corner-stone in the support of the modern Church edifice; on this definitive foundation all other stones were to be superposed, one by one. In 1801, Pius VII., under the pressure of the reigning Napoleon, had obliged the prelates of the old régime, sullied by a monarchical origin and suspected of zeal for the dethroned Bourbons, to abandon their seats. In 1816, under the pressure of the re-established Bourbons, the same Pius VII. obliged Fesch, cardinal-archbishop of Lyons, and uncle of the fallen Napoleon, to abandon his seat. Bercastel et Henrion, XIII, 192. Cardinal Fesch having been banished from France by the law of January 12, 1816, "the Pope no longer regarded the person of the cardinal, but the diocese that had to be saved at any cost, by virtue of the principle salus populi suprema lex. Consequently, he prohibited the cardinal from "exercising episcopal jurisdiction in his metropolitan church, and constituted M. de Bernis administrator of that church, spiritually as well as temporally, notwithstanding all constitutions decreed even by the general councils, the apostolic ordinances, privileges, etc." In both cases the situation was similar, and, in the latter as in the former case, motives of the same order warranted the same use of the same power.
But the situation, in being prolonged, multiplied, for the Church, the number of urgent cases, and, for the sovereign pontiff the number of cases of intervention. Since 1789, the entire civil order of things, constitutional, political, social and territorial, had become singularly unstable, not only in France but in Europe, not only on the old continent but likewise on the new one. Sovereign states by hundreds sunk under the strokes and counter-strokes, indefinitely propagated and enforced by the philosophy of the eighteenth century and of the French Revolution; others, by dozens, arose in their place, and, in these, different dynasties succeeded each other; here, Catholic populations falling under the rule of a schismatic or Protestant prince; there, this or that Catholic country, for fifteen years included in a mixed state, detached from it and constituted apart. In Protestant America, the Catholics, increased to millions, formed new communities in Catholic America, the colonies had become independent; almost everywhere in America and in Europe the maxims of government and of public opinion had changed. Now, after each of these changes, some initiative, some direction, some authority was necessary, in order to reconcile ecclesiastical with lay institutions; the Pope was on hand, and on each occasion he establishes this concord.5208 At one time, by a diplomatic act analogous to the French Concordat of 1801, he negotiates with the sovereign of the country—Bavaria, Wurtemburg, Prussia, Austria, Spain, Portugal, the two Sicilies, the Netherlands, Belgium and Russia. Again, owing to the tolerant liberalism, or to the Constitutional indifference of the lay government, he alone prescribes, notably in Holland, in Ireland, in England, in Canada, and in the United States, a division of the country into ecclesiastical districts, the erection of new bishoprics, and the lasting regulation of the hierarchy, the discipline, the means of support and the recruiting of the clergy. Again, when sovereignty is in dispute, as after the emancipation of the Spanish colonies, he does without it, in spite of the opposition of the mother-country, and, "without putting himself in relation with the new governments,5209 he, acting for himself, "that he may put an end to the widowhood of the Churches," appoints bishops, assigns them a provisional régime in anticipation of the epoch when, in concert with better founded governments, he will decree their definitive régime. In this way, all the great existing churches of the Catholic universe are the work of the Pope, his latest work, his own creation attested by a positive act of contiguous date, and of which the souvenir is vivid: he has not recognized them—he has made them; he has given them their external form and their internal structure; no one of them can look within itself without finding in its laws the fresh imprint of the sovereign hand which has fashioned it; none of them can assert or even believe itself legitimate without declaring the superior authority to be legitimate which has just endowed it with life and being. The last step, the greatest of all, above the terrestrial and practical order of things, in speculative theology, in the revelation of the supernatural, in the definition of things that are divine: the Pope, the better to prove his autocracy, in 1854, decrees, solely, of his own accord, a new dogma, the immaculate conception of the Virgin, and he is careful to note that he does it without the concurrence of the bishops; they were on hand, but they neither deliberated nor decided.5210
Thus arise durable powers, spiritual or temporal, little by little, through the uninterrupted and uncontested series of their acts; from 1791 to 1870 all ecclesiastical precedents, one added to another, became consolidated, one through the other and through their mass; story after story, steadily ascending and converging to raise the Pope higher still, until at last, on the summit of the edifice, the Holy See becomes the keystone of the arch, the omnipotence of fact being completed by omnipotence of right.
Meanwhile Catholic opinion came to the aid of pontifical opinion, and, in France, the clergy spontaneously became ultramontane because there was no longer any motive for remaining Gallican. Since the Revolution, the Concordat and the Organic Articles, all the sources which maintained in it a national as well as particularist spirit, had dried up; in ceased being a distinct, proprietary and favored body; its members are no longer leagued together by the community of a temporal interest, by the need of defending their privileges, by the faculty of acting in concert, by the right of holding periodical assemblies; they are no longer, as formerly, attached to the civil power by great social and legal advantages, by their honorable priority in lay society, by their immunities from taxation, by the presence and influence of their bishops in the provincial parliaments, by the noble origin and magnificent endowments of nearly all their prelates, by the repressive support which the secular arm lent to the church against dissenters and free-thinkers, by the immemorial legislation and customs which, erecting Catholicism into a State religion, imposed the Catholic faith on the monarch, not alone in his quality of a private individual and to fix his personal belief, but again in his quality of public magistrate, to influence his policy and to share in his government. This last article is capital, and out of its abrogation the rest follows: at this turn of the road the French clergy is thrown off the Gallican track, every step it takes after this being on the way to Rome. For, according to Catholic doctrine, outside of the Roman Church there is no salvation; to enter it, to rest in it, to be led by it is the highest interest and first duty of man; it is the unique and infallible guide; all acts that it condemns are culpable, and not only private acts, but likewise all public acts; the sovereign who commits them may, as an individual, be Catholic by profession and even loyal at heart; but, as a ruler, he is disloyal, he has lost his semi-ecclesiastic character, he has ceased to be "the exterior bishop," he is not worthy to command a clerical body. Henceforth, the Christian conscience no longer bows down before him with love and respect; nothing remains to him for support but social prudence; and again is it with resignation, because the Church commands obedience to the authorities, and the same Church commands disobedience to these authorities when, abusing their power, they encroach on its rights.
Now, ten years ago, the State had done nothing else, and, to the old Concordat which was not good, it had just substituted a Concordat that was worse. This new alliance, concluded by it with the Church in 1802, is not a religious marriage, the solemn sacrament by which, at Rheims, she and the King promised to live together and in harmony in the same faith, but a simple civil contract, more precisely the legal regulation of a lasting and deliberate divorce.—In a paroxysm of despotism the State has stripped the Church of its possessions and turned it out of doors, without clothes or bread, to beg on the highways; next, in a fit of rage, its aim was to kill it outright, and it did partially strangle it. Recovering its reason, but having ceased to be Catholic, it has forced the signature of a pact which is repugnant, and which reduces their moral union to physical cohabitation. Willingly or not, the two contracting parties are to continue living together in the same domicile, since that is the only one they possess; but, as there is incompatibility of humor, they will do well to live apart. To this end, the State assigns a small, distinct lodging to the Church and allows her a meager supply of food; this done, it fancies that it may cry quits; and, worse still, it imagines that she is always its subject, and still pretends to the same authority over her; the State is determined to retain all rights conferred upon it by the old marriage, and these rights it exercises and adds to. Meanwhile, it admits into the same lodging three other Churches which it subjects to the same régime: that makes four mess-rooms to be maintained and which it watches, supports and utilizes the best it can for the temporal advantage of the household. There is nothing more odious to the Catholic Church than this advertised, practical polygamy, this subvention granted indifferently to all cults, this patronage in common, more insulting than abandonment, this equal treatment5211 which places the pulpit of truth and the pulpits of falsehood, the ministry of salvation and the ministries of perdition, on the same footing. Nothing is more serviceable for alienating a Catholic clergy, for making it consider civil power as foreign, usurping, or even inimical, for detaching the Gallican Church from its French center, for driving it back towards its Roman center and for handing it over to the Pope.
Henceforth, the latter is the unique center, the sole surviving head of the Church, inseparable from it because he is naturally its head and because it is naturally his body; and all the more because this mutual tie has been strengthened by trials. Head and body have been struck together, by the same hands, and each on the other's account. The Pope has suffered like the Church, along with and for it. Pius VI., dethroned and borne off by the Directory, died in prison at Valence; Pius VII., dethroned and carried off by Napoleon, is confined, sequestered and outraged for four years in France, while all generous hearts take sides with the oppressed against his oppressors. Moreover, his dispossession adds to his prestige: it can no longer be claimed that territorial interests prevail with him over Catholic interests; therefore, according as his temporal power diminishes his spiritual power expands, to such an extent that, in the end, after three-quarters of a century, just at the moment when the former is to fall to the ground the latter is to rise above the clouds; through the effacement of his human character his superhuman character becomes declared; the more the sovereign prince disappears, the more does the sovereign pontiff assert himself. The clergy, despoiled like him of its hereditary patrimony and confined like him to its sacerdotal office, exposed to the same dangers, menaced by the same enemies, rallies around him the same as an army around its general; inferiors and superiors, they are all priests alike and are nothing else, with a clearer and clearer conscience of the solidarity which binds them together and subordinates the inferiors to the superiors. From one ecclesiastical generation to another,5212 the number of the refractory, of the intractable and of independents, rigorists or the lax, goes on decreasing, some, conscientious Jansenists, hardened and sectarians of the "Little Church," others, semi-philosophers, tolerant and liberal, both inheriting too narrow convictions or too broad opinions for maintaining themselves and spreading in the newly founded society (milieu).5213 They die out, one by one, while their doctrines fall into discredit and then into oblivion. A new spirit animates the new clergy, and, after 1808, Napoleon remarks of it, "It does not complain of the old one, and is even satisfied with it; but, he says, they are bringing up new priests in a sombre fanatical doctrine: there is nothing Gallican in the youthful clergy,"5214 no sympathy for the civil power. After Napoleon, and on getting out of his terrible hands, the Catholics have good reasons for their repugnance to his theology; it has put too many Catholics in jail, the most eminent in rank, in holiness, bishops and cardinals, including the Pope. Gallican maxims are dishonored by the use Napoleon has made of them. Canon law, in public instruction and in the seminaries (of the Catholics), ends insensibly in unlooked-for conclusions; texts and arguments opposed to the Pope's authority seem weaker and weaker; texts and arguments favorable to the Pope's authority seem stronger and stronger;5215 the doctors most deferred to are no longer Gerson and Bossuet, but Bellarmin and Suarez; flaws are discovered in the decrees of the council of Constance; the Declaration of the clergy of France in 1682 is found to contain errors condemned and open to condemnation.5216 After 1819, M. de Maistre, a powerful logician, matchless herald and superb champion, in his book on "The Pope," justifies, prepares and announces the coming constitution of the Church.—Step by step, the assent of Catholic community is won or mastered;5217 on approaching 1870, it is nearly universal; after 1870, it is wholly so and could not be otherwise; whoever refuses to submit is excluded from the community and excludes himself from it, for he denies a dogma which it professes, a revealed dogma, an article of faith which the Pope and the council have just decreed. Thenceforward, the Pope, in his magisterial pulpit, in the eyes of every man who is and wants to remain Catholic, is infallible; when he gives his decision on faith or on morals, Jesus Christ himself speaks by his mouth, and his definitions of doctrine are "irrefutable," "they are so of themselves, they alone, through their own virtue, and not by virtue of the Church's consent."5218 For the same reason, his authority is absolute, not only in matters which concern faith and morals, but again in matters which concern the discipline and government of the Church."5219 His judgment may be resorted to in every ecclesiastical case; nobody is allowed to question his verdict; "nobody is allowed to appeal to the future oecumenical council;"5220 He has not only "a priority by right, an office of inspection and of direction; he holds again priority of jurisdiction, a full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the universal Church,... ", "the total plenitude of this supreme power," not indirectly and extraordinarily, but "directly and ordinarily, over all churches and over each one of them, over all pastors and all believers, over each believer and each of the pastors."—Read this in the Latin: each word, through its ancient root and through its historic vegetation, contributes to strengthening the despotic and Roman sense of the text; the language of the people which invented and practiced dictatorship had to be employed for the affirmation of dictatorship with that precision and that copiousness, with that excess of energy and of conviction.
II. The Bishops and their new Situation.
The bishop in his diocese.—Change of situation and rôle.
—Depreciation of other local authorities.—Diminution of
other ecclesiastical authorities.—Decline of the chapter
and the jurisdiction.—The bishop alone dispenses rigors and
favors.—Use of displacement.—Second-class clergy subject
to military discipline.—Why it submits to this.
The change brought about in the condition and role of the bishop was not less grave. Along with the court noblesse and great ecclesiastical property, we see the prelate of the old régime disappearing by degrees, the younger son of a noble family, promoted by favor and very young, endowed with a large income and much more a man of the world than of the Church. In 1789, out of 134 bishops or archbishops, only 5 were of plebeian origin; in 1889, out of 90 bishops or archbishops there are only 4 of them nobles;5221 previous to the Revolution, the titular of an Episcopal see enjoyed, on the average, a revenue of 100,000 francs; at the present day, he receives only a salary of from 10,000 to 15,000 francs.5222 In place of the grand seignior, an amiable and magnificent host, given to display and to entertaining the best company, keeping an open table in his diocese when he happens to be there, but generally absent, an habitué of Paris or a courtier at Versailles, we see another stepping forward to take his seat He is bearing the same title, is a personage whose habits and origins are different, a resident administrator, much less ornamental but much more active and governing, provided with a more ample jurisdiction, with more absolute authority and wielding more effective influence. The final effect of the Revolution in relation to the bishop is the same as in relation to the Pope, and in the French diocese, as in the universal Church, the modern régime sets up a central, extraordinary, enormous power of which the ancient regime knew nothing.
Formerly, the bishop encountered around him, on the spot, equals and rivals, bodies of men or individuals, as independent and powerful as himself, irremovable, owners of estates, dispensers of offices and of favors, local authorities by legal sanction, permanent patrons of a permanent class of dependents. In his own cathedral, his metropolitan chapter was, like himself, a collator of benefice; elsewhere, other chapters were so likewise and knew how to maintain their rights against his supremacy. In each body of regular clergy, every grand abbot or prior, every noble abbess was, like himself, a sort of sovereign prince. The territorial seignior and justiciary on his own domain, was through the partial survival of the old wholly secular feudal order equally sovereign. Likewise sovereign, was, for its part, the parliament of the province, with its rights of registry and of remonstrance, with its administrative attributes and interference, with its train of loyal auxiliaries and subordinates, from the judges of the presidencies and bailiwicks down to the corporations of advocates, prosecutors and other members of the bar.5223 The parliamentarians of the district capital (chef-lieu), purchasers and owners of their offices, magistrates from father to son, much wealthier and much prouder than nowadays, were, in their old hereditary mansions, the real chiefs of the province, its constant representatives on the spot, its popular defenders against ministerial and royal absolutism. All these powers, which once counterbalanced episcopal power, have disappeared. Restricted to their judicial office, the tribunals have ceased to be political authorities and moderators of the central government: in the town and department, the mayor and general councilors, appointed or elected for a certain time, enjoy only temporary credit; the prefect, the military commandant, the rector, the treasurer-general are merely passing strangers. The local circumscription, for a century, is an exterior post where individuals live together in contact but not associated; no longer does any intimate, lasting and strong bond exist between them; nothing remains of the old province but a population of inhabitants, a given number of private persons under unstable functionaries. The bishop alone has maintained himself intact and erect, a dignitary for life, the conductor, by title and in fact, of a good many persons, the stationary and patient undertaker of a great service, the unique general and undisputed commander of a special militia which, through conscience and professions, gathers close around him and, every morning, awaits his orders. Because in his essence, he is a governor of souls. Revolution and centralization have not encroached on his ecclesiastical prerogative. Thanks to this indelible quality he has been able to endure the suppression of the others; these have come back to him of themselves and with others added, comprising local superiority, real importance and local ascendancy; including the various honorable appellations which, under the ancient régime, denoted his rank and preeminence; at the present day, under the modern régime, they are no longer in use for a layman and even for a minister of state; after 1802, one of the articles of the Organic Laws,5224 interdicts them to bishops and archbishops; they are "allowed to add to their name only the title of citizen and monsieur." But practically, except in the official almanac, everybody addresses a prelate as "my lord," and in the clergy, among believers, in writing or in speaking to him, he is called "your Grace," under the republic as under the monarchy.
Thus, in this provincial soil where other powers have lost their roots, not only has he kept his, but he has extended them and much farther; he has grown beyond all measure and now the whole ecclesiastical territory belongs to him. Formerly, on this territory, many portions of it, and quite large ones, were enclosures set apart, reserves that an immemorial wall prevented him from entering. It was not he who, in a great majority of cases, conferred livings and offices; it was not he who, in more than one-half of them, appointed to vacant curacies. At Besançon,5225 among 1500 benefices and livings, he once conferred less than 100 of them, while his metropolitan chapter appointed as many curés as himself; at Arras, he appointed only 47 curés and his chapter 66; at Saint-Omer, among the collators of curacies he ranked only third, after the abbey of Saint-Martin and after the chapter of the cathedral. At Troyes, he could dispose only of 197 curacies out of 372; at Boulogne, out of 180, he had only 80, and this again because the chapter voluntarily abandoned to him 16. Naturally, the eyes of all candidates turned towards the collator; and, among the highest and most lucrative places, those which gave the least trouble and afforded the most satisfaction, all sinecures, ranks, simple benefices and large urban curacies, probendaries and canonicates, most of the offices, titles, and incomes that might tempt human ambition, were in the hands, not of the bishop, but of the king or of the Pope, of an abbot or prior, of an abbess, or of a certain university,5226 of this or that cathedral or college-body, of a lay seignior, of a patentee, or of an indultaire, and often of the titulary himself. Thus, the hold of the bishop on his clercs was feeble; he did not hold them through the hope of a favor. And, on the other hand, he had still less hold on them, no hold at all, through fear of losing favor. They might displease him almost with impunity; his faculty for punishment was much more restricted than his means of recompense. His subordinates could find shelter and refuge against his displeasure, and even against his hostility. In the first place, and as a principle, a titulary, whether ecclesiastic or secular, owned his office and hence was irremovable; they themselves, plain vicar-curates, the humble desservans5227 of a rural parish, had acquired this privilege through the declarations of 1726 and 1731.5228 Moreover, in case of interdiction, suspension or of censure, a titulary could always recur to the courts against episcopal judgment and any other, against all encroachment on spiritual or temporal prerogatives, or on those which were useful or honorary belonging to his charge.
These courts were of two kinds, one ecclesiastical and the other secular, and in each an appeal could be made from a lower to a higher court, from the diocesan official to the metropolitan official, and from the présidial to the parliament, with a complete judicial staff, judge, assessors, public ministry, prosecutors, advocates and clerks, restricted to the observing of all judicial formalities, authentic papers, citations of witnesses and challenges of testimony, interrogatories and pleadings, allegation of canons, laws and precedents, presence of the defendant, opposing arguments, delays in procedure, publicity and scandal. Before the slow march and inconveniences of such a trial, the bishop often avoided giving judgment, and all the more because his verdicts, even when confirmed by the ecclesiastical court, might be warded off or rendered ineffective by the lay tribunal; for, from the former to the latter, there was an appeal under writ of error, and the latter, a jealous rival of the former, was ill-disposed towards the sacerdotal authorities;5229 besides, in the latter case, far more than in the former, the bishop found confronting him not merely the more or less legal right of his own party, but again the allies and patrons of his party, corporations and individuals who, according to an accepted usage, interfered through their solicitations with the judges and openly placed their credit at the service of their protégé. With so many spokes in the wheels, the working of an administrative machine was difficult; to give it effective motion, it required the steady pressure, the constant starting, the watchful and persistent efforts of a laborious, energetic, and callous hand, while, under the ancient régime, the delicate white hands of a gentleman-prelate were ill-adapted to this rude business; they were too nicely washed, too soft. To manage personally and on the spot a provincial, complicated and rusty machine, always creaking and groaning, to give one's self up to it, to urge and adjust twenty local wheels, to put up with knocks and splashes, to become a business man, that is to say a hard worker—nothing was less desirable for a grand seignior of that epoch. In the Church as in the State, he made the most of his rank; he collected and enjoyed its fruits, that is to say money, honors and gratifications, and, among these gratifications, the principal one, leisure; hence, he abandoned every special duty, the daily manipulation of men and things, the practical direction, all effective government, to his ecclesiastical or lay intendants, to subordinates whom he scarcely looked after and who, at his own house, on his own domain, replaced him as fixed residents. The bishop, in his own diocese, left the administration in the hands of his canons and grand-vicars; "the official decided without his meddling."5230 The machine thus worked alone and by itself, with very few shocks, in the old rut established by routine; he helped it along only by the influence he exercised at Paris and Versailles, by recommendations to the ministers in reality, he was merely the remote and worldly representative of his ecclesiastical principality at court and in the drawing-room.5231 When, from time to time, he made his appearance there, the bells were rung; deputations from all bodies hurried to his antechambers; each authority in turn, and according to the order of precedence, paid him its little compliment, which compliment he graciously returned and then, the homage being over, he distributed among them benedictions and smiles. After this, with equal dignity and still more graciously throughout his sojourn, he invited the most eligible to his table and, in his episcopal palace or in his country-house, he treated them as guests. This done, he had performed his duty; the rest was left to his secretaries, ecclesiastical officials and clerks, men of the bureaux, specialists and "plodders." "Did you read my pastoral letter?" said a bishop to Piron. And Piron, who was very outspoken, dared reply, "Yes, my lord. And yourself?"
Under the modern régime, this suzerain for show, negligent and intermittent, is succeeded by an active sovereign whose reign is personal and constant; the limited and easy monarchy of the diocese is converted into an universal and absolute monarchy. When the bishop, once invested and consecrated, enters the choir of his cathedral to the reverberations of the organ, lighted with wax candles amidst clouds of incense, and seats himself in solemn pomp5232 "on his throne," he is a prince who takes possession of his government, which possession is not nominal or partial, but real and complete. He holds in his hand "the splendid cross which the priests of his diocese have presented to him," in witness of and symbolizing their voluntary, eager and full obedience; and this pastoral baton is larger than the old one. In the ecclesiastical herd, no head browses at a distance or under cover; high or low, all are within reach, all eyes are turned towards the episcopal crook; at a sign made by the crook, and according to the signal, each head forthwith stands, advances or recedes: it knows too well that the shepherd's hands are free and that it is subject to its will. Napoleon, in his reconstruction of the diocese, made additions to only one of the diocesan powers, that of the bishop; he suffered the others to remain low down, on the ground. The delays, complications and frictions of a divided government were repugnant to him; he had no taste for and no comprehension of any but a concentrated government; he found it convenient to deal with but one man, a prefect of the spiritual order, as pliable as his colleague of the temporal order, a mitered grand functionary—such was the bishop in his eyes. This is the reason why he did not oblige him to surround himself with constitutional and moderating authorities; he did not restore the ancient bishop's court and the ancient chapter; he allowed his prelates themselves to pen the new diocesan statute.—Naturally, in the division of powers, the bishop reserved the best part to himself, the entire substance, and, to limit his local omnipotence, there remained simply lay authority. But, in practice, the shackles by which the civil government kept him in its dependence, broke or became relaxed one by one. Among the Organic Articles, almost all of them which subjected or repressed the bishop fell into discredit or into desuetude. Meanwhile, those which authorized and exalted the bishop remained in vigor and maintained their effect. Consequently, Napoleon's calculation, in relation to the bishop or in relation to the Pope, proved erroneous. He wanted to unite in one person two incompatible characters, to convert the dignitaries of the Church into dignitaries of the State, to make functionaries out of potentates. The functionary insensibly disappeared; the potentate alone subsisted and still subsists.
At the present day, conformably to the statute of 1802, the cathedral chapter,5233 except in case of one interim, is a lifeless and still-born body, a vain simulachre; it is always, by title or on paper, the Catholic "senate," the bishop's obligatory "council";5234 but he takes his councillors where he pleases, outside of the chapter, if that suits him, and he is free not to take any of them, "to govern alone, to do all himself." It is he who appoints to all offices, to the five or six hundred offices of his diocese; he is the universal collator of these and, nine times out of ten, the sole collator; excepting eight or nine canonships and the thirty or forty cantonal curacies, which the government must approve, he alone makes appointments and without any person's concurrence. Thus, in the way of favors, his clerical body has nothing to expect from anybody but himself.—And, on the other hand, they no longer enjoy any protection against his harshness; the hand which punishes is still less restrained than that which rewards; like the cathedral chapter, the ecclesiastical tribunal has lost its consistency and independence, its efficiency; nothing remains of the ancient bishop's court but an appearance and a name.5235
At one time, the bishop in person is himself the whole court; he deliberates only with himself and decides ex informata conscientia without a trial, without advice, and, if he chooses, in his own cabinet with closed doors, in private according to facts, the value of which he alone estimates, and through motives of which he is the sole appreciator. At another time, the presiding magistrate is one of his grand-vicars, his revocable delegate, his confidential man, his megaphone, in short, another self, and this official acts without the restraint of ancient regulations, of a fixed and understood procedure beforehand, of a series of judicial formalities, of verifications and the presence of witnesses, of the delays and all other legal precautions which guard the judge against prejudice, haste, error, and ignorance and without which justice always risks becoming injustice. In both cases, the head over which the sentence is suspended lacks guarantees, and, once pronounced, this sentence is definitive. For, on appeal to the court of the metropolitan bishop, it is always confirmed;5236 the bishops support each other, and, let the appellant be right or wrong, the appeal is in itself a bad mark against him: he did not submit at once, he stood out against reproof, he was lacking in humility, he has set an example of insubordination, and this alone is a grave fault. There remains the recourse to Rome; but Rome is far off,5237 and, while maintaining her superior jurisdiction, she does not willingly cancel an episcopal verdict; she treats prelates with respect, she is careful of her lieutenant-generals, her collectors of Saint Peter's pence. As to the lay tribunals, these have declared themselves incompetent,5238 and the new canon law teaches that never, "under the pretext of a writ of error, may a priest make an appeal to the secular magistrate";5239 through this appeal, "he derogates from the authority and liberty of the Church and is liable to the gravest censures;" he betrays his order.
Such is now, for the lower clergy, ecclesiastical law, and likewise secular law, both agreeing together in not affording him protection; add to this change in the jurisprudence which concerns him a no less divisive change in the jurisprudence which concerns him a no less decisive change in the titles which place and qualify him. Before 1789, there were in France 36,000 curés entitled irremovable; at the present day, there are only 3,425; before 1789, there were only 2500 curés entirely removable, while to-day there are 34,042;5240 all of the latter, appointed by the bishop without the approbation of the civil powers, are removable at his discretion; their parochial ministry is simply a provisional commission; they may be placed elsewhere, passing from one precarious curacy to another no less precarious. "At Valence,5241 Mgr. Chartrousse, in one month transferred 150 priests from one parish to another. In 1835, in the diocese of Valence, 35 transfers were sent out by the same mail." No assistant-priest, however long in his parish, feels that he is at home there, on his own domain, for the rest of his life; he is merely there in garrison, about the same as lay functionaries and with less security, even when irreproachable. For he may be transplanted, not alone for spiritual reasons, but likewise for political reasons. He has not grown less worthy, but the municipal council or the mayor have taken a dislike to his person; consequently to tranquilize things, he is displaced. Far better, he had become worthy and is on good terms with the municipal council and the mayor; wherever he has lived he has known how to mollify these, and consequently "he is removed from parish to parish,5242 chosen expressly to be put into those where there are troublesome, wrangling, malevolent, and impious mayors." It is for the good of the service and in the interest of the Church. The bishop subordinates persons to this superior interest. The legislation of 1801 and 1802 has conferred full powers upon him and he exercises them; among the many grips by which he holds his clergy the strongest is the power of removal, and he uses it. Into all civil or ecclesiastical institutions Napoleon, directly or by counterstrokes, has injected his spirit, the military spirit; hence the authoritative régime, still more firmly established in the Church than in the State, because that is the essence of the Catholic institution; far from being relaxed in this, it has become stricter; at present it is avowed, proclaimed, and even made canonical; the bishop, in our days, in fact as in law, is a general of division, and, in law as in fact, his curés are simply sergeants or corporals.5243 Command, from such a lofty grade falls direct, with extraordinary force, on grades so low, and, at the first stroke, is followed by passive obedience. Discipline in a diocese is as perfect as in an army corps, and the prelates publicly take pride in it. "It is an insult," said Cardinal de Bonnechose to the Senate,5244 "to suppose that we are not masters in our own house, that we cannot direct our clergy, and that it is the clergy which directs us... There is no general within its walls who would accept the reproach that could not compel the obedience of his soldiers. Each of us has command of a regiment, and the regiment marches."
III. The new Bishop.
Change in the habits and ways of the bishop.—His origin,
age, capability, mode of living, labor, initiative,
undertakings, and moral and social ascendancy. 5245
In order to make troops march, a staff, even a croisier, is not enough; to compulsory subordination voluntary subordination must be added; therefore, legal authority in the chief should be accompanied with moral authority; otherwise he will not be loyally supported and to the end. In 1789, this was not the case with the bishop; on two occasions, and at two critical moments, the clergy of the inferior order formed a separate band, at first at the elections, by selecting for deputies curés and not prelates, and next in the national assembly, by abandoning the prelates to unite with the Third Estate. The intimate hold of the chief on his men was relaxed or broken. His ascendency over them was no longer sufficiently great; they no longer had confidence in him. His subordinates had come to regard him as he was, a privileged individual, sprung from a another stock and furnished by a class apart, bishop by right of birth, without a prolonged apprenticeship, having rendered no services, without tests of merit, almost an interloper in the body of his clergy, a Church parasite accustomed to spending the revenues of his diocese away from his diocese, idle and ostentatious, often a shameless gallant or obnoxious hunter, disposed to be a philosopher and free-thinker, and who lacked two qualifications for a leader of Christian priests: first, ecclesiastical deportment, and next, and very often, Christian faith.5246
All these gaps in and discrepancies of episcopal character, all these differences and distances (which existed before 1789), between the origins, interests, habits, and manners of the lower and the upper clergy, all these inequalities and irregularities which alienated inferiors from the superior, have disappeared; the modern régime has leveled the wall of separation established by the ancient régime between the bishop and his priests. At the present day he is, like them, a plebeian, of common extraction, and sometimes very low, one being the son of a village shoemaker, another the natural son of a poor workwoman, both being men of feeling and never blushing at their humble origin, openly tender and respectful to their mothers,—a certain bishop lodging his mother, formerly a servant, in his episcopal palace and giving her the first seat at his table among the most honored and noblest of his guests.5247 He is "one of fortune's officers," that is to say, a meritorious and old officer.5248 According the "Almanac" of 1889, the three youngest are from forty-seven to forty-nine years of age; all the others are fifty and over; among the latter, three fourths of them are over sixty. As a general rule, a priest cannot become a bishop short of twenty or twenty-five years' service in lower or average grades; he must have remained in each grade a longer or shorter period, in turn vicar, curé, vicar-general, canon, head of a seminary, sometimes coadjutor, and almost always have distinguished himself in some office, either as preacher or catechist, professor or administrator, canonist or theologian. His full competence cannot be contested, and he enjoys a right to exact full obedience; he has himself rendered it up to his consecration; "he boasts of it," and the example he proposes to his priests is the one he has himself given.5249 On the other hand, his moderate way of living excites but little envy; it is about like that of a general of division, or of a prefect, or of a high civil functionary who, lacking personal fortune, has nothing but his salary to live on. He does not display, as formerly, confessionals lined with satin, kitchen utensil of massive silver, hunting accoutrements, a hierarchical staff of major-domos, ushers, valets, and liveried lackeys, stables and carriages, lay grand-seigniors, vassals of his suzerainty and figuring at his consecration, a princely ceremonial of parade and homage, a pompous show of receptions and of hospitalities. There is nothing but what is necessary, the indispensable instruments of his office: an ordinary carriage for his episcopal journeys and town visits, three or four domestics for manual service, three or four secretaries for official writings, some old mansion or other, cheaply repaired and refurnished without ostentation, its rooms and bureaus being those of an administrator, business man, and responsible head of a numerous staff; in effect, he is responsible for a good many subordinates, he has a good deal to attend to; he works himself, looking after the whole and in detail, keeping classified files by means of a chronological and systematic collection,5250 like the general director of a vast company; if he enjoys greater honors, he is subject to greater exigencies; assuredly, his predecessors under the ancient régime, delicate Epicureans, would not have wished for such a life; they would not have considered the benefit worth the effort.
Even when old, he draws on his energies; he officiates, he preaches, he presides at long ceremonies, he ordains seminarians, he confirms thousands of children,5251 he visits one after another the parishes in his diocese; often, at the end of his administration, he has visited them all and many times. Meanwhile, shut up in his episcopal cabinet, he is constantly inspecting these four or five hundred parishes; he reads or listens to reports, informs himself on the number of communicants, on what is required in worship, on the financial state of the fabrique, on the attitude of the inhabitants, on the good or bad dispositions of municipal counselors and mayors, on the local cause of dissension and conflict, on the conduct and character of the curé or vicar; each resident ecclesiastic needs guidance or maintenance between intemperate zeal and inert lukewarmness, evenly balanced according as parishes and circumstances vary, but always in a way to prevent false steps, to turn aside mistakes, to humor opinion, to stop scandals. For the entire life of the clergyman, not only his public life but again his personal, domestic, private life, belongs to and concerns the Church:5252 there must be no evil reports, even without foundation, on his account; if these occur, the bishop summons him to headquarters, warns him, admonishes him, and, without unburdening himself by handing the matter over to a responsible tribunal, he alone passes judgment after personally conducting the investigations, suffering the worries, and carrying out the painful, painstaking labor always attendant on direct absolute power. Likewise, in relation to his upper and his lower seminary: here are two indispensable nurseries of which he is the head gardener, attentive to filling annual vacancies and seeking proper subjects for these throughout his diocese, ever verifying and cultivating their vocations; he confers scholarships; he dictates rules and regulations; appoints and dismisses, displaces and procures as he pleases, the director and professors; he takes them, if he chooses, out of his diocese or out of the body of regular clergy; he prescribes a doctrine to them, methods, ways of thinking and teaching, and he keeps his eye, beyond his present or future priests, on three or four hundred monks and on fourteen hundred nuns.
As to the monks, so long as they remain inside their dwellings, in company together and at home, he has nothing to say to them; but, when they come to preach, confess, officiate or teach in public on his ground, they fall under his jurisdiction; in concert with their superior and with the Pope, he has rights over them and he uses them. They are now his auxiliaries assigned to or summoned by him, available troops and a reinforcement, so many chosen companies expressly ready, each with its own discipline, its particular uniform, its special weapon, and who bring to him in following a campaign under his orders, distinct aptitudes and a livelier zeal. He needs them5253 in order to make up for the insufficiency of his local clergy in arousing the spirit of devotion in his parishes and in enforcing sound doctrine in his seminaries. Now, between these two forces a common understanding is difficult; the former, adjuncts and flying about, march in front; the latter, holding the ground and stationary, look upon the new-comers as usurpers who lessen both their popularity and their fees; a bishop must possess great tact as well as energy to impose on both bodies of this clergy, if not an intimate union, at least mutual aid and a collaboration without conflict.—As to the nuns,5254 he is their ordinary, the sole arbiter, overseer and ruler over all these cloistered lives; he receives their vows, and renders them free of them; it is he who, after due inquiry and examination, authorizes each entrance into the community or a return to society, at first each admission or novitiate, and next each profession of faith or assumption of the veil, every dismissal or departure of a nun, every claim that one makes, every grave act of severity or decision on the part of the superior. He approves of, or appoints, the confessor of the establishment; he maintains seclusion in it, he draws tighter or relaxes the observances; he himself enters its doors by privilege of his office, and, with his own eyes, he inspects its régime, spiritual and temporal, through a right of control which extends from the direction of souls to the administration of property.
To so many obligatory matters he adds others which are voluntary, not alone works of piety, those relating to worship, propaganda, diocesan missions, catechizing adults, brotherhoods for perpetual adoration, meetings for the uninterrupted recital of the rosary, Peter's pence, seminary funds, Catholic journals and reviews-but, again, institutions for charity and education.5255 In the way of charity, he founds or supports twenty different kinds, sixty in one diocese alone, general and special services, infant nurseries, clubs, asylums, lodging-houses, patronages, societies for helping and placing the poor, for the sick at home and in the hospitals, for suckling infants, for the deaf and dumb, for the blind, for old men, for orphans, for repentant prostitutes, for prisoners, for soldiers in garrison, for workmen, apprentices, youths, and quantities of others. In the way of education, there are yet more of them—works which the Catholic chiefs have most at heart; without these, it is impossible in modern society to preserve the faith in each new generation. Hence, at each turning-point of political history, we see the bishops benefiting by the toleration or warding off the intolerance of the teaching State, competing with it, erecting alongside of its public schools free schools of its own, directed or served by priests or religious brotherhoods;—after the suppression of the university monopoly in 1850, more than one hundred colleges5256 for secondary education; after the favorable law of 1875, four or five provincial faculties or universities for superior instruction after the hostile laws of 1882, many thousands of parochial schools for primary instruction.
Foundation and support, all this is expensive. The bishop requires a great deal of money, especially since the State, become ill-disposed, cuts off clerical resources as much as possible, no longer maintains scholarships in the seminaries, deprives suspicious desservans of their small stipends, eats into the salaries of the prelates, throws obstacles in the way of communal liberalities, taxes and over taxes the congregations, so that, not merely through the diminution of its allowances it relieves itself at the expense of the Church, but again, through the increase of its imposts, it burdens the Church for its own advantage. The episcopacy obtains all necessary funds through collections in the churches and at domiciles, through the gifts and subscriptions of the faithful; and, every year, it needs millions, apart from the budget appropriation, for its faculties and universities in which it installs largely paid professors, for the construction, location and arrangement of its countless buildings, for the expenses of its minor schools, for the support of its ten thousand seminarists, for the general out-lay on so many charitable institutions; and it is the bishop who, their principal promoter, must provide for this, all the more because he has often taken it upon himself in advance, and made himself responsible for it by either a written or verbal promise. He responds to all these engagements; he has funds on hand at the maturity of each contract. In 1883, the bishop of Nancy, in need of one hundred thousand francs to build a school-house with a work-room attached to it, mentions this to a number of persons assembled in his drawing-room; one of these puts his hand in his pocket and gives him ten thousand francs, and others subscribe on the spot to the amount of seventy-four thousand francs.5257 Cardinal Mathieu, during his administration, archbishop of Besançon, thus collects and expends four millions. Lately, Cardinal Lavigerie, to whom the budget allows fifteen thousand francs per annum, wrote that he had spent eighteen hundred thousand francs and had incurred no debt.5258—Through this initiative and this ascendancy the bishop becomes a central social rallying-point; there is no other in the provinces, nothing but so many disjointed lives, juxtaposed and kept together in an artificial circle prescribed from above; so that a good many of these, and of most consideration, gravitate to and group themselves, especially since 1830, around this last permanent center and form a part of its body; he is the sole germinating, vivifying, intact center that still agglutinates scattered wills and suitably organizes them. Naturally, class and party interests incorporate themselves additionally along with the Catholic interest which he represents, and his ecclesiastical authority becomes a political influence; besides his secular and regular clergy, over and beyond the two thousand five hundred exemplary or directorial lives which he controls, we see behind him an indefinite multitude of lay adhesions and devotedness. Consequently, every government must take him into their calculations, and all the more because his colleagues stand by him; the episcopacy, banded together, remains erect in face of the omnipotent State, under the July monarchy as claimants of free instruction and under the second empire in support of the temporal power of the Pope.—In this militant attitude, the figure of the bishop is fully unveiled; the titular champion of an infallible Church, himself a believer and submissive; his voice is extraordinarily proud and defiant;5259 in his own eyes, he is the unique depository of truth and morality; in the eyes of his followers, he becomes a superhuman personage, a prophet of salvation or of destruction, the annunciator of divine judgments, the dispenser of celestial anger or of celestial pardon; he rises to the clouds in an apotheosis of glory; with women especially, this veneration grows into enthusiasm and degenerates into idolatry. Towards the end of the second empire an eminent French bishop, on a steamboat on Lake Leman, taking a roll of bread from his pocket, seated himself alongside of two ladies and ate it, handing each of them a piece of it. One of them, bowing reverently, replied to him, "At your hands, my lord, this is almost the holy communion!"5260
IV. The subordinate clergy.
The subordinates.—The secular clergy.—Its derivation and
how recruited.—How prepared and led.—The lower seminary.—
The higher seminary.—Monthly lectures and annual retreat.—
The Exercitia.—The Manreze du Prêtre.—The curé in his
parish.—His rôle a difficult one.—His patience and correct
conduct.
A clergy submissive in mind and feeling, long prepared by its condition and education for faith and obedience, acts under the sway of this sovereign and consecrated hand.5261 Among the 40,000 curés and desservans "more than 35,000 belong to the laboring class of workmen and peasants,"5262 not the first class of peasants, but the second class, the poorer families earning their daily bread and often with a good many children. Under the pressure of the ambient atmosphere and of the modern régime, the others keep back their sons, retaining them for the world and denying them to the Church; ambition, even low down on the scale, has developed itself and changed its object. No longer do they aspire for their sons to become a curé but a school master, a railroad employee, or a commercial clerk.5263 It was necessary to go descend further, a lower stratum has to be attained, in order to extract from it the priests that are lacking.
Undoubtedly, at this depth, the extraction was more expensive; the family cannot afford to pay for the child's ecclesiastic cal education; the State, moreover, after 1830, no longer gives anything to the lower seminary, nor to the large one after 1885.5264 The expenses of these schools must be borne by the faithful in the shape of donations and legacies; to this end, the bishop orders collections in the churches in Lent and encourages his diocesans to found scholarships. The outlay for the support and education, nearly gratis, of a future priest between the ages of twelve and twenty-four is very great; in the lower seminary alone it costs from forty to fifty thousand francs over and above the net receipts;5265 facing such an annual deficit, the bishop, who is responsible for the undertaking, is greatly concerned and sometimes extremely anxious. To make amends, and as compensation, the extraction is surer; the long process by which a child is withdrawn and instructed for the priesthood goes on and is finished with less uncertainty. Neither the light nor the murmur of the century finds its way to these low depths; nobody ever reads the newspaper, even the penny paper; vocations can here shape themselves and become fixed like crystals, intact and rigid, and all of a piece; they are better protected than in the upper layers, less exposed to mundane infiltrations; they run less risk of being disturbed or thwarted by curiosity, reason and skepticism, by modern ideas; the outside world and family surroundings do not, as elsewhere, interfere with their silent internal workings.5266 When the choir-boy comes home after the service, when the seminarian returns to his parents in his vacations, he does not here en-counter so many disintegrating influences, various kinds of information, free and easy talk, comparisons between careers, concern about advancement, habits of comfort, maternal solicitude, the shrugs of the shoulder and the half-smile of the strong-minded neighbor. Stone upon stone and each stone in its place, his faith builds up and becomes complete without any incoherency in its structure, with no incongruity in the materials, without any hidden imbalance. He has been taken in hand before his twelfth year, when very young; his curé, who has been instructed from above to secure suitable subjects, has singled him out in the catechism class and again at the ceremony of confirmation;5267 he is found to have a pious tendency and a taste for sacred ceremonies, a suitable demeanor, a mild disposition, complacency, and is inclined to study; he is a docile and well-behaved child; whether an acolyte at the altar or in the sacristy, he tries to fold the chasuble properly; all his genuflexions are correct, they do not worry him, he has no trouble in standing still, he is not excited and diverted, like the others, by the eruptions of animal spirits and rustic coarseness. If his rude brain is open to cultivation, if grammar and Latin can take root in it, the curé or the vicar at once take charge of him; he studies under them, gratis or nearly so, until he has completed the sixth or the seventh grade, and then he enters the lower seminary.5268
This is a school apart, a boarding-house of picked youths, an enclosed hot-house intended for the preservation and development of special vocations. None of these schools existed previous to 1789; at the present day(in 1885), they number 86 in France, and all the pupils are to become future priests. No foreign plants, no future laymen, are admitted into this preparatory nursery;5269 for experience has shown that if the lower seminary is mixed it no longer attains its ecclesiastical purpose; "it habitually turns over to the upper seminary only the bottom of the classes; those at the top seek fortune elsewhere". But if, on the contrary, "the lower seminaries are kept pure, the entire rhetoric5270 class continues on into the upper seminary; not only do they obtain the bottom of the classes but the top."—The culture, in this second nursery, which is prolonged during five years, becomes extreme, wholly special; it was less so under the ancient régime, even at Saint-Sulpice; there were cracks in the glass letting in currents of air; the archbishop's nephews and the younger sons of nobles predestined for Church dignities had introduced into it the laxity and liberties which were then the privileges of the episcopacy. During the vacations,5271 fairy scenes and pastorals were performed there with costumes and dances, "The Enthronement of the Great Mogul," and the "Shepherds in Chains"; the seminarians took great care of their hair; a first-class hair-dresser came and waited on them; the doors were not regularly shut: the youthful Talleyrand knew how to get out into the city and begin or continue his gallantries.5272 From and after the Concordat, stricter discipline in the new seminaries had become monastic; these are practical schools, not for knowledge, but for training, the object being much less to make learned men than believing priests; education takes precedence of instruction and intellectual exercises are made subordinate to spiritual exercises5273—mass every day and five visits to the Saint-Sacrament, with one minute to half-hour prayer stations; rosaries of sixty-three paters and aves, litanies, the angelus, loud and whispered prayers, special self-examinations, meditation on the knees, edifying readings in common, silence until one o'clock in the afternoon, silence at meals and the listening to an edifying discourse, frequent communions, weekly confessions, general confession at New-year's, one day of retreat at the end of every month after the vacations and before the collation of each of the four orders, eight days of retirement during which a suspension of all study, morning and evening sermons, spiritual readings, meditations, orisons and other services from hour to hour;5274 in short, the daily and systematic application of a wise and steadily perfected method, the most serviceable for fortifying faith, exalting the imagination, giving direction and impulse to the will, analogous to that of a military school, Saint-Cyr or Saumur, to such an extent that its corporeal and mental imprint is indelible, and that by the way in which he thinks, talks, smiles, bows and stands in your presence we at once recognize a former pupil of Saint-Sulpice as we do a former pupil of Saumur and of Saint-Cyr. Thus graduated, an ordained and consecrated priest, first a vicar and then a curé desservant, the discipline which has bound and fashioned him still keeps him erect and presenting arms. Besides his duties in church and his ministrations in the homes of his parishioners, besides masses, vespers, sermons, catechisings, confessions, communions, baptisms, marriages, extreme unctions, funerals, visiting the sick and suffering, he has his personal and private exercises: at first, his breviary, the reading of which demands each day an hour and a half, no practical duty being so necessary. Lamennais obtained a dispensation from it, and hence his lapses and fall.5275 Let no one object that such a recitation soon becomes mechanical5276; the prayers, phrases and words which it buries deep in the mind, even wandering, necessarily become fixed inhabitants in it, and hence occult and stirring powers banded together which encompass the intellect and lay siege to the will, which, in the subterranean regions of the soul, gradually extend or fortify their silent occupation of the place, which insensibly operate on the man without his being aware of it, and which, at critical moments, unexpectedly rise up to steady his footsteps or to save him from temptation. Add to this antique custom two modern institutions which contribute to the same end. The first one is the monthly conference, which brings together the desservans curés at the residence of the oldest curé in the canton; each has prepared a study on some theme furnished by the bishopric, some question of dogma, morality or religious history, which he reads aloud and discusses with his brethren under the presidency and direction of the oldest curé, who gives his final decision; this keeps theoretical knowledge and ecclesiastical erudition fresh in the minds of both reader and hearers. The other institution, almost universal nowadays, is the annual retreat which the priests in the diocese pass in the large seminary of the principal town. The plan of it was traced by Saint Ignatius; his Exercitia is still to-day the manual in use, the text of which is literally,5277 or very nearly, followed.5278 The object is to reconstitute the supernatural world in the soul, for, in general, it evaporates, becomes effaced, and ceases to be palpable under the pressure of the natural world. Even the faithful pay very little attention to it, while their vague conception of it ends in becoming a mere verbal belief; it is essential to give them back the positive sensation, the contact and feeling. To this end, a man retires to a suitable place, where what he does actively or passively is hourly determined for him in advance—attendance at chapel or at preaching, telling his beads, litanies, orisons aloud, orisons in his own breast, repeated self-examination, confession and the rest—in short, an uninterrupted series of diversified and convergent ceremonies which, by calculated degrees, drive out terrestrial preoccupations and overcome him with spiritual impressions; immediately around him, impressions of the same kind followed by the contagion of example, mutual fervor, common expectation, involuntary emulation, and that overstrained eagerness which creates its object; with all the more certainty that the individual himself works on himself, in silence, five hours a day, according to the prescriptions of a profound psychology, in order that his bare conception may take upon itself body and substance. What-ever may be the subject of his meditations, he repeats it twice the same day, and each time he begins by "creating the scene," the Nativity or the Passion, the Day of Judgment or Hell; he converts the remote and undefined story, the dry, abstract dogma, into a detailed and figured representation; he dwells on it, he evokes in turn the images furnished by the five senses, visual, audible, tactile, olfactory, and even gustatory; he groups them together, and in the evening he animates them afresh in order that he may find them more intense when he awakes the next morning. He thus obtains the complete, precise, almost physical spectacle of his aspirations; he reaches the alibi, that mental transposition, that reversal of the points of view in which the order of certainties becomes inverted, in which substantial objects seem to be vain phantoms and the mystic world a world of substantial reality.5279—According to persons and circumstances, the theme for meditation differs, and the retreat is prolonged for a shorter or longer period. For laymen, it generally lasts for three days only; for the Brethren of the Christian Schools it is eight days annually, and when, at the age of twenty-eight, they take their vows in perpetuity, it lasts thirty days: for the secular priests, it lasts a little less than a week, while the theme on which their meditations are concentrated is the supernatural character of the priest. The priest who is confessor and ministrant of the Eucharist, the priest who is the savior and restorer, the priest who is pastor, preacher and administrator—such are the subjects on which their imagination, assisted and directed, must work in order to compose the cordial which has to support them for the entire year. None is more potent; that which the Puritans drank at an American camp-meeting or at a Scotch revival was stronger but of less enduring effect.5280
Two different cordials, one reinforcing the other, are mixed together in this drink, both being of high flavor and so rank as to burn an ordinary mouth. On the one hand, with the freedom of language and the boldness of deduction characteristic of the method, the sentiment of the priest's dignity is exalted. What is the priest?"He is, between God who is in heaven and the man who tries to find him on earth, a being, God and man, who brings these nearer by his symbolizing both.5281.. I do not flatter you with pious hyperboles in calling you gods; this is not a rhetorical falsehood.... You are creators similar to Mary in her cooperation in the Incarnation.... You are creators like God in time.... You are creators like God in eternity. Our creation on our part, our daily creation, is nothing less than the Word made flesh itself.... God may create other worlds, he cannot so order it that any act under the sun can be greater than your sacrifice; for, at this moment, he reposes in your hands all that he has and all that he is.... I am not a little lower than the cherubim and seraphim in the government of the world, I am far above them; they are only the Servants of God, we are his coadjutors.... The angels, who behold the vast riches passing through our hands daily, are amazed at our prerogative.... I fulfill three sublime functions in relation to the god of our altars—I cause him to descend, I administer his body, I am his custodian... . Jesus dwells under your lock and key; his hours of reception begin and end through you, he does not move without your permission, he gives no benediction without your assistance, he bestows nothing except at your hands, and his dependence is so dear to him that, for eighteen hundred years, he has not left the Church for one moment to lose himself on the glory of his Father."—On the other hand, they are made to drink in full draughts the sentiment of subordination, which they imbibe to their very marrow.5282 "Ecclesiastical obedience is... a love of dependence, a violation of judgment.... Would you know what it is as to the extent of sacrifice? A voluntary death, the sepulcher of the will, says Saint Climaque.... There is a sort of real presence infused into those who command us...." Let us be careful not to fall "into the crafty opposition of liberal Catholicism.... Liberalism, in its consequences, is social atheism.... Unity, in Roman faith, is not sufficient; let us labor together in the unity of the Roman spirit; for that, let us always judge Rome with the optimism of affection.... Each new dogmatic definition produces its own advantages: that of the Immaculate Conception has given us Lourdes and its truly oecumenical wonders."
Nothing of all this is too much, and, in the face of the exigencies of modern times, it scarcely suffices. Now that society has become incredulous, indifferent or, at the least, secular, the priest must possess the two intense and master ideas which support a soldier abroad among insurgents or barbarians, one being the conviction that he is of a species and essence apart, infinitely superior to the common herd; and the other is the thought that he belongs to his flag, to his chiefs, especially to the commanding general, and that he has given himself up entirely to prompt obedience, to obeying every order issued without question or doubt.5283 Thus, in that parish where the permanent curé was once installed, especially in the rural districts,5284 the legal and popular governor of all souls, his successor, the removable desservant, is merely a resident bailiff, a sentry in his box, at the opening of a road which the public at large no longer travel. From time to time he hails you! But scarcely any one listens to him. Nine out of ten men pass at a distance, along a newer, more convenient and broader road. They either nod to him afar off or give him the go-by. Some are even ill-disposed, watching him or denouncing him to the ecclesiastic or lay authorities on which he depends. He is expected to make his orders respected and yet not hated, to be zealous and yet not importunate, to act and yet not efface himself: he succeeds pretty often, thanks to the preparation just described, and, in his rural sentry-box, patient, resigned, obeying his orders, he mounts guard lonely and in solitude, a guard which, for the past fifteen years, (from 1870-1885) is disturbed and anxious and becoming singularly difficult.
5201 (return)
[ Artaud, "Histoire de Pie VII.", I., 167.]
5202 (return)
[ Comte d'Haussonville, "L'Église romaine et le premier Empire, IV.,378, 415. (Instructions for the ecclesiastical commission of 1811.) "The Pope exercised the authority of universal bishop at the time of the re-establishment of the cult in France.... The Pope, under the warrant of an extraordinary and unique case in the Church, acted, after the Concordat, as if he had absolute power over the bishops." (Speech by Bigot de Préameneu, Minister of Worship, at the national council, June 20, 1811.) This act was almost universal in the history of the church, and the court of Rome started from this sort of extraordinary act, passed by it at the request of the sovereign, in order to enforce its ideas of arbitrary rule over the bishops."]
5203 (return)
[ So stated by Napoleon.]
5204 (return)
[ Bossuet, "OEuvres complètes, XXXII.", 415. (Defensio declarationis cleri gallicani, lib. VIII, caput 14).—"Episcopos, licet papæ divino jure subditos, ejusdem esse ordinis, ejusdem caracteris, sive, ut loquitur Hieronymus, ejusdem meriti, ejusdem, sacerdotii, collegasque et coepiscopos appelari constat, scitumque illud Bernardi ad Eugenium papam: Non es dominus episcoporum, sed unus ex illis."]
5205 (return)
[ Comte Boulay (de la Meurthe), "les Négociations du Concordat," p. 35.—There were 50 vacancies in 135 dioceses, owing to the death of their incumbents.]
5206 (return)
[ Bercastel and Henrion, XIII., 43. (Observations of Abbé Emery on the Concordat.) "None of the past Popes, not even those who have extended their authority the farthest, have been able to carry such heavy, authoritative blows out, as those struck at this time by Pius VII."]
5207 (return)
[ Prælectiones juris canonici habitæ in seminario Sancti Sulpitii, 1867 (Par l'abbé Icard), I., 138. "Sancti canones passim memorant distinctionem duplicis potestatis quâ utitur sanctus pontifex: unam appelant ordinariam, aliam absolutam, vel plenitudinem potestatis... . Pontifex potestate ordinaria utitur, quando juris positivi dispositionem retinet.... Potestatem extraordinariam exserit, quando jus humanum non servat, ut si jus ipsum auferat, si 1egibus conciliorum deroget, privilegia acquisita immutet.... Plenitudo potestatis nullis publici juris regulis est limitata."—Ibid., I, 333.]
5208 (return)
[ Principal Concordats: with Bavaria, 1817; with Prussia, 1821; with Wurtemburg, Baden, Nassau, the two Hesses, 1821; with Hanover, 1824; with the Netherlands, 1827; with Russia, 1847; with Austria, 1855; with Spain, 1851; with the two Sicilies, 1818; with Tuscany, 1851; with Portugal (for the patronat of the Indies and of China), 1857; with Costa Rica, 1852; Guatemala, 1853; Haiti, 1860; Honduras 1861; Ecuador, Venezuela, Nicaragua and San Salvador, 1862.]
5209 (return)
[ Bercastel et Henrion, XIII, 524.]
5210 (return)
[ "Adstantibus non judicantibus."—One of the prelates assembled at the Vatican, Nov. 20, 1854, observed that if the Pope decided on the definition of the Immaculate Conception... this decision would furnish a practical demonstration... of the infallibility with which Jesus Christ had invested his vicar on earth." (Émile Ollivier, "L'Église et l'État au concile du Vatican, I., 313.)]
5211 (return)
[ Bercastel et Henrion, XIII., 105. (Circular of Pius VII., February 25, 1808.) "It is said that all cults should be free and publicly exercised; but we have thrown this article out as opposed to the canons and to the councils, to the catholic religion."—Ibid., (Pius VII. to the Italian bishops on the French system, May 22, 1808.) "This system of indifferentism, which supposes no religion, is that which is most injurious and most opposed to the Catholic apostolic and Roman religion, which, because it is divine, is necessarily sole and unique and, on that very account, cannot ally itself with any other."—Cf. the "Syllabus" and the encyclical letter "Quanta Cura"of December 8, 1864.]
5212 (return)
[ Sauzay, "Histoire de la persecution révolutionnaire dans le departement du Doubs," X., 720-773. (List in detail of the entire staff of the diocese of Besançon, in 1801 and in 1822, under Archbishop Lecoz, a former assermenté.—During the Empire, and especially after 1806, this mixed clergy keeps refining itself. A large number, moreover, of assermentés do not return to the Church. They are not disposed to retract, and many of them enter into the new university. For example ("Vie du Cardinal Bonnechose," by M. Besson, I., 24), the principal teachers in the Roman college in 1815-1816 were a former Capuchin, a former Oratorian and three assermentés priests. One of these, M. Nicolas Bignon, docteur ès lettres, professor of grammar in the year IV at the Ecole Centrale, then professor of rhetoric at the Lycée and member of the Roman Academy, "lived as a philosopher, not as a Christian and still less as a priest." Naturally, he is dismissed in 1816. After that date, the purging goes on increasing against all ecclesiastics suspected of having compromised with the Revolution, either liberals or Jansenists. Cf. the "Mémoires de l'abbé Babou, évêque nommé de Séez," on the difficulties encountered by a too Gallican bishop and on the bitterness towards him of the local aristocracy of his diocese.]
5213 (return)
[ Cf. the "Mémoires de l'abbé Babou, évêque nommé de Séez," on the difficulties encountered by a too Gallican bishop and on the bitterness towards him of the local aristocracy of his diocese.]
5214 (return)
[ "Mémorial," July 31, 1816.]
5215 (return)
[ Both systems, set forth with rare impartiality and clearness, may be found in "L'Église et l'Etat au concile du Vatican," by Émile Ollivier, I., chs. II. and III.]
5216 (return)
[ Bercastel et Henrion, XIII., p. 14. (Letter of M. d'Avian, archbishop of Bordeaux, October 28, 1815.) "A dozen consecutive Popes do not cease, for more than one hundred and thirty years, improving that famous Declaration of 1682."]
5217 (return)
[ Ernile Olliver, ibid., I. 315-319. (Declarations of the French provincial councils and of foreign national and provincial councils before 1870.)—Cf. M. de Montalembert, "Des Intérets Catholiques," 1852, ch. II. and VI. "The ultramontane doctrine is the only true one. The great Count de Maistre's ideas in his treatise on the Pope have become commonplace for all Catholic youth."—Letter of Mgr. Guibert, February 22, 1853. "Gallicanism no longer exists."—"Diary in France," by Chris. Wordsworth, D.D., 1845. "There are not two bishops in France who are not ultramontane, that is to say devoted to the interests of the Roman See."]
5218 (return)
[ "Constitutio dogmatica prima de Ecclesia Christi," July 18, 1870. "Ejusmodi romani pontificis definitiones ex sese, non ex consensu Ecclesiæ irreformabiles esse." (ch. IV.)]
5219 (return)
[ Ibid., ch. III. "Si quis dixerit romanum pontificem habere tantummodo officium inspectionis vel directionis, non autem plenam et supremam potestatem juridictionis in universam Ecclesiam, non solum in rebus quæ ad fidem et mores, sed etiam in iis quæ ad disciplinam et regimen Ecclesiæ per totum orbem diffusæ pertinent; aut etiam habere tantum potiores partes, non vero totam plenitudinem hujus supremæ potestatis, aut hanc ejus potestatem non esse ordinariam et immediatam..."]
5220 (return)
[ Ibid., ch. III. "Aberrant a recto veritatis tramite qui affirmant licere ab judiciis Romanorum pontificum ad oecumenicum concilium, tanquam ad auctoritatem romano pontifice superiorem, appellare."]
5221 (return)
[ "Almanach national de 1889." (Among these four, one only belongs to a historic family, Mgr. de Deux-Brézé of Moulins.)]
5222 (return)
[ See "The Ancient Régime," pp. 65, 120, 150, 292. (Ed. Laffont I. pp. 53-43, 92-93, 218,219.)]
5223 (return)
[ Cf. the history of the parliaments of Grenoble and Rennes on the approach of the Revolution. Remark the fidelity of all their judicial subordinates in 1788 and 1789, and the provincial power of the league thus formed.]
5224 (return)
[ Article 12.]
5225 (return)
[ "The Revolution," Vol. I.—Abbé Sicard, "Les Dispensateurs des bénéfices ecclésiastiques avant 1789." ("Correspondant" of Sep. 10, 1889, pp. 887, 892, 893.) Grosley, "Mémoires pour servir l'histoire de Troyes," II, pp. 35, 45.]
5226 (return)
[ Abée Elie Méric, "Le Clergé sous l'ancien régime," I., p. 26. (Ten universities conferred letters of appointment on their graduates.)—Abbé Sicard, "Les Dispensateurs," etc., p 876.—352 parliamentarians of Paris had an indult, that is to say, the right of obliging collators and church patrons to bestow the first vacant benefice either on himself or on one of his children, relations or friends. Turgot gave his indult to his friend Abbé Morellet, who consequently obtained (in June 1788) the priory of Thimer, with 16,000 livres revenue and a handsome house.—Ibid., p.887. "The bias of the Pope, ecclesiastical or lay patrons, licensed parties, indultaires, graduates, the so frequent use of resignations, permutations, pensions, left to the bishop, who is now undisputed master of his diocesan appointments, but very few situations to bestow."—Grosley, "Mémoires, etc.," II., p.35. "The tithes followed collations. Nearly all our ecclesiastical collators are at the same time large tithe-owners."]
5227 (return)
[ An inferior class of priests, generally assigned to poor parishes.]
5228 (return)
[ Abbé Elie Méric, ibid., p.448.]
5229 (return)
[ Abbé Elie Méric, ibid., pp 392~403. (Details in support.)]
5230 (return)
[ Abbé Richandeau, "De l'ancienne et de la nouvelle discipline de l'Église en France," p. 281.—Cf. Abbé Elie Méric, ibid., ch. II. (On the justice and judges of the church.)]
5231 (return)
[ Mercur, "Tableau de Paris," IV.,chap. 345. "The flock no longer recognize the brow of their pastor and regard him as nothing but an opulent man, enjoying himself in the capital and giving himself very little trouble about it."]
5232 (return)
[ "Le Monde" of Novem. 9, 1890. (Details, according to the Montpellier newspapers, of the ceremony which had just taken place in the cathedral of that town for the remission of the pallium to Mgr. Roverié de Cabrières.]
5233 (return)
[ "Encyclopedie théologique," by Abbé Migne, ix., p.465. (M. Emery, "Des Nouveaux chapitres cathédraux," p.238.) "The custom in France at present, of common law, is that the bishops govern their dioceses without the participation of any chapter. They simply call to their council those they deem proper, and choose from these their chapter and cathedral councillors."]
5234 (return)
[ Ibid., id.: "Notwithstanding these fine titles, the members of the chapter take no part in the government during the life of the bishop; all depends on this prelate, who can do everything himself, or, if he needs assistants, he may take them outside of the chapter." —Ibid., p. 445. Since 1802, in France, "the titular canons are appointed by the bishop and afterwards by the government, which gives them a salary. It is only the shadow of the canonical organization, of which, however, they possess all the canonical rights."]
5235 (return)
[ Abbé André, "Exposition de quelques principes fondamentaux de droit Canonique," p.187 (citing on this subject one of the documents of Mgr. Sibour, then bishop of Digne).—"Since the Concordat of 1801, the absence of all fixed procedure in the trial of priests has left nothing for the accused to depend on but the conscience and intelligence of the bishop. The bishop, accordingly, has been, in law, as in fact, the sole pastor and judge of his clergy, and, except in rare cases, no external limit has been put to the exercise of his spiritual authority."]
5236 (return)
[ Émile Ollivier, "L'Église et l'État au concile du Vatican," p 517.—Abbé André, ibid., PP.17, 19, 30, 280. (Various instances, particularly the appeal of a rural curé, Feb. 8, 1866.) "The metropolitan (bishop) first remarked that he could not bring himself to condemn his suffragan." Next (Feb.20, 1866), judgment confirmed by the metropolitan court, declaring "that no reason exists for declaring exaggerated and open to reform the penalty of depriving the rector of the parish of X—of his title, a title purely conferred by and revocable at the will of the bishop."]
5237 (return)
[ Émile Ollivier, ibid., II.,517, 516.—Abbé André, ibid., p.241. "During the first half of the nineteenth century no appeal could be had from the Church of France to Rome."]
5238 (return)
[ Émile Ollivier, ibid., I. p. 286.—Abbé André, ibid., p.242: "From 1803 to 1854 thirty-eight appeals under writ of error (were presented) to the Council of State by priests accused.... Not one of the thirty-eight appeals was admitted."]
5239 (return)
[ Prælectiones juris canonici habitæ in seminario Sancti Sulpicii, III., p.146.]
5240 (return)
[ Émile Ollivier, ibid., I., 136.]
5241 (return)
[ Id., ibid., I., p. 285. (According to Abbé Denys, "Études sur l'administration de l'Église," p. 211.)—Cf. Abbé André, ibid., and "L'Etat actuel du clergé en France par les frères Allignol" (1839).—This last work, written by two assistant-curés, well shows, article by article, the effects of the Concordat and the enormous distance which separates the clergy of to-day from the old clergy. The modifications and additions which comport with this exposition are indicated by Abbé Richandeau, director of the Blois Seminary, in his book, "De l'ancienne et de la nouvelle discipline de l'Eglise en France" (1842). Besides this, the above exposition, as well as what follows, is derived from, in addition to printed documents, personal observations, much oral information, and numerous manuscript letters.]
5242 (return)
[ "Manreze du prêtre," by the R. P. Caussette, vicar-general of Toulouse, 1879., V. II.,p.523. (As stated by the Abbé Dubois, an experienced missionary. He adds that these priests, "transferred to difficult posts, are always on good terms with their mayors,... triumph over obstacles, and maintain peace.")—Ibid., I., p.312. "I do not know whether the well-informed consciences of our lords the bishops have made any mistakes, but what pardons have they not granted! what scandals have they not suppressed! what reputations have they not preserved! what a misfortune if you have to do with a court instead of with a father! For the court acquits and does not pardon.... And your bishop may not only employ the mercy of forgiveness, but, again, that of secrecy. How reap the advantages of this paternal system by calumniating it!"]
5243 (return)
[ Vie de Mgr. Dupanloup," by Abbé Lagrange, II.,p.43: "Mgr. Dupanloup believed that pastoral removal was very favorable, not to say necessary, to the good administration of a diocese, to the proper management of parishes, even to the honor of priests and the Church, considering the difficulties of the times we live in. Irremovability was instituted for fortunate times and countries in which the people fulfilled all their duties and in which the sacerdotal ministry could not be otherwise than a simple ministry of conservation; at the present day it is a ministry of conquest and of apostleship. The bishop, accordingly, must dispose of his priests as he thinks them fit for this work, according to their zeal and to their possible success in a country which has to be converted." Against the official character and publicity of its judgments "it is important that it should not make out of a misfortune which is reparable a scandal that nothing can repair."]
5244 (return)
[ "Moniteur," session of March 11, 1865.]
5245 (return)
[ In the following Taine describes the centralization and improvement of the Church administration which probably made many socialist readers believe that the same kind of improvements easily could be introduced into private enterprise at the same time making them more determined to exclude children from the old families from all kinds of leadership in the coming socialist state.]
5246 (return)
[ "The Ancient Régime," pp. 65, 120, 150, 292. "Memoires inédits de Madame de....." (I am not allowed to give the author's name). The type in high relief of one of these prelates a few years before the Revolution may here be found. He was bishop of Narbonne, with an income of 800,000 livres derived from the possessions of the clergy. He passed a fortnight every other year at Narbonne, and then for six weeks he presided with ability and propriety over the provincial parliament at Montpellier. But during the other twenty-two months he gave no thought to any parliamentary business or to his diocese, and lived at Haute Fontaine with his niece, Madame de Rothe, of whom he was the lover. Madame de Dillon, his grand-niece, and the Prince de Guémenée, the lover of Madame de Dillon, lived in the same château. The proprieties of deportment were great enough, but language there was more than free, so much so that the Marquise d'Osmond, on a visit, "was embarrassed even to shedding tears.... On Sunday, out of respect to the character of the master of the house, they went to Mass; but nobody carried a prayer-book; it was always some gay and often scandalous book, which was left lying about in the tribune of the château, open to those who cleaned the room, for their edification as they pleased."]
5247 (return)
[ "Vie de Mgr. Dupanloup," by Abbé Lagrange.—"Histoire du Cardinal Pie, évêque de Poitiers," by Mgr. Bannard.]
5248 (return)
[ One could imagine the impression this text would have made on Lenin and his plans to create an elite communist party once he should take the power he dreamt of. (SR.)]
5249 (return)
[ "Moniteur," session of March 14, 1865, speech of Cardinal de Bonnechose: "I exact full obedience, because I myself, like those among you who belong to the army or navy, have always taken pride in thus rendering it to my chiefs, to my superiors."]
5250 (return)
[ "Histoire du cardinal Pie," by M. Bannard, II.,p.690. M. Pie left six large volumes in which, for thirty years, he recorded his episcopal acts, uninterruptedly, until his last illness.]
5251 (return)
[ Ibid., II., p.135: "In the year 1860 he had confirmed 11,586 belonging to his diocese; in 1861 he confirmed 11,845."—"Vie de Mgr. Dupanloup," by Abbé La Grange, I II., p. 19. (Letter to his clergy, 1863.) He enumerates what he had done in his diocese: "The parochial retraites which have amounted to nearly one hundred; the perpetual adoration of the Holy Sacrament established in all the parishes; confirmation, not alone in the cantonal town but in the smallest villages and always preceded by the mission; the canonical visit made annually in each parish, partly by the archdeacon, partly by the dean, and partly by the bishop;... the vicarships doubled; life in common established among the parochial clergy; sisters of charity for schools and the sick multiplied in the diocese and spread on all sides; augmentation of everything concerning ecclesiastical studies, the number of small and large seminaries being largely increased; examinations of young priests; ecclesiastical lectures; grades organized and raised; churches and rectories everywhere rebuilt or 'repaired; a great diocesan work in helping poor parishes and, to sustain it, the diocesan lottery and fair of the ladies of Orleans; finally, retraites and communions for men established, and also in other important towns and parishes of the diocese." (P. 46.) (Letter of January 26, 1846, prescribing in each parish the exact holding of the status animarum, which status is his criterion for placing a curé.) "The État de Pâques in his parish must always be known while he is in it, before withdrawing him and placing him elsewhere."]
5252 (return)
[ The drafters of the charter of the United Nations Staff Rules had the same idea in mind when writing Regulation 1.2: "Staff members are subject to the authority of the Secretary-General and to assignment by him to any of the activities or offices of the United Nations. They are responsible to him in the exercise of their functions. The whole time of staff members shall be at the disposal of the Secretary-General. The Secretary-General shall establish a normal working week." The disciplinary means of which the bishops disposed are, however, lacking in the United Nations secretariat. (SR.)]
5253 (return)
[ "Moniteur," session of March 14 1865. (Speech of Cardinal de Bonnechose.) "What would we do without our monks, Jesuits, Dominicans, Carmelites, etc., to preach at Advent and during Lent, and act as missionaries in the country? The (parochial) clergy is not numerous enough to do this daily work."]
5254 (return)
[ Prælectiones juris canonici, II., 305 and following pages.]
5255 (return)
[ "La Charité à Nancy," by Abbé Girard, 1890, I. vol.—"La Charité à Angers," by Léon Cosnier, 1890, 2 vols.—"Manuel des oeuvres et institutions charitable à Paris," by Lacour, I vol.—"Les Congrégations religieuses en France," by Émile Keller, 1880, 1 vol,]
5256 (return)
[ "Vie de Mgr. Dupanloup," I., 506 (1853). "More than one hundred free ecclesiastical establishments for secondary education have been founded since the law of 1850."—"Statistique de l'enseignement secondaire." In 1865, there were 276 free ecclesiastical schools for secondary instruction with 34,897 pupils, of which 23.549 were boarders and 11,348 day-scholars. In 1876, there were 390 with 46,816 pupils, of which 33,092 were boarders and 13,724 day-scholars.]
5257 (return)
[ "La Charité à Nancy," by Abbé Girard, p.87.—"Vie du Cardinal Mathieu," by Mgr. Besson, 2 vols.]
5258 (return)
[ December, 1890.]
5259 (return)
[ Cf., in the above-mentioned biographies, the public and political discourses of the leading prelates, especially those of M. Mathieu (of Besançon), M. Dupanloup (of Orleans), Mgr. de Bonnechose (of Rouen), and particularly Mgr. Pie (of Poitiers).]
5260 (return)
[ A fact told me by a lady, an eye-witness. In the seventeenth century it is probable that Fénelon or Bossuet would have regarded such a response as extravagant and even sacrilegious.]
5261 (return)
[ Imagine the impression this might have had on ambitious men dreaming of establishing their own faithful parties. (SR.)]
5262 (return)
[ Abbé Elie Méric, in the "Correspondant" of January 10, 1890, p. 18.]
5263 (return)
[ "De l'État actuel du clergé en France" (1839), p.248, by the brothers Allignol. Careers of every kind are too crowded; "only the ecclesiastical is in want of subjects; willing youths are the only ones wanted and none are found." This is due, say these authors, to the profession of assistant-priest being too gloomy—eight years of preparatory study five years in the seminary, 800 francs of pay with the risk of losing it any day, poor extras, a life-servitude, no retiring pension, etc.—"Le Grand Péril de L'Église en France," by Abbé Bougaud (4th ed., 1879), pp 2-23.—"Lettre Circulaire" (No. 53) of Mgr. Thiebaut, archbishop of Rouen, 1890, p.618.]
5264 (return)
[ There is a gradual suppression of the subvention in 1877 and 1853 and a final one in 1885.]
5265 (return)
[ Abbé Bougaud, Ibid., p. 118, etc.—The lower seminary contains about 200 or 250 pupils. Scarcely one of these pays full board. They pay on the average from 100 to 200 frs. per head, while their maintenance costs 400 francs.—The instructors who are priests get 600 francs a year. Those who are not priests get 300 francs, which adds 12,000 francs to the expenses and brings the total deficit up to 42,000 or 52,000 francs.]
5266 (return)
[ Somewhat like television where he who controls this media controls the minds of the people. (SR.)]
5267 (return)
[ Circular letter (No. 53) of M. Léon, archbishop of Rouen (1890), p. 618 and following pages.]
5268 (return)
[ Had Hitler and Lenin read this, which is likely, then they would have fashioned their youth party programmes accordingly!! The Catholic faith in France today (in 1999) is nearly extinguished with only 14 seminaries and only a few hundred young men yearly entering these.(SR.)]
5269 (return)
[ Abbé Bougaud, ibid., p. 135. (Opinion of the archbishop of Aix, Ibid., p. 38.) "I know a lower seminary in which a class en quatrième (8th grade US.) of 44 pupils furnished only 4 priests, 40 having dropped out on the way.... I have been informed that a large college in Paris, conducted by priests and containing 400 pupils, turned out in ten years but one of an ecclesiastical calling."—"Moniteur," March, 14, 1865. (Speech in the Senate by Cardinal Bonnechose.) "With us, discipline begins at an early age, first in the lower seminary and then in the upper seminary.... Other nations envy us our seminaries. They have not succeeded in establishing any like them. They cannot keep pupils so long; their pupils enter their seminaries only as day scholars."]
5270 (return)
[ Old-fashioned name for the 11th grade in a French high school. (SR.)]
5271 (return)
[ "Histoire de M. Emery," by Abbé Elie Méric, I., 15, 17. "From 1786 onwards, plays written by the 'les philosophes,' by the 'Robertuis' and the Laon community; they were excluded from the great seminary where they ought never to have been admitted." This reform was effected by the new director, M. Emery, and met with such opposition that it almost cost him his life.]
5272 (return)
[ M. de Talleyrand, "Mémoires," vol. i. (Concerning one of his gallantries.) "The superiors might have had some Suspicion,... but Abbé couturier had shown them how to shut their eyes. He had taught them not to reprove a young seminarist whom they believed destined to a high position, who might become coadjutor at Rheims, perhaps a cardinal, perhaps minister, minister de la feuille—who knows?"]
5273 (return)
[ "Diary in France," by Christopher Wordsworth, D.D. 1845. (Weakness of the course of study at Saint-Sulpice.) "There is no regular course of lectures on ecclesiastical history."—There is still at the present day no special course of Greek for learning to read the New Testament in the original.—"Le clergé français en 1890" (by an anonymous ecclesiastic), pp.24-38. "High and substantial service is lacking with us.... For a long time, the candidates for the episcopacy are exempt by a papal bull from the title of doctor."—In the seminary there are discussions in barbarous Latin, antiquated subjects, with the spouting of disjointed bits of text: "They have not learned how to think. .. Their science is good for nothing; they have no means or methods even for learning.... The Testament of Christ is what they are most ignorant of.... A priest who devotes himself to study is regarded either as a pure speculator unfit for the government, or with an ambition which nothing can satisfy, or again an odd, ill-humored, ill-balanced person; we live under the empire of this stupid prejudice,... We have archeologists, assyriologists, geologists, philologists and other one-sided savants. The philosophers, theologians, historians, and canonists have become rare."]
5274 (return)
[ "Journal d'un voyage en France," by Th. W. Allies, 1845, p.38. (Table of daily exercises in Saint-Sulpice furnished by Abbé Caron, former secretary to the archbishop of Paris.)—Cf. in "Volupté," by Saint-Beuve, the same table furnished by Lacordaire.]
5275 (return)
[ "Manreze du prêtre," by the Rev. Father Caussette, I., 82.]
5276 (return)
[ Ibid., I., 48. "Out of 360 meditations made by a priest during the year, 300 of them are arid." We have the testimony of Abbé d'Astros on the efficacy of prayers committed to memory, who was in prison for three years under the first empire and without any books. "I knew the psalms by heart and, thanks to this converse with God, which escaped the jailor, I was never troubled by boredom."]
5277 (return)
[ As with the "Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes," whose society has the most members.]
5278 (return)
[ "Manreze du prêtre," by the Rev. Father Caussette, I., 9. The Manreze is the grotto where Saint Ignatius found the plan of his Exercitia and the three ways by which a man succeeds in detaching himself from the world, "the purgative, the illuminative and the unitive." The author says that he has brought all to the second way, as the most suitable for priests. He himself preached pastoral retreats everywhere in France, his book being a collection of rules for retreats of this kind.]
5279 (return)
[ Someone who, like me, have lived through the attempted Communist conquest of the world, in Eastern Europe, in China, Korea, Vietnam and other conquered territories, the terrible experiences of those imprisoned in re-education camps, come to mind. Did Lenin have Taine translated? Did Lenin and Stalin use this description of catholic brainwashing as their model? We might never find out. (SR.)]
5280 (return)
[ One of these enduring effects is the intense faith of the prelates, who in the 18th century believed so little. At the present day, not made bishops until about fifty years of age, thirty of which have been passed in exercises of this description, their piety has taken the Roman, positive, practical turn which terminates in devotions properly so called. M. Emery, the reformer of Saint-Sulpice, gave the impulsion in this sense. ("Histoire de M. Emery," by Abbé Elie Méric, p. 115 etc.) M. Emery addressed the seminarians thus: "Do you think that, if we pray to the Holy Virgin sixty times a day to aid us at the hour of death, she will desert us at the last moment?"—" He led us into the chapel, which he had decked with reliquaries.... He made the tour of it, kissing in turn each reliquary with respect and love, and when he found one of them out of reach for this homage, he said to us, 'Since we cannot kiss that one, let us accord it our profoundest reverence!'... And we all three kneeled before the reliquary."—Among other episcopal lives, that of Cardinal Pie, bishop of Poitiers, presents the order of devotion in high relief. ("Histoire du cardinal Pie," by M. Bannard, II.,348 and passim.) There was a statuette of the Virgin on his bureau. After his death, a quantity of paper scraps, in Latin or French, written and placed there by him-were found, dedicating this or that action, journey or undertaking under the special patronage of the Virgin or St. Joseph. He also possessed a statuette of Our Lady of Lourdes which never was out of his sight, day or night. "One day, having gone out of his palace, he suddenly returned, having forgotten something—he had neglected to kiss the feet of his Heavenly Mother."—Cf. "Vie de Mgr. Dupanloup," Abbé Lagrange, I., 524. "During his mother's illness, he multiplied the novenas, visited every altar, made vows, burnt candles, for not only had he devotion, but devotions... On the 2d of January, 1849, there was fresh alarm; thereupon, a novena at Saint-Geneviève and a vow—no longer the chaplet, but the rosary. Then, as the fête of Saint François de Sales drew near a new novena to this great Savoyard saint; prayers to the Virgin in Saint-Sulpice; to the faithful Virgin; to the most wise Virgin, everywhere."]
5281 (return)
[ "Manreze du prêtre," I., 27, 29, 30, 31, 35, 91, 92, 244, 246, 247, 268.]
5282 (return)
[ Ibid. I., 279, 281, 301, 307, 308, 319.]
5283 (return)
[ Just like the believing faithful 20th century international revolutionary Marxist-communist. (SR.)]
5284 (return)
[ "Le clergé française en 1890" (by an anonymous ecclesiastic), p. 72. (On the smaller parishes.) "The task of the curé here is thankless if he is zealous, too easy if he has no zeal. In any event, he is an isolated man, with no resources whatever, tempted by all the demons of solitude and inactivity."—Ibid.,,92. "Our authority among the common classes as well as among thinking people is held in check; the human mind is to-day fully emancipated and society secularized."— Ibid., 15. "Indifference seems to have retired from the summits of the nation only to descend to the lower strata.... In France, the priest is the more liked the less he is seen; to efface himself, to disappear is what is first and most often demanded of him. The clergy and the nation live together side by side, scarcely in contact, through certain actions in life, and never intermingling."]
CHAPTER III THE CLERGY
I. The regular clergy.
The regular clergy.—Difference in the condition of the two
clergies.—The three vows.—Rules.—Life in common.—Object
of the system.—Violent suppression of the institution and
its abuses in 1790.—Spontaneous revival of the institution
free of its abuses after 1800.—Democratic and republican
character of monastic constitutions.—Vegetation of the old
stock and multiplication of new plants,—Number of monks and
nuns.—Proportion of these numbers to the total population
in 1789 and 1878.—Predominance of the organizations for
labor and charity.—How formed and extended.—Social
instinct and contact with the mystic world.
However correct the life of a secular priest may be, he stills belongs to his century. Like a layman, he has his own domicile and fireside, his parsonage in the country with a garden, or an apartment in town—in any event, his own home and household, a servant or housekeeper, who is often either his mother or a sister; in short, a suitable enclosure set apart, where he can enjoy his domestic and private life free of the encroachments on his public and ecclesiastical life, analogous to that of a lay functionary or a bachelor of steady habits. In effect, his expenses and income, his comforts and discomforts are about the same. His condition, his salary,5301 his table, clothes and furniture, his out-of-door ways and habits, give him rank in the village alongside of the schoolteacher and postmaster; in the large borough or small town, alongside of the justice of the peace and college professor; in the large towns, side by side with the head of a bureau or a chief of division; at Paris, in certain parishes, alongside of the prefect of police and the prefect of the Seine.5302 Even in the humblest curacy, he regulates his budget monthly, spending his money without consulting anybody. When not on duty, his time is his own. He can dine out, order for himself at home a special dish, allow himself delicacies. If he does not possess every comfort, he has most of them, and thus, like a lay functionary, he may if he chooses get ahead in the world, obtain promotion to a better curacy, become irremovable, be appointed canon and sometimes mount upward, very high, to the topmost rank. Society has a hold on him through all these worldly purposes; he is too much mixed up with it to detach himself from it entirely; very often his spiritual life droops or proves abortive under so many terrestrial preoccupations.—If the Christian desires to arrive at the alibi and dwell in the life beyond, another system of existence is essential for him, entailing a protection against two temptations, that is to say the abandonment of two dangerous liberties, one consisting in the power by which, being an owner of property, he disposes as he likes of what belongs to him, and the other consisting in the power by which, being master of his acts, he arranges as he pleases his daily occupations. To this end, in addition to the vow of chastity also taken by the secular priest, the members of religious orders also take two other distinct and precise vows. By the vow of poverty he (or she) renounces all property whatever, at least that which is fully and completely his own,5303 the arbitrary use of possessions, the enjoyment of what belongs to him personally, which vow leads him to live like a poor man, to endure privations, to labor, and beyond this, even to fasting, to mortifications, to counteracting and deadening in himself all those instincts by which man rebels against bodily suffering and aims at physical well being. By the vow of obedience he (or she) gives himself up entirely to a double authority: one, in writing, which is discipline, and the other a living being, consisting of the superior whose business it is to interpret, apply and enforce the rule. Except in unheard-of cases, where the superior's injunctions might be expressly and directly opposed to the letter of this rule,5304 he interdicts himself from examining, even in his own breast, the motives, propriety and occasion of the act prescribed to him; he has alienated in advance future determinations by entirely abandoning self-government; hence-forth, his internal motor is outside of himself and in another person. Consequently, the unforeseen and spontaneous initiative of free will disappears in his conduct to give way to a predetermined, obligatory and fixed command, to a system (cadre) which envelops him and binds together in its rigid compartments the entire substance and details of his life, anticipating the distribution of his time for a year, week by week, and for every day, hour by hour, defining imperatively and circumstantially all action or inaction, physical or mental, all work and all leisure, silence and speech, prayers and readings, abstinences and meditations, solitude and companionship, hours for rising and retiring, meals, quantity and quality of food, attitudes, greetings, manners, tone and forms of language and, still better, mute thoughts and the deepest sentiments. Moreover, through the periodical repetition of the same acts at the same hours, lie confines himself to a cycle of habits which are forces, and which keep growing since they are ever turning the inward balance on the same side through the ever-increasing weight of his entire past. Through eating and lodging together, through a communion of prayer, through incessant contact with other brethren of the same religious observances, through the precaution taken to join with him one companion when he goes out and two companions when he lodges elsewhere, through his visits to and fro to the head establishment, he lives in a circle of souls strained to the same extent, by the same processes, to the same end as himself, and whose visible zeal maintains his own.—Grace, in this state of things, abounds. Such is the term bestowed on the silent and steady, or startling and brusque, emotion by which the Christian enters into communication with the invisible world, an aspiration and a hope, a presentiment and a divination, and even often a distinct perception. Evidently, this grace is not far off, almost within reach of the souls which, from the tenor of their whole life, strive to attain it. They have closed themselves off on the earthly side, therefore, these can no longer look or breathe otherwise than heavenward.
At the end of the eighteenth century, the monastic institution no longer produced this effect; deformed, weakened and discredited through its abuses, especially in the convents of males, and then violently overthrown by the Revolution, it seemed to be dead. But, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, behold it springing up again spontaneously, in one direct, new, strong and active jet and higher than the old one, free of the excrescences, rottenness and parasites which, under the ancient régime, disfigured and discolored it. No more compulsory vows, no "frocked" younger sons "to make an elder," no girls immured from infancy, kept in the convent throughout their youth, led on, urged, and then driven into a corner and forced into the final engagement on becoming of age; no more aristocratic institutions, no Order of Malta and chapters of men or of women in which noble families find careers and a receptacle for their supernumerary children. No more of those false and counterfeit vocations the real motive of which was, sometimes pride of race and the determination not to lose a social standing, sometimes the animal attractions of physical comfort, indolence and idleness. No more lazy and opulent monks, occupied, like the Carthusians of Val Saint-Pierre, in overeating, stupefied by digestion and routine, or, like the Bernardines of Granselve5305 turning their building into a worldly rendezvous for jovial hospitality and themselves taking part, foremost in rank, in prolonged and frequent parties, balls, plays and hunting-parties; in diversions and gallantries which the annual fête of Saint Bernard, through a singular dissonance, excited and consecrated. No more over-wealthy superiors, usufructuaries of a vast abbatial revenue, suzerain and landlord seigniors, with the train, luxury and customs of their condition, with four-horse carriages, liveries, officials, antechamber, court, chancellorship and ministers of justice, obliging their monks to address them as "my lord," as lax as any ordinary layman, well fitted to cause scandal in their order by their liberties and to set an example of depravity. No more lay intrusions, commendatory abbés or priors, interlopers, and imposed from above; no more legislative and administrative interferences5306 in order to bind monks and nuns down to their vows, to disqualify them and deprive them almost of citizenship, to exclude them from common rights, to withhold from them rights of inheritance and testamentary rights, from receiving or making donations, depriving them in advance of the means of subsistence, to confine them by force in their convents and set the patrol on their track, and, on trying to escape, to furnish their superior with secular help and keep down insubordination by physical constraint. Nothing of this subsists after the great destruction of 1790. Under the modern régime, if any one enters and remains in a convent it is because the convent is more agreeable to him than the world outside; there is no other motive no pressure or hindrance of an inferior or different kind, no direct or indirect, no domestic or legal constraint, no ambition, vanity and innate or acquired indolence, no certainty of finding satisfaction for a coarse and concentrated sensuality. That which now operates is the awakened and persistent vocation; the man or the woman who takes vows and keeps them, enters upon and adheres to his or her engagement only through a spontaneous act deliberately and constantly renewed through their own free will.
Thus purified, the monastic institution recovers its normal form, which is the republican and democratic form, while the impracticable Utopia which the philosophers of the eighteenth century wanted to impose on lay society now becomes the effective régime under which the religious communities are going to live. In all of them, the governors are elected by the governed; whether the suffrage is universal or qualified, one vote is as good as another; votes are counted by heads, and, at stated intervals, the sovereign majority uses its right anew; with the Carmelites, it is every three years and to elect by secret ballot, not alone one authority but all the authorities, the prior, the sub-prior and the three clavières.5307—Once elected, the chief, in conformity with his mandate, remains a mandatory, that is to say a laborer assigned a certain work, and not a privileged person enjoying a gratification. His dignity is not a dispensation, but an additional burden; along with the duties of his office, he subjects himself to an observance of the rules—having become a general, he is no better off than the simple soldier; he rises as early and his daily life is no better; his cell is as bare and his personal support not more expensive. He who commands ten thousand others lives as poorly, under the same strict instructions, with as few conveniences and with less leisure than the meanest brother.5308 Over and above the austerities of ordinary discipline this or that superior imposed on himself additional mortifications which were so great as to astonish as well as edify his monks. Such is the ideal State of the theorist, a Spartan republic, and for all, including the chiefs, an equal ration of the same black broth. There is another resemblance, still more profound. At the base of this republic lies the corner-stone designed in anticipation by Rousseau, then hewn and employed, well or ill, in the constitutions or plébiscites of the Revolution, the Consulate and the Empire, to serve as the foundation of the complete edifice. This stone is a primitive and solemn agreement by all concerned, a social contract, a pact proposed by the legislator and accepted by the citizens; except that, in the monastic pact, the will of the acceptors is unanimous, earnest, serious, deliberate and permanent, while, in the political pact, it is not so; thus, whilst the latter contract is a theoretical fiction, the former is an actual verity.
For, in the small religious cité, all precautions are taken to have the future citizen know for what and how far he engages himself. The copy of the rules which is handed to him in advance explains to him the future use of each day and of each hour, the detail in full of the régime to which he is to subject himself. Besides this, to forestall any illusion and haste on his part he is required to make trial of the confinement and discipline; he realizes through personal, sensible and prolonged experience what he must undergo; before assuming the habit, he must serve a novitiate of at least one year and without interruption. Simple vows sometimes precede the more solemn vows; with the Jesuits, several novitiates, each lasting two or three years, overlie and succeed each other. Elsewhere, the perpetual engagement is taken only after several temporary engagements; up to the age of twenty-five the "Fréres des Ecoles Chrétiennes" take their vows for a year; at twenty-five for three years; only at twenty-eight do they take them for life. Certainly, after such trials, the postulant is fully informed; nevertheless, his superiors contribute what they know. They have watched him day after day; deep down under his superficial, actual and declared disposition they define his profound, latent, and future intention; if they deem this insufficient or doubtful, they adjourn or prevent the final profession: "My child, wait-your vocation is not yet determined," or "My friend, you were not made for the convent, return to the world!"—Never was a social contract signed more knowingly, after greater reflection on what choice to make, after such deliberate study: the conditions of human association demanded by the revolutionary theory are all fulfilled and the dream of the Jacobins is realized. But not where they planned it: through a strange contrast, and which seems ironical in history, this day-dream of speculative reason has produced nothing in the lay order of things but elaborate plans on paper, a deceptive and dangerous Declaration of (human) Rights, appeals to insurrection or to a dictatorship: incoherent or still-born organizations, in short, abortions or monsters; in the religious order of things, it adds to the living world thousands of living creatures of indefinite viability. So that, among the effects of the French revolution, one of the principal and most enduring is the restoration of monastic institutions....
From the Consulate down to the present day they can everywhere be seen sprouting and growing. Early, new sprouts shoot out and cover the old trunks of which the revolutionary axe had cut off the branches. In 1800, "the re-establishment of a corporation shocked current ideas."5309 But the able administrators of the Consulate required volunteer women for service in their hospitals. In Paris, Chaptal, the minister, comes across a lady superior whom he formerly knew and enjoins her to gather together ten or a dozen of her surviving companions; he installs them in the rue Vieux-Colombier, in a building belonging to the hospitals, and which he furnishes for forty novices; at Lyons, he notices that the "Sisters" of the general hospital were obliged, that they might perform their duties, to wear a lay dress; he authorizes them to resume their costume and their crosses; he allows them two thousand francs to purchase necessaries, and, when they have donned their old uniform, he presents them to the First Consul. Such is the first sprout, very small and very feeble, that appears in the institution of Saint-Vincent de Paule at Paris and in that of Saint-Charles at Lyons. In our days5310(around 1885), the congregation of Saint-Charles, besides the parent-house at Lyons, has 102 others with 2,226 nuns, and the congregation of Saint-Vincent de Paule, besides the parent-house at Paris, has 88 others with 9,130 nuns. Often, the new vegetation on the trunk amputated by the Revolution is much richer than on the old one; in 1789, the institution of the "Fréres des Ecoles Chrétiennes" had 800 members; in 1845, there were 4,000; in 1878, 9,818; on the 31st of December, 1888, there were 12,245. In 1789, it counted 126 houses; in 1888, there were 1,286.—Meanwhile, alongside of the old plantations, a large number of independent germs, new species and varieties, spring up spontaneously, each with its own aim, rules and special denomination. On Good Friday, April 6, 1792, at the very date of the decree of the Legislative Assembly abolishing all religious communities,5311 one is born, that of the "Soeurs de la Retraite Chrétienne," at Fontenelle, and, from year to year, similar plants constantly and suddenly spring out of the ground for a century. The list is too long to be counted; a large official volume of more than four hundred pages is filled with the mere statement of their names, localities and statistics.—This volume, published in 1878, divides religious institutions into two groups. We find in the first one, comprising the legally authorized societies, at first 5 congregations of men possessing 224 establishments with 2,418 members, and 23 associations of men with 20,341 members and supplying 3,086 schools; next, 259 congregations of women and 644 communities which possess 3,196 establishments, supplying 16,478 schools and counting 113,750 members. In the second group, comprising unauthorized societies, we find 384 establishments of men with 7,444 members, and 602 establishments of women with 14,003 members,—in all, in both groups, 30,287 brethren and 127,753 sisters. Considering the total population, the proportion of brethren in 1789 and in our day is about the same; it is their spirit which has changed; at the present day, all desire to remain in their profession, while in 1789 two-thirds wanted to withdraw from it. As to the proportion of Sisters, it has increased beyond all calculation.5312 Out of 10,000 women in the population, there were, in 1789, 28 Sisters; in 1866, 45; in 1878, 67.5313
Carmelites, Clarisses, Filles du Coeur de Jésus, Réparatrices, Soeurs du Saint-Sacrament, Visitandines, Franciscaines, Benedictines and others like these, about 4000 nuns or sisters, are contemplatists. The Carthusians, Cistercians, Trappists, and some others, about 1800 monks and brethren who, for the most part, till the ground, do not impose labor on themselves other than as an accessory exercise; their first and principal object is prayer, meditation and worship; they, too, devote their lives to contemplation on the other world and not to the service of this one. But all the others, more than 28,000 men and more than 123,000 women, are benefactors by institution and voluntary laborers, choosing to devote themselves to dangerous, revolting, and at least ungrateful services—missions among savages and barbarians, care of the sick, of idiots, of the insane, of the infirm, of the incurable, the support of poor old men or of abandoned children; countless charitable and educational works, primary schools, orphan asylums, houses of refuge and prisons, and all gratuitously or at the lowest wages through a reduction of bodily necessities to the lowest point, and of the personal expenditure of each brother or sister.5314 Evidently, with these men and with these women, the ordinary balance of motives which prompt people is reversed; in the inward balance of the scale it is no longer selfishness which prevails against altruism, but the love of others which prevails against selfishness.—Let us look at one of their institutions just at the moment of its formation and see how the preponderance passes over from the egoistic to the social instinct. The first thing we always find at the origin of the enterprise is compassion; a few kind hearts have been moved at the aspect of misery, degradation and misconduct; souls or bodies were in distress and there was danger of shipwreck; three or four saviors have come to the rescue. At Rouen, in 1818, it is a poor girl who, by advice of her curé, brings together a few of her friends in her garret; during the day they study in a class and at night they work for their living; today, under the title of "Soeurs du Sacré-Coeur de Jésus," they number 800. Elsewhere, at Laval, the founder of the House of Refuge for poor repentants is a plain ironing-girl who began her "House" by charitably harboring two prostitutes; these brought others, and there are now a hundred of similar institutions. Most frequently, the founder is the desservant or vicar of the place, who, moved by local misery, fancies at first that he is doing only local work. Thus, there is born in 1806 at Rouissé-sur-Loire the congregation of "La Providence," which now has 918 "Sisters," in 193 houses; in 1817, at Lovallat, the association of "Les Petits-Frères de Marie," which numbers to-day 3600 brethren; in 1840, at Saint-Servan, the institution of "Les Petites-Soeurs des Pauvres," who now number 2685, and, with no other help but alms-giving, feed and care for, in their 158 houses, 20,000 old men, of which 13,000 live in their 93 domiciles in France; they take their meals after the inmates, and eat only what they leave; they are prohibited from accepting any endowment whatever; by virtue of their rules they are and remain mendicants, at first, and especially, in behalf of their old men, and afterwards and as accessory, in their own behalf. Note the circumstances of the undertaking and the condition of the founders—they were two village work-women, young girls between sixteen and eighteen for whom the vicar of the parish had written short regulations (une petite règle); on Sunday, together in the cleft of a rock on the seaside, they studied and meditated over this little summary manual, performed the prescribed devotions, this or that prayer or orison at certain hours, saying their beads, the station in the church, self-examination and other ceremonies of which the daily repetition deposits and strengthens the supernatural mental conception. Such, over and above natural pity, is the superadded weight which fixes the unstable will and maintains the soul permanently in a state of abnegation.—At Paris, in the two halls of the Prefecture of Police, where prostitutes and female thieves remain for a day or two in provisional confinement, the "Sisters" of "Marie-Joseph," obliged by their vows to live constantly in this sewer always full of human dregs, sometimes feel their heart failing them; fortunately, a little chapel is arranged for them in one corner where they retire to pray, and in a few minutes they return with their store of courage and gentleness again revived.—Father Etienne, superior of the "Lazarists" and of the "Filles de Saint-Vincent de Paule," with the authority of long experience, very justly observed to some foreign visitors,5315 "I have given you the details of our life, but I have not told you the secret of it. This secret, here it is—it is Jesus Christ, known, loved, and served in the Eucharist."
II. Evolution of the Catholic Church.
The mystic faculty.—Its sources and works.—Evangelical
Christianity.—Its moral object and social effect.—Roman
Christianity.—Development of the Christian idea in the
West.—Influence of the Roman language and law.—Roman
conception of the State.—Roman conception of the Church.
In the thirteenth century, to the communicant on his knees about to receive the sacrament, the Host often faded out of sight; it disappeared, and, in its place, appeared an infant or the radiant features of the Savior and, according to the Church doctors, this was not an illusion but an illumination.5316 The veil had lifted, and the soul found itself face to face with its object, Jesus Christ present in Eucharist. This was second sight, infinitely superior in certainty and reach to the former, a direct, full view granted by grace from above, a supernatural view.—By this example, which is an extreme case, we comprehend in what faith consists. It is an extraordinary faculty operating alongside of and often in conjunction with our natural faculties; over and above things as our observation naturally presents them to us, it reveals to us a beyond, a majestic, grandiose world, the only one truly real and of which ours is but the temporary veil. In the depths of the soul, much below the superficial crust of which we have any conscience,5317 impressions have accumulated like subterranean waters. There, under the surging heat of innate instincts, a living spring has burst forth, growing and bubbling in the obscurity; let a shock or a fissure intervene and it suddenly sprouts up and forces its way above the surface; the man who has this within him and in whom it overflows is amazed at the inundation and no longer recognizes himself; the visible field of his conscience is completely changed and renewed; in place of his former and vacillating and scattered thoughts he finds an irresistible and coherent belief, a precise conception, and intense picture, a passionate affirmation, sometimes even positive perceptions of a species apart and which come to him not from without but from within, not alone mere mental suggestions, like the dialogues of the "Imitation" and the "intellectual locutions" of the mystics, but veritable physical sensations like the details of the visions of Saint Theresa, the articulate voices of Joan of Arc and the bodily stigmata of Saint Francis.
In the first century, this beyond discovered by the mystic faculty was the kingdom of God, opposed to the kingdoms of this world;5318 these kingdoms, in the eyes of those who revealed them, were worthless; through the keen insight of the moral and social instinct, these large, generous and simple hearts had divined the internal defect of all the societies or States of the century. Egoism in these was too great; there was in them a lack of charity,5319 the faculty of loving another equally with one's self, and thus of loving, not only a few, but all men, whoever they might be, simply because they were men, and especially the meek, the humble and the poor; in other words, the voluntary repression of the appetites by which the individual makes of himself a center and subordinates other lives to himself, the renunciation of "the lusts of the flesh, of the eyes and of vanity, the insolence of wealth and luxury, of force and of power."5320—Opposed to and in contrast with this human order of things, the idea of a divine order of things was born and developed itself—a Heavenly Father, his reign in heaven, and very soon, perhaps on the morrow, his reign here below; his son descending to the earth to establish his reign and dying on the cross for the salvation of men; after him, his Spirits, sent by him, the inward breath which animates his disciples and continues his work; all men brethren and beloved children of the same common father; here and there spontaneous groups who have learned "these good tidings" and propagated them; small scattered communities which live in the expectation of an ideal order of things and yet, by anticipation, realizing it from this time forth; "All5321 were of one heart and one soul,... for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold and laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need," all happy in being together, in mutual love and in feeling themselves regenerate or pure.
Here is to be found in the soul a new regulator and motor, and moreover a powerful organ, appropriate and effective, obtained through internal recasting and metamorphosis, like the wings with which an insect is provided after its transformation. In every living organism, necessity, through tentative effort and selections, thus produces the possible and requisite organ. In India, five hundred years before our era, it was Buddhism; in Arabia, six hundred years after our era, it was Islam; in our western societies it is Christianity. At the present day, after eighteen centuries on both continents, from the Ural to the Rocky Mountains, amongst Russian moujiks and American settlers, it works as formerly with the fishermen of Galilee and in the same way, in such a way as to substitute for the love of self the love of others; neither in substance nor in use has any change taken place; under its Greek, Catholic or Protestant envelope, it is still, for four hundred millions of human beings, the spiritual means, the great, indispensable pair of wings by which man rises upward above himself, above his groveling existence and his limited horizons, leading him on through patience, hope and resignation to serenity, and beyond to temperance, purity, goodness, and self-devotion and self-sacrifice. Always and everywhere, for the past eighteen hundred years, as soon as these wings grow feeble or give way, public and private morals degenerate. In Italy, during the Renaissance, in England under the restoration, in France under the Convention and Directory, man becomes as pagan as in the first century; the same causes render him the same as in the times of Augustus and Tiberius, that is to say voluptuous and cruel: he abuses himself and victimizes others; a brutal, calculating egoism resumes its ascendancy, depravity and sensuality spread, and society becomes a den of cut-throats and a brothel.5322
After contemplating this spectacle near by, we can value the contribution to modern societies of Christianity, how much modesty, gentleness and humanity it has introduced into them, how it maintains integrity, good faith and justice. Neither philosophic reason, artistic or literary culture, or even feudal, military or chivalric honor, nor any administration or government can replace it. There is nothing else to restrain our natal bent, nothing to arrest the insensible, steady, down-hill course of our species with the whole of its original burden, ever retrograding towards the abyss. Whatever its present envelope may be, the old Gospel still serves as the best auxiliary of the social instinct.
Among its three contemporary forms, that which groups together the most men, about 180 millions of believers, is Catholicism, in other words, Roman Christianity, which two words, comprising a definition, contain a history. At the origin, on the birth of the Christian principle, it expressed itself at first in Hebrew, the language of prophets and of seers; afterwards, and very soon, in Greek, the language of the dialecticians and philosophers; at last, and very late, in Latin, the language of the jurisconsults and statesmen; then come the successive stages of dogma. All the evangelical and apostolic texts, written in Greek, all the metaphysical speculations,5323 also in Greek, which served as commentary on these, reached the western Latins only through translations. Now, in metaphysics, Latin poorly translates the Greek5324; it lacks both the terms and the ideas; what the Orient says, the Occident only half comprehends; it accepts this without dispute and confidently holds it as truth.5325 At length in its turn, in the fourth century, when, after Theodosius, the Occident breaks loose from the Orient, it intervenes, and it intervenes with its language, that is to say with the provision of ideas and words which its culture provided; it likewise had its instruments of precision, not those of Plato and Aristotle, but others, as special, forged by Ulpian, Gaius and twenty generations of jurists through the original invention and immemorial labor of Roman genius. "To say what is law," to impose rules of conduct on men, is, in abridged form, the entire practical work of the Roman people; to write this law out, to formulate and coordinate these rules, is, in abridged form, its entire scientific work, and with the Romans in the third, fourth and fifth centuries, during the decadence of other studies, the science of law was still in full force and vigor.5326 Hence, when the Occidentals undertook the interpretation of texts and the elaboration of the Creed it was with the habits and faculties of jurisconsults, with the preoccupations and mental reservations of statesmen, with the mental and verbal instruments which they found suitable. In those days, the Greek doctors, in conflict with the monophysites and monothelites, brought out the theory of the divine essence; at the same date, the Latin doctors, opposing the Pelagians, Semi-Pelagians and Donatists, founded the theory of human obligation.5327 Obligation, said the Roman jurists, is a lien of law" by which we are held to doing or suffering something to free us from indebtedness. Out of this juridical conception, which is a masterpiece of Roman jurisprudence, issued, as with a bud full of sap, the new development of the Creed.—On the one hand, we are obligated towards God, for, in relation to him, we are, in legal terms, insolvent debtors, heirs of an infinite debt, incapable of paying it and of satisfying our creditor except through the interpostion of a superhuman third person5328 who assumes our indebtedness as his own; still more precisely, we are delinquents, guilty from birth and by inheritance, condemned en masse and then pardoned en masse, but in such a way that this pardon, a pure favor, not warranted by any merit of our own, always remains continual and revocable at will; that, for a few only, it is or becomes plenary and lasting, that no one amongst us can be sure of obtaining it, and that its award, determined beforehand on high, forever remains for us a State secret. Hence the prolonged controversies on Predestination, Free-will and Original Sin, and the profound investigations on man before, during and after the Fall. Hence, also, the accepted solutions, not very conclusive and, if one pleases, contradictory, but practical, average and well calculated for maintaining mankind in faith and obedience, under the ecclesiastical and dogmatic government which, alone, is authorized to lead man on in the way of salvation.
On the other hand, we are obligated to the Church, for she is a cité, the city of God, and, following the Roman definition, the cité is not an abstract term, a collective term, but a real, positive existence, "the commonwealth" (chose publique), that is to say a distinct entity consisting of generations which succeed each other in it, of infinite duration and of a superior kind, divine or nearly so, which does not belong to individuals but to which they belong, an organized body, with special form and structure, based on traditions, constituted by laws and ruled by a government. The absolute authority of the community over its members and the despotic leadership of the community by its chiefs—such is the Roman notion of the State and, for much stronger reasons, of the Church. She, thus, is a militant, conquering, governing Rome, predestined to universal empire, a legitimate sovereign like the other one, but with a better title, for she derives hers from God. It is God who, from the beginning, has preconceived and prepared her, who has bodied her forth in the Old Testament and announced her through the prophets; it is the Son of God who has built her up, who, to all eternity, will never fail to maintain and guide her steps, who, through his constant inspiration, ever remains present in her and active through her. He has committed to her his revelation. She alone, expressly delegated by Christ, possesses second sight, the knowledge of the invisible, the comprehension of the ideal order of things as its Founder prescribed and instituted, and hence, accordingly, the custodianship and interpretation of the Scriptures, the right of framing dogmas and injunctions, of teaching and commanding, of reigning over souls and intellects, of fashioning belief and morals. Henceforth, the mystic faculty is to be confined within dikes. At bottom, this is the faculty for conceiving of the ideal, to obtain a vision of it, to have faith in this vision and to act upon it; the more precious it is the greater the necessity of its being under control. To preserve it from itself, to put it on guard against the arbitrariness and diversity of individual opinions, to prevent unrestrained digression, theoretically or practically, either on the side of laxity or of rigor, requires a government.—That this is a legacy of ancient Rome the Catholic Church does not dispute. She styles herself the Roman Church. She still writes and prays in Latin. Rome is always her capital; the title of her chief is that which formerly designated the head of the pagan cult; after 1378 all the Popes except five, and since 1523 all, have been Italians; at the present day, thirty-five out of sixty-four cardinals are likewise Italians. The Roman stamp becomes still more evident on comparing the millions of Christians who are Catholics with the millions of Christians who are not. Among the primitive annexations and ulterior acquisitions of the Roman Church, several have separated from her, those of the countries whose Greek, Slavic and Germanic populations never spoke Latin and whose language is not derived from the Latin. Poland and Ireland are alone, or nearly so, the only countries which have remained loyal, because, with these, the Catholic faith, under the long pressure of public calamities, has become incorporated with national sentiment. Elsewhere the Roman deposit is non-existent or too thin. On the contrary, all the populations that were once Latinized have at bottom remained Catholic; four centuries of imperial rule and of Roman assimilation have deposited in them of layers of habits, ideas and sentiments which endure.5329 To measure the influence of this historic layer it is sufficient to note that three elements compose it, all three contemporary, of the same origin and of the same thickness, a Roman language, the civil law of Rome, and Roman Christianity; each of these elements, through its consistence, indicates the consistence of the others.
Hence the profound and established characteristics by which the Catholic branch now distinguishes itself from the other two issuing from the same Christian trunk. With the Protestants, the Bible, which is the Word of God, is the sole spiritual authority; all the others, the Doctors, Fathers, tradition, Popes and Councils, are human and, accordingly, fallible; in fact, these have repeatedly and gravely erred.5330 The Bible, however, is a text which each reader reads with his own eyes, more or less enlightened and sensitive, with eyes which, in Luther's time, possessed the light and sensibility of the sixteenth century, and which, at the present time, read with the sensibility and light of the nineteenth century; so that, according to epochs and groups, the interpretation may vary, while authority, if not as regards the text, or at least its meaning, belongs wholly to the individual. With the Greeks and Slavs, as with the Catholics, it belongs only to the Church, that is to say to the heads of the Church, the successors of the apostles. But with the Greeks and Slavs, since the ninth century, the Church had decreed no new dogmas; according to her, revelation had stopped; the creed was finished, final and complete, and there was nothing to do but to maintain it.—On the contrary, with the Catholics, after as before that date, the creed never ceased developing itself, always becoming more precise, and revelation kept on; the last thirteen councils were inspired like the first seven, while the first one, in which Saint Peter at Jerusalem figured, enjoyed no more prerogatives than the last one convoked by Pius IX. at the Vatican. The Church is not "a frozen corpse,"5331 but a living body, led by an always active brain which pursues its work not only in this world but likewise in the next world, at first to define it and next to describe it and assign places in it; only yesterday she added two articles of faith to the creed, the immaculate conception of the Virgin and the infallibility of the Pope; she conferred ultra-terrestrial titles; she declared Saint Joseph patron of the universal Church; she canonized Saint Labre; she elevated Saint François de Sales to the rank of Doctor. But she is as conservative as she is active. She retracts nothing of her past, never rescinding any of her ancient decrees; only, with the explanations, commentaries and deductions of the jurist, she fastens these links closer together, forms an uninterrupted chain of them extending from the present time back to the New Testament and, beyond, through the Old Testament, to the origins of the world, in such a way as to coordinate around herself the entire universe and all history. Revelations and prescriptions, the doctrine thus built up is a colossal work, as comprehensive as it is precise, analogous to the Digest but much more vast; for, besides canon law and moral theology, she includes dogmatic theology, that is to say, besides the theory of the visible world, the theory of the invisible world and its three regions, the geography of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, immense territories of which our earth is merely the vestibule, unknown territories inaccessible to sense and reason, but whose confines, entrances, issues and subdivisions, the inhabitants and all that concerns them, their faculties and their communications, are defined, as on Peutinger's map and in the Notitia imperii romani, with extraordinary clearness, minutia and exactitude, through a combination of the positive spirit and the mystic spirit and by theologians who are at once Christians and administrators. In this relation, examine the "Somme" of Saint Thomas. Still at the present day his order, the Dominican, furnishes at Rome those who are consulted on matters of dogma; or rather, in order to abridge and transcribe scholastic formula into perceptible images, read the "Divine Comedy "by Dante.5332 It is probable that this description, as far as imagination goes, is still to-day the most exact as well as most highly-colored presentation of the human and divine world as the Catholic Church conceives it. She has charge of its keys and reigns and governs in it. The prestige of such a government over multitudes of minds and souls, susceptible to discipline, without personal initiative, and in need of firm and systematic guidance, is supreme. It is equal to or superior to that of the ancient roman State with its 120 million subjects. Outside of the Empire all seemed to these souls anarchy or barbarism; the same impression exists with the Catholics in relation to their Church. Whether spiritual or temporal, an authority is more likely to be approved and venerated when, always visible and everywhere present, it is neither arbitrary nor capricious, but orderly, restrained by texts, traditions, legislation and jurisprudence, derived from above and from a superhuman source, consecrated by antiquity and by the continuity, coherence and grandeur of its work, in short, by that character which the Latin tongue is alone capable of expressing and which it terms majesty.
Among the acts which religious authority prescribes to its subjects, there are some which it imposes in its own name—rites, outward ceremonies and other observances—of which the principal ones, in the Catholic catechism, form a sequence to the "commandments of God," and which are entitled the "commandments of the Church."—With the Protestants, where Church authority is almost gone, rites have almost disappeared; considered in themselves, they have ceased to be regarded as obligatory or meritorious; the most important ones, the Eucharist itself, have been retained only as commemorative or as symbolic; the rest, fasts, abstinences, pilgrimages, the worship of saints and the Virgin, relics of the cross, words committed to memory, genuflections and kneeling before images or altars, have been pronounced vain; in the way of positive injunctions none remain but the reading of the Bible, while duty in outward demonstration of piety is reduced to piety within, to the moral virtues, to truthfulness, probity, temperance and steadfastness, to the energetic determination to observe the watchword received by man in two forms and which he finds in two concordant examples, in the Scriptures as interpreted by his conscience, and in his conscience as enlightened by the Scriptures. As another consequence, the Protestant priest has ceased to be a delegate from on high, the indispensable mediator between man and God, alone qualified to give absolution and to administer the rites by which salvation is obtained; he is simply a man, graver, more learned, more pious and more exemplary than other men, but, like the others, married, father of a family and entering into civil life, in short a semi-layman. The laymen whom he leads owe him deference, not obedience; he issues no orders; he sentences nobody; speaking from the rostrum to a gathering is his principal, almost unique, office, and the sole purpose of this is instruction or an exhortation.—With the Greeks and Slaves, with whom the authority of the Church is merely of a preservative nature, all the observances of the twelfth century have subsisted, as rigorously in Russia as in Asia Minor or in Greece, although fasting and Lents, which Southern stomachs can put up with, are unhealthy for the temperaments of the North. Here, likewise, these observances have assumed capital importance. The active sap, withdrawn from theology and the clergy, flows nowhere else; these, in an almost paralyzed religion, constitute almost the sole vivifying organ, as vigorous and often more so, than ecclesiastical authority; in the seventeenth century, under the patriarch Nicon, thousands of "old believers," on account of slight rectifications of the liturgy, the alteration of a letter in the Russian translation of the name of Jesus, and the sign of the cross made by three instead of two fingers, separated themselves and, to-day, these dissenters, multiplied by their sects, count by millions. Defined by custom, every rite is sacred, immutable, and, when exactly fulfilled, sufficient in itself and efficacious; the priest who utters the words and makes the motions is only one piece in the mechanism, one of the instruments requisite for a magic incantation; after his instrumentation, he falls back into his human negativity; he is nothing more than an employee paid for his ministration. And this ministration is not exalted in him by an extraordinary and visible renunciation, by perpetual celibacy, by continence promised and kept; he is married,5333 father of a family, needy, obliged to shear his flock to support himself and those belonging to him, and therefore is of little consideration; he is without moral ascendancy; he is not the pastor who is obeyed, but the official who is made use of.
The role of the priest in the Catholic Church is quite different. Through her theory of rites she confers on him incomparable dignity and real personal power.—According to this theory, observances and ceremonies possess intrinsic and peculiar virtue; undoubtedly, these require some mental base, which is found in earnest piety; but earnest piety independent of these is not enough; it lacks its final consequence, its praiseworthy completion or "satisfaction,"5334 the positive act by which we atone for our sins to God and demonstrate our obedience to the Church.5335 It is the Church, the living interpreter of God's will, which prescribes these rites; she is then the mistress of these and not the servant; she is empowered to adapt their details and forms to necessities and circumstances, to lighten or simplify them according to time and place, to establish the communion in one shape, to substitute the Host in place of bread, to lessen the number and rigor of the ancient Lents, to determine the effects of diverse pious works, to apply, ascribe and transfer their salutary effects, to assign proper value and reward to each devotional act, to measure the merit derived from them, the sins they efface and the pardons these obtain not only in this world but in the next one. By virtue of her administrative habits, and with the precision of a bookkeeper, she casts up her accounts of indulgences and notes on the margin the conditions for obtaining them,—a certain prayer repeated so many times on certain days and what for, so many days less in the great penitentiary into which every Christian, however pious, is almost sure to get on dying, this or that diminution of the penalty incurred, and the faculty, if the penitent rejects this deduction for himself, of bestowing the benefit on another. By virtue of her authoritative habits and the better to affirm her sovereignty, she regards as capital sins the omission of the rites and ceremonies she commands,—"not going to mass on Sunday or on fête-days;5336 eating meat on Friday or Saturday unnecessarily;" not confessing and communing at Easter, a mortal sin which "deprives one of the grace of God and merits eternal punishment" as well as "to slay and to steal something of value." For all these crimes, unforgivable in themselves, there is but one pardon, the absolution given by the priest, that is to say, confession beforehand, itself being one of the observances to which we are bound by strict obligation and at the very least once a year.
Through this office the Catholic priest rises above human conditions to an immeasurable height; for, in the confessional, he exercises supreme power, that which God is to exercise at the Last Judgment, the formidable power of punishing or remitting sins, of judgment or of absolution, and, if he intervenes on the death-bed, the faculty of consigning the impenitent or repentant soul to an eternity of rewards or to an eternity of damnation.5337 No creature, terrestrial or celestial, not even the highest of archangels, or St. Joseph or the Virgin,5338 possesses this veritably divine prerogative. He alone holds it through exclusive delegation, by virtue of a special sacrament, the order which assigns to him the privilege of conferring five others, and which endows him for life with a character apart, ineffaceable and supernatural.—To render himself worthy of it, he has taken a vow of chastity, he undertakes to root out from his flesh and his heart the consequences of sex; he debars himself from marriage and paternity; through isolation, he escapes all family influences, curiosities and indiscretions; he belongs wholly to his office. He has prepared himself for it long beforehand, he has studied moral theology together with casuistry and become a criminal jurist; and his sentence is not a vague pardon bestowed on penitents after having admitted in general terms that they are sinners. He is bound to weigh the gravity of their errors and the strength of their repentance, to know the facts and details of the fall and the number of relapses, the aggravating or extenuating circumstances, and, therefore, to interrogate in order to sound the soul to its depths. If some souls are timorous, they surrender themselves to him spontaneously and, more than this, they have recourse to him outside of his tribunal; he marks out for them the path they must follow, he guides them at every turn; he interferes daily, he becomes a director as was said in the seventeenth century, the titular and permanent director of one or of many lives.5339 This is still the case at the present day, and especially for women and for all nuns; the central conception around which all Roman ideas turn, the conception of the imperium and of government, has here found its perfect accomplishment and attained to its final outermost limits.
There are now of these spiritual governors about 180,000, installed in the five regions of the world, each assigned to the leadership of about 1000 souls and as special guardian of a distinct flock, all ordained by bishops instituted by the Pope, he being absolute monarch and declared such by the latest council. In the new Rome as in the ancient Rome, authority has gradually become concentrated until it has centered in and is entrusted wholly to the hands of one man. Romulus, the Alban shepherd, was succeeded by Cæsar Augustus, Constantine or Theodosius, whose official title was "Your Eternal," "Your Divine," and who pronounced their decrees "immutable oracles." Peter, the fisherman of Galilee, was succeeded by infallible pontiffs whose official title is "Your Holiness," and whose decrees, for every Catholic, are "immutable oracles" in fact as in law, not hyperbolically, but in the full sense of the words expressed by exact terms. The imperial institution has thus formed itself anew; it has simply transferred itself from one domain to another; only, in passing from the temporal order of things to the spiritual order, it has become firmer and stronger, for it has guarded against two defects which weakened its antique model.—One the one hand, it has provided for the transmission of supreme power; in old Rome, they did not know how to regulate this; hence, when an interregnum occurred, the many violent competitors, the fierce conflicts, the brutalities, all the usurpations of force, all the calamities of anarchy. In Catholic Rome, the election of the sovereign pontiff belongs definitively to a college of prelates5340 who vote according to established formalities; these elect the new pope by a majority of two-thirds, and, for more than four centuries, not one of these elections has been contested; between each defunct pope and his elected successor, the transfer of universal obedience has been prompt and unhesitating and, during as after the interregnum, no schism in the Church has occurred.—On the other hand, in the legal title of Cæsar Augustus there was a defect. According to Roman law, he was only the representative of the people; the community had delegated all its rights incorporate to him; but in it alone was omnipotence vested. According to canon law, omnipotence was vested solely in God; it is not the Catholic community which possesses this and delegates it to the Pope;5341 his rights accrue to him from another and higher source.5342 He is not the elect of the people, but the interpreter, vicar and representative of Jesus Christ.
III. The Church today.
Existing Catholicism and its distinctive traits.—Authority,
its prestige and supports.—Rites, the priest, the Pope.
—The Catholic Church and the modern State.—Difficulties in
France born out of their respective constitutions.—
Such is the Catholic Church of to-day, a State constructed after the type of the old Roman empire, independent and autonomous, monarchical and centralized, with a domain not of territory but of souls and therefore international, under an absolute and cosmopolite sovereign whose subjects are simultaneously subjects of other non-religious rulers. Hence, for the Catholic Church a situation apart in every country, more difficult than for Greek, Slavic or Protestant churches; these difficulties vary in each country according to the character of the State and with the form which the Catholic Church has received in them.5343 In France, since the Concordat, these difficulties are of greater gravity than elsewhere.
When, in 1802, the Church initially received her French form, this was a complete systematic organization, after a general and regular plan, according to which she formed only one compartment of the whole. Napoleon, by his Concordat, organic articles and ulterior decrees, in conformity with the ideas of the century and the principles of the Constituent Assembly, desired to render the clergy of all kinds, and especially the Catholic clergy, one of the subdivisions of his administrative staff, a corps of functionaries, mere agents assigned to religious interests as formerly to civil matters and therefore manageable and revocable. This they all were, in fact, including the bishops, since they at once tendered their resignations at his order. Still, at the present day all, except the bishops, are in this situation, having lost the ownership of their places and the independence of their lives, through the maintenance of the consular and imperial institutions, through removal, through the destruction of the canonical and civil guarantees which formerly protected the lower clergy, through the suppression of the officialité; through the reduction of chapters to the state of vague shadows, through the rupture or laxity of the local and moral tie which once attached every member of the clergy to a piece of land, to an organized body, to a territory, to a flock, and through the lack of ecclesiastical endowment, through the reduction of every ecclesiastic, even a dignitary, to the humble and precarious condition of a salaried dependent.5344
A régime of this kind institutes in the body subject to it an almost universal dependence, and hence entire submission, passive obedience, and the stooping, prostrate attitude of the individual no longer able to stand upright on his own feet.5345 The clergy to which it is applied cannot fail to be managed from above, which is the case with this one, through its bishops, the Pope's lieutenant-generals, who give the countersign to all of them. Once instituted by the Pope, each bishop is the governor for life of a French province and all-powerful in his circumscription we have seen to what height his moral and social authority has risen, how he has exercised his command, how he has kept his clergy under discipline and available, in what class of society he has found his recruits, through what drill and what enthusiasm every priest, including himself, is now a practiced soldier and kept in check; how this army of occupation, distributed in 90 regiments and composed of 50,000 resident priests, is completed by special bodies of troops subject to still stricter discipline, by monastic corporations, by four or five thousand religious institutions, nearly all of them given to labor and benevolence; how, to the subordination and correct deportment of the secular clergy is added the enthusiasm and zeal of the regular clergy, the entire devotion, the wonderful self-denial of 30,000 monks and of 120,000 nuns; how this vast body, animated by one spirit, marches steadily along with all its lay supporters towards one end. This purpose, forever the same, is the maintenance of its dominion over all the souls that it has won over, and the conquest of all the souls over which it has not yet established its domination.
Nothing could be more antipathetic to the French State. Built up like the Church, after the Roman model, it is likewise authoritative and absorbent. In the eyes of Napoleon, all these priests appointed or sanctioned by him, who have sworn allegiance to him, whom he pays annually or quarterly, belong to him in a double sense, first under the title of subjects, and next under the title of clerks. His successors are still inclined to regard them in the same light; in their hands the State is ever what he made it, that is to say a monopolizer, convinced that its rights are illimitable and that its interference everywhere is legitimate, accustomed to governing all it can and leaving to individuals only the smallest portion of themselves, hostile to all bodies that might interpose between them and it, distrustful and ill-disposed towards all groups capable of collective action and spontaneous initiation, especially as concerns proprietary bodies. A self-constituted daily overseer, a legal guardian, a perpetual and minute director of moral societies as of local societies, usurper of their domains, undertaker or regulator of education and of charitable enterprises, the State is ever in inevitable conflict with the Church. The latter, of all moral societies, is the most active; she does not let herself be enslaved like the others, her soul is in her own keeping; her faith, her organization, her hierarchy and her code are all her own. Against the rights of the State based on human reason, she claims rights founded on divine revelation, and, in self-defense, she justly finds in the French clergy, as the State organized it in 1802, the best disciplined militia, the best classified, the most capable of operating together under one countersign and of marching in military fashion under the impulsion that its ecclesiastical leaders choose to give it.
Elsewhere, the conflict is less permanent and less sharp the two conditions which aggravate it and maintain it in France are, one or both, wanting. In other European countries, the Church has not the French form imposed upon it and the difficulties are less; in the United States of America, not only has it not undergone the French transformation, but the State, liberal in principle, interdicts itself against interventions like those of the French State and the difficulties are almost null. Evidently, if there was any desire to attenuate or to prevent the conflict it would be through the first or the last of these two policies. The French State, however, institutionally and traditionally, always invasive, is ever tempted to take the contrary course.5346—At one time, as during the last years of the Restoration and the first years of the second Empire, it allies itself with the Church; each power helps the other in its domination, and in concert together they undertake to control the en tire man. In this case, the two centralizations, one ecclesiastic and the other secular, both increasing and prodigiously augmented for a century, work together to overpower the individual. He is watched, followed up, seized, handled severely, and constrained even in his innermost being; he can no longer breathe the atmosphere around him; we can well remember the oppression which, after 1823 and after 1852, bore down on every independent character and on every free intellect.—At another time, as under the first and the third Republic, the State sees in the Church a rival and an adversary; consequently, it persecutes or worries it and we of to-day see with our own eyes how a governing minority, steadily, for a long time, gives offence to a governed majority where it is most sensitive; how it breaks up congregations of men and drives free citizens from their homes whose only fault is a desire to live, pray and labor in common; how it expels nuns and monks from hospitals and schools, with what detriment to the hospital and to the sick, to the school and to the children, and against what unwillingness and what discontent on the part of physicians and fathers of families, and at what bungling waste of public money, at what a gratuitous overburdening of taxation already too great.
IV. Contrasting Vistas.
Other difficulties of the French system.—New and scientific
conception of the world.—How opposed to the Catholic
conception.—How it is propagated.—How the other is
defended.—Losses and gains of the Catholic Church.—Its
narrow and broad domains.—Effects of Catholic and French
systems on Christian sentiment in France.—Increased among
the clergy and diminished in society.
Other disadvantages of the French system are still worse.—In (the nineteenth) century, an extraordinary event occurs. Already about the middle of the preceding century, the discoveries of scientists, coordinated by the philosophers, had afforded the sketch in full of a great picture, still in course of execution and advancing towards completion, a picture of the physical and moral universe. In this sketch the point of sight was fixed, the perspective designed, the various distances marked out, the principal groups drawn, and its outlines were so correct that those who have since continued the work have little to add but to give precision to these and fill them up.5347 In their hands, from Herschel and Laplace, from Volta, Cuvier, Ampère, Fresnel and Faraday to Darwin and Pasteur, Burnouf, Mommsen and Renan, the blanks on the canvas have been covered, the relief of the figures shown and new features added in the sense of the old ones, thus completing it without changing in any sense the expression of the whole, but, on the contrary, in such a way as to consolidate, strengthen and perfect the master-conception which, purposely or not, had imposed itself on the original painters, all, predecessors and successors, working from nature and constantly inviting a comparison between the painting and the model.—And, for one hundred years, this picture, so interesting, so magnificent, and the accuracy of which is so well guaranteed, instead of being kept private and seen only by select visitors, as in the eighteenth century, is publicly exposed and daily contemplated by an ever-increasing crowd. Through the practical application of the same scientific discoveries, owing to increased facilities for travel and intercommunication, to abundance of information, to the multitude and cheapness of books and newspapers, to the diffusion of primary instruction, the number of visitors has increased enormously.5348 Not only has curiosity been aroused among the workmen in towns, but also with the peasants formerly plodding along in the routine of their daily labor, confined to their circle of six leagues in circumference. This or that small daily journal treats of divine and human things for a million of subscribers and probably for three millions of readers.—Of course, out of a hundred visitors, ninety of them are not capable of comprehending the sense of the picture; they give it only a cursory glance; moreover, their eyes are not properly educated for it, and they are unable to grasp masses and seize proportions. Their attention is generally arrested by a detail which they interpret in a wrong way, and the mental image they carry away is merely a fragment or a caricature; basically, if they have come to see a magisterial work, it is most of all due to vanity and so that his spectacle, which some of them enjoy, should not remain the privileged of a few. Nevertheless, however imperfect and confused their impressions, however false and ill-founded their judgments, they have learned something important and one true idea of their visit remains with them: of the various pictures of the world not one is painted by the imagination but from nature.5349
Now, between this picture and that which the Catholic Church presents to them, the difference is enormous. Even with rude intellects, or minds otherwise occupied, if the dissimilarity is not clearly perceived it is vaguely felt; in default of scientific notions, the simple hearsay caught on the wing, and which seem to have flickered through the mind like a flash of light over a hard rock, still subsists there in a latent state, amalgamating and agglutinating into a solid block until at length they form a massive, refractory sentiment utterly opposed to faith.—With the Protestant, the opposition is neither extreme nor definitive. His faith, which the Scriptures give him for his guidance, leads him to read the Scriptures in the original text and, hence, to read with profit, to call to his aid whatever verifies and explains an ancient text, linguistics, philology, criticism, psychology, combined with general and particular history; thus does faith lay hold on science as an auxiliary. According to diverse souls, the role of the auxiliary is more or less ample it may accordingly adapt itself to the faculties and needs of each soul, and hence extend itself indefinitely, and already do we see ahead the time when the two collaborators, enlightened faith and respectful science, will together paint the same picture, or each separately paint the same picture twice in two different frames.— With the Slavs and Greeks, faith, like the Church and the rite, is a national thing; creed forms one body with the country, and there is less disposition to dispute it; besides, it is not irksome; it is simply a hereditary relic, a domestic memorial, a family icon, a summary product of an exhausted art no longer well understood and which has ceased to produce. It is rather sketched out than completed, not one feature having been added to it since the tenth century; for eight hundred years this picture has remained in one of the back chambers of the memory, covered with cobwebs as ancient as itself, badly lighted and rarely visited; everybody knows that it is there and it is spoken of with veneration; nobody would like to get rid of it, but it is not daily before the eyes so that it may be compared with the scientific picture.—Just the reverse with the Catholic picture. Each century, for eight hundred years, has applied the brush to this picture; still, at the present time we see it grow under our eyes, acquiring a stronger relief, deeper color, a more vigorous harmony, an ever more fixed and striking expression.—To the articles of belief which constitute the creed for the Greek and Slavic church, thirteen subsequent Catholic councils have added to it many others, while the two principal dogmas decreed by the last two councils, Transubstantiation by the council of Trent and the Infallibility of the Pope by that of the Vatican, are just those the best calculated to hinder forever any reconciliation between science and faith.
Thus, for Catholic nations, the dissimilarity, instead of diminishing, is aggravated; both pictures, one painted by faith and the other by science, become more and more dissimilar, while the profound contradiction inherent in the two conceptions becomes glaring through their very development, each developing itself apart and both in a counter-sense, one through dogmatic verdicts and through the strengthening of discipline and the other by ever-increasing discoveries and by useful applications, each adding daily to its authority, one by precious inventions and the other by good works, each being recognized for what it is, one as the leading instructor of positive truths and the other as the leading instructor of sound morality. That is why we find a combat in each Catholic breast as to which of the two concepts is to be accepted as guide. To every sincere mind and to one capable of entertaining both, each is irreducible to the other. To the vulgar mind, unable to combine both in thought, they exist side by side and clash with each other only occasionally when action demands a choice. Many intelligent, cultivated people, and even savants, especially specialists, avoid confronting them, one being the support of their reason and the other the guardian of their conscience; between them, in order to prevent any possible conflict, they interpose in advance a wall of separation, a compartment partition,5350" which prevents them from meeting and clashing. Others, at length, clever or not too clear-sighted politicians, try to force their agreement, either by assigning to each its domain and in prohibiting mutual access, or by uniting both domains through the semblance of bridges, by imitation stairways, and other illusory communications which the phantasmagoria of human eloquence can always establish between incompatible things and which procure for man, if not the acquisition of a truth, at least a pleasure in the play of words. The ascendancy of the Catholic faith over these uncertain, inconsequent, tormented souls is more or less weak or strong according to time, place, circumstance, individuals and groups; in the larger group it has diminished, while it has increased in the smaller one.
The latter comprises the regular and secular clergy with its approximate recruits and its small body of supporters; never was it so exemplary and so fervent; the monastic institution in particular never flourished so spontaneously and more usefully. Nowhere in Europe are more missionaries formed, so many "brethren" for small schools, so many volunteers, male and female, in the service of the poor, the sick, the infirm and of children, such vast communities of women freely devoting their lives to teaching and to charity.5351 Life in common, under uniform and strict rules, to a people like the French, more capable than any other of enthusiasm and of emulation, of generosity and of discipline, naturally prone to equality, sociable and predisposed to fraternity through the need of companionship, sober, moreover, and laborious, a life in common is no more distasteful in the convent than in the barracks, nor in an ecclesiastical army more than in a lay army, while France, always Gallic, affords as ready a hold nowadays to the Roman system as in the time of Augustus. When this system obtains a hold on a soul it keeps its hold, and the belief it imposes becomes the principal guest, the sovereign occupant of the intellect. Faith, in this occupied territory, no longer allows her title to be questioned; she condemns doubt as a sin, she interdicts investigation as a temptation, she presents the peril of un belief as a mortal danger, she enrolls conscience in her service against any possible revolt of reason. At the same time that she guards herself against attacks, she strengthens her possession; to this end, the rites she prescribes are efficient, and their efficiency, multiplicity and convergence—confession and communion, retreats, spiritual exercises, abstinences, and ceremonies of every kind, the worship of saints and of the Virgin, of relics and images, orisons on the lips and from the heart, faithful attendance on the services and the exact fulfillment of daily duties—all attest it.
Through its latest acquisitions and the turn it now takes, Catholic faith buries itself in and penetrates down to the very depths of the sensitive and tried souls which it has preserved from foreign influences; for it supplies to this chosen flock the aliment it most needs and which it loves the best. Below the metaphysical, abstract Trinity, of which two of the three persons are out of reach of the imagination, she has set up an historical Trinity whose personages are all perceptible to the senses, Mary, Joseph and Jesus. The Virgin, since the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, has risen to an extraordinary height; her spouse accompanies her in her exaltation;5352 between them stands their son, child or man, which forms the Holy Family.5353 No worship is more natural and more engaging to chaste celibates in whose brain a pure, vague vision is always present, the reverie of a family constituted without the intervention of sex. No system of worship furnishes so many precise objects for adoration, all the acts and occurrences, the emotions and thoughts of three adorable lives from birth to death and in the beyond, down to the present day. Most of the religious institutions founded within the past eighty years devote themselves to meditation on one of these lives considered at some one point of incident or of character, either purity, charity, compassion or justice, conception, nativity or infancy, presence in the Temple, at Nazareth, at Bethany, or on Calvary, the passion, the agony, the assumption or apparition under this or that circumstance or place, and the rest. There are now in France, under the name and patronage of Saint Joseph alone, one hundred and seventeen congregations and communities of women. Among so many appellations, consisting of special watchwords designating and summing up the particular preferences of a devout group, one name is significant there are seventy-nine congregations or communities of women which have devoted themselves to the heart of Mary or of Jesus or to both together.5354 In this way, besides the narrow devotion which is attached to the corporeal emblem, a tender piety pursues and attains its supreme end, the mute converse of the soul, not with the dim Infinite, the indifferent Almighty who acts through general laws, but with a person, a divine person clothed with the vesture of humanity and who has not discarded it, who has lived, suffered and loved, who still loves, who, in glory above, welcomes there the effusions of his faithful souls and who returns love for love.
All this is incomprehensible, bizarre or even repulsive to the public at large, and still more so to the vulgar. It sees in religion only what is very plain, a government; and in France, it has already had enough of government temporally; add a complementary one on the spiritual side and that will be more and too much. Alongside of the tax-collector and the gendarme in uniform, the peasant, the workman and the common citizen encounter the curé in his cassock who, in the name of the Church, as with the other two in the name of the State, gives him orders and subjects him to rules and regulations. Now every rule is annoying and the latter more than the others; one is rid of the tax-collector after paying the tax, and of the gendarme when no act is committed against the law; the curé is much more exacting; he interferes in domestic life and in private matters and assumes to govern man entirely. He admonishes his parishioners in the confessional and from the pulpit, he lords it over them even in their inmost being, and his injunctions bind them in every act, even at home, around the fireside, at table and in bed, comprising their moments of repose and relaxation, even hours of leisure and in the tavern. Villagers, after listening to a sermon against the tavern and drunkenness, murmur and are heard to exclaim: "Why does he meddle with our affairs? Let him say his mass and leave us alone." They need him for baptism, marriage and burial, but their affairs do not concern him. Moreover, among the observances he prescribes, many are inconvenient, tasteless or disagreeable—fasting, Lent, a passive part in a Latin mass, prolonged services, ceremonies of which the details are all insignificant, but of which the symbolic meaning is to-day of no account to people in attendance; add to all this the mechanical recitation of the Pater and of the Ave, genuflections and crossing one's self, and especially obligatory confession at specified dates. Nowadays the worker and the peasant manage without these constraints. In many villages, there is nobody at high mass on Sundays but women, and often, in small numbers, one or two troops of children led by the clerical instructor and by the "Sister," with a few old men; the great majority of the men remain outside, under the porch and on the square before the church chatting with each other about the crops, on local news and on the weather.
In the eighteenth century, when a curé was obliged to report to the "intendant" the number of inhabitants of his parish, he had only to count his communicants at the Easter service; their number was about that of the adult and valid population, say one half or two fifths of the sum total.5355 Now, at Paris, out of two millions of Catholics who are of age, about one hundred thousand perform this strict duty, aware of its being strict and the imperative prescription of which is stamped in their memory by a rhyme which they have learned in their infancy;5356 out of one hundred persons, this is equal to five communicants, of which four are women and one is a man, in other words, about one woman out of twelve or thirteen and one man out of fifty. In the provinces,5357 and especially in the country, there is good reason for doubling and even tripling these figures; in the latter case, the most favorable one and, without any doubt, the rarest, the proportion of professed Christians is that of one to four among women and one man out of twelve. Evidently, with the others who make not attend Church regularly, with the three women and the eleven other men, their faith is only verbal; if they are still Catholics, it is on the outside and not within.
Besides this separation from the main body and this indifference, other signs denote disaffection and even hostility.—In Paris, at the height of the Revolution, in May and June 1793, the shopkeepers, artisans and market-women, the whole of the common people, were still religious,5358 "kneeling in the street" when the Host passed by, and before the relics of Saint Leu carried along in ceremonial procession, passionately fond of his worship, and suddenly melted, "ashamed, repentant and with tears in their eyes, when, inadvertently, their Jacobin rulers tolerated the publicity of a procession. Nowadays, among the craftsmen, shopkeepers and lower class of employees, there is nothing more unpopular than the Catholic Church. Twice, under the Restoration and the second Empire, she has joined hands with a repressive government, while its clergy has seemed to be not merely an efficient organ but, again, the central promoter of all repression.— Hence, accumulated bitterness that still survives. After 1830, the archbishopric of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois is sacked; in 1871 the archbishop and other ecclesiastical hostages are murdered. For two years after 1830 a priest in his cassock dared not show himself in public;5359 he ran the risk of being insulted in the streets; since 1871, the majority of the Parisian electors, through the interposition of the Municipal Council which they elect over and over again, persists in driving "Brethren" and "Sisters" from the schools and hospitals in order to put laymen in their places and pay twice as much for work not done as well.5360—In the beginning, antipathy was confined to the clergy; through contamination, it reached the doctrine, to include the faith, the entire Catholicism and even Christianity itself. Under the Restoration, it was called, in provocative language, the priest party, and under the second Empire, the clericals. Afterwards, confronting the Church and under a contrary name, the anti-clerical league was formed by its adversaries, a sort of negative church which possessed, or tried to, its own dogmas and rites, its own assemblies and discipline: and for lack of something better, it has its own fanaticism, that of aversion; on the word being given, it marches, rank and file, against the other, its enemy, and manifests, if not its belief, at least its unbelief in refusing or in avoiding the ministration of the priest. In Paris, twenty funerals out of a hundred, purely civil, are not held in a church; out of one hundred marriages, twenty-five, purely civil, are not blessed by the Church; twenty-four infants out of a hundred are not baptized.5361
And, from Paris to the provinces, both sentiment and example are propagated. For sixteen years, in our parliaments elected by universal suffrage, the majority maintains that party in power which wages war against the Church; which, systematically and on principle, is and remains hostile to the Catholic religion; which has its own religion for which it claims dominion; which is possessed by a doctrinal spirit, and, in the direction of intellects and souls, aims at substituting this new spirit for the old one; which, as far as it can, withdraws from the old one its influence, or its share in education and in charity; which breaks up the congregations of men, and overtaxes congregations of women; which enrolls seminarians in the army, and deprives suspect curés of their salaries; in short, which, through its acts collectively and in practice, proclaims itself anti-Catholic. Many of its acts certainly displease the peasant. He would prefer to retain the teaching "brother" in the public school and the "sister" in the hospital as nurse or as teacher in the school; both would cost less, and he is used to their dark dresses and their white caps; moreover, he is not ill-disposed towards his resident curé, who is a "good fellow." Nevertheless, in sum, the rule of the curé is not to his taste; he does not wish to have him back, and he distrusts priests, especially the aspect of their allies who now consist of the upper bourgeoisie and the nobles. Hence, out of ten million electors, five or six millions, entertaining partial dislikes and mute reservations, continue to vote, at least provisionally, for anti-Christian radicals. All this shows that, through an insensible and slow reaction, the great rural mass, following the example of the great urban mass, is again becoming pagan5362; for one hundred years the wheel turns in this sense, without stopping, and this is serious, still more serious for the nation than for the Church.
In France, the inner Christianity, has, for all that, through the dual effect of its Catholic and French envelope, grown warmer among the clergy especially among the regular clergy, but is has cooled off among the people and it is especially here that it is needed.
Post Scriptum:
Taine died in 1893 not long after having written this. Much has happened since and the struggle between "Lay Republicans" and the Catholic Church has continued. In "QUID 2000," a French popular reference manual containing on page 515 some notes on the evolution of the Catholic religion in France, we can read the following:
"1899-11-11 the police occupies l'Assomption, 6, rue François Ier. The Augustin brothers are accused in court for breaking the law forbidding unauthorized assemblies... 1900 Thomas, mayor of Kremlin-Bicêtre, forbids the wearing of the ecclesiastical costume in his town. This example is followed by others..." Reading further we may learn that later in 1901 to 1904 the various Catholic orders are forbidden or dissolved and most French Church property seized. In 1905 a law decreeing a separation between the State and the Church is narrowly and bitterly voted and a struggle between France and the Pope begins ... Between 1914 and 1918 25 000 priests and seminarians are mobilized and app. 5000 among them fall. This disarms many of the Church's enemies and in 1920 funds are appropriated for the re-establishment of the French embassy to the Pope in Rome. etc. etc. Today the Catholic religion is tolerated more or less in the same manner as Judaism, Islam etc. (SR.)
5301 (return)
[ The Budget of 1881. 17,010 desservans of small parishes have 900 francs per annum; 4500 have 1000 francs; 9492, sixty years of age and over, have from 1100 to 1300 francs. 2521 curés of the second class have from 1200 to 1300 francs; 850 curés of the first class, or rated the same, have from 1500 to 1600 francs; 65 archiprêtre curés have 1600 francs, that of Paris 2400 francs; 709 canons have from 1600 to 2400 francs; 193 vicars-general have from 2500 to 4000 francs.—Abbé Bougaud, "le Grand Péril," etc., p.23. In the diocese of Orleans, which may be taken as an average type, fees, comprising the receipts for masses, are from 250 to 300 francs per annum, which brings the salary of an ordinary desservant up to about 1200 francs.]
5302 (return)
[ The fees, etc., of the curé of the Madeleine are estimated at about 40,000 francs a year. The prefect of police has 40,000 francs a year, and the prefect of the Seine, 50,000 francs.]
5303 (return)
[ Prælectiones juris canonici, II., 264-267.]
5304 (return)
[ Ibid., II., 268.]
5305 (return)
[ "The Ancient Régime," pp. 119, 147. (Ed. Laffont I. pp. 92, 115.) (On the "Chartreuse" of Val Saint-Pierre, read the details given by Merlon de Thionville in his "Mémoires.")]
5306 (return)
[ Prælectiones juris canonici, II.,205. (Edict of Louis XIII., 1629, art. 9.)]
5307 (return)
[ The following are other instances. With the "Filles de Saint-Vincent de Paule," the superior of the "Prètres de la Mission" proposes two names and all the Sisters present choose one or the other by a plurality of votes. Local superiors are designated by the Council of Sisters who always reside at the principal establishment.—With the "Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes," assembled at the call of the assistants in function, a general chapter meets at Paris, 27 rue Oudinot. This chapter, elected by all professed members belonging to the order, comprises 15 directors of the leading houses and 15 of the older brethren who have been at least fifteen years in profession. Besides these 30, the assistants in function, or who have resigned, and the visitors of the houses form, by right, a part of the chapter which comprises 72 members. This chapter elects the general superior for ten years. He is again eligible; he appoints for three years the directors of houses, and he can prolong or replace them. With the Carthusians, the superior-general is elected by the professed brethren of the Grande Chartreuse who happen to be on hand when the vacancy occurs. They vote by sealed ballots unsigned, under the presidency of two priors without a vote.]
5308 (return)
[ The reader may call to mind the portrait of Brother Philippe by Horace Vernet. For details of the terrible mortifications inflicted on himself by Lacordaire see his life by Father Chocarne. "Every sort of mortification which the saints prized, hair-cloth jackets of penance, scourges, whips of every kind and form, he knew of and used.... He scourged himself daily and often several times during the day. During Lent and especially on Good Friday he literally scored and flayed himself alive."]
5309 (return)
[ Notes (unpublished) by Count Chaptal.]
5310 (return)
[ "État des congrégations, communantés et associations religieuses, autorisées et non-autorisées, dressé en execution" according to article 12, law of Dec. 28, 1876. (Imprimerie nationale, 1878)—"L'Institut des frères des écoles chrétiennes," by Eugène Rendu (1882), p. 10.—Th. W. Allies, "Journal d'un voyage en France, p.81. (Conversation with Brother Philippe, July 16, 1845.)—"Statistique de Institut des Frères des Ecoles Chrétiennes," Dec.31, 1888. (Drawn up by the head establishment.) Out of the 121 houses of 1789, there were 117 of these in France and 4 in the colonies. Out of the 1,286 houses of 1888, there are 1,010 in France and in the colonies. The other 276 are in other countries.]
5311 (return)
[ Émile Keller, "Les Congrégations religieuses en France" (1880), preface, xxIII., xvIII., and p. 492.]
5312 (return)
[ In 1789, 37,000 Sisters; in 1866, 86,000 Sisters ("Statistique de la France," 1866); in 1878, 127,753 Sisters ("État des congrégations," etc.).]
5313 (return)
[. (But today, around 1990, there are only 5 nuns per 10,000 inhabitants. SR.)]
5314 (return)
[ Émile Keller, ibid., passim.—In many communities of men and of women the personal expenses of each member are not over 300 francs per annum; with the Trappists at Devielle this is the maximum.—If the value of the useful labor performed by these 160,000 monks and nuns be estimated at 1000 francs per head, which is below the real figures, the total is 160 millions per annum; estimate the expenses of each monk or nun at 500 francs per head and the total is 80 millions a year. The net gain to the public is 80 millions per annum.]
5315 (return)
[ "La Charité à Nancy," by Abbé Girard, p. 245.—The same judgment is confirmed by the Rev. T. W. Allies, in a "Journal d'un voyage en France," 1848, p. 291. "The dogma of the real presence is the centre of the whole religious life of the Church (Catholic): it is the secret support of the priest in his mission, so painful and so filled with abnegation. It is by this that the religious orders are maintained."]
5316 (return)
[ This question is examined by St. Thomas in his Summa Theologica.]
5317 (return)
[ For the past twenty years, owing to the researches of psychologists and physiologists, we have begun to know something of the subterranean regions of the mind and the latent processes taking place there. The storing, the residue and unconscious combination of images, the spontaneous and automatic transformation of images into sensations, the composition, disassociations and splitting into dual personalities of the ego, the alternate or simultaneous coexistence of two, or more than two, distinct persons in the same individual, the suggestions accomplished later and at fixed dates, the chock of the return from the inside to the outside, and the physical effect on the nervous extremities of the mental sensations, all these late discoveries have resulted in a new conception of mind, and psychology, thus renewed, throws a sharp light on history.]
5318 (return)
[ See in "Herodiade," by Flaubert, the depicting of these "kingdoms of the world or of the century," as they appeared to Palestinian eyes in the first century. For the first four centuries we must consider, confronting the Church, by way of contrast and in full relief, the pagan and Roman world, the life of the day, especially in the baths, at the circus, in the theatre, the gratuitous supplies of food, of physical enjoyments and of spectacles to the idle populace of the towns, the excesses of public and private luxury, the enormity of unproductive expenditure, and all this in a society which, without our machines, supported itself by hand-labor; next, the scantiness and dearness of available capital, a legal rate of interest at twelve per cent, the latifundia, the oberati, the oppression of the working classes, the diminution of free laborers, the exhaustion of slaves, depopulation and impoverishment, at the end the colon attached to his glebe, the workman to his tool, the curiale to his curie, the administrative interference of the centralized State, its fiscal exigencies, all that it sucked out of the social body, and the more strenuously inasmuch as there was less to be sucked out of it. Against these sensual habits and customs and this economic system the Church has preserved its primitive aversion, especially on two points, in relation to the theatre and to loaning money at interest.]
5319 (return)
[ See St. Paul's epistle to the Romans, ch. I., 26 to 32; also the First Epistle to the Corinthians, ch. XIII.]
5320 (return)
[ The First Epistle of John, II. 16.]
5321 (return)
[ Acts of the Apostles, ch. IV.,32, 34 and 35.]
5322 (return)
[ I cannot help but conclude that the two world wars, started by Christian Governments, led to socialism and religious decay. How large a role television played in removing the need for clerical guidance and comfort is hard to determine, the fact is that the Churches in Europe stand mostly empty and Taine's description fits rather will on today's society. (SR.)]
5323 (return)
[ Saint Athanasius, the principal founder of Christian metaphysics, did not know Latin and learned it with great difficulty at Rome when he came to defend his doctrine. On the other hand, the principal founder of western theology, Saint Augustin, had only an imperfect knowledge of Greek.]
5324 (return)
[ For example, the three words which are essential and technical in metaphysical speculations on the divine essence, have no real equivalent in Latin, while the words by which an attempt is made to render these terms, verbum, substantia, persona, are very inexact. Persona and substantia, in Tertullian, are already used in their Roman sense, which is always juridical and special.]
5325 (return)
[ Sir Henry Sumner Maine, "Ancient Law," p. 354. The following is profound in a remarkable degree: "Greek metaphysical literature contained the sole stock of words and ideas out of which the human mind could provide itself with the means of engaging in the profound controversies as to the Divine Persons, the Divine Substance, and the Divine Natures. The Latin language and the meager Latin philosophy were quite unequal to the undertaking, and accordingly the western or Latin-speaking provinces of the Empire adopted the conclusions of the East without disputing or reviewing them."]
5326 (return)
[ Maine, "Ancient Law," p.357 "The difference between the two theological systems is accounted for by the fact that, in passing from the East to the West, theological speculation had passed from a climate of Greek metaphysics to a climate of Roman law." Out of this arose the Western controversies on the subject of Free-will and Divine Providence. "The problem of Free-will arises when we contemplate a metaphysical conception under a legal aspect."]
5327 (return)
[ Ibid. "The nature of Sin and its transmission by inheritance; the debt owed by man and its vicarious satisfaction; the necessity and sufficiency of the Atonement; above all the apparent antagonism between Free-will and the Divine Providence-these were the points which the West began to debate as ardently as ever the East had discussed the articles of its more special creed." This juridical fashion of conceiving theology appears in the works of the oldest Latin theologians, Tertullian and Saint Cyprian.]
5328 (return)
[ Ibid. Among the technical notions borrowed from law and here used in Latin theology we may cite "the Roman penal system, the Roman theory of the obligations established by Contract or Delict," the intercession or act by which one assumes the obligation contracted by another, "the Roman view of Debts and of the modes of incurring, extinguishing and transmitting them, the Roman notion of the continuance of individual existence by Universal Succession,"]
5329 (return)
[ Cf. Fustel de Coulanges, "La Gaule Romaine," p.96 and following pages, on the rapidity, facility and depth of the transformation by which Gaul became Latinized.]
5330 (return)
[ The Church of England, in its confession of faith, makes this express declaration.]
5331 (return)
[ As called by Joseph de Maistre, referring to the Greek church.]
5332 (return)
[ Duke Sermoneta-Gaetani has shown in his geographic map of the "Divine Comedy" the exact correspondence of this poem with the "Somme" by Saint Thomas.—It was already said of Dante in the middle ages, Theologus Dantes nullius dogmatis expers.]
5333 (return)
[ Cf. "L'Empire des tsars et les Russes," by Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, vol. III., entire, on the characteristics of the Russian clergy.]
5334 (return)
[ Bossuet, ed. Deforis, VI., 169. The Meaux catechism (reproduced, with some additions, in the catechism adopted by Napoleon). "What works are deemed satisfactory?"—"Works unpleasant to us imposed by the priest as a penance."—"Repeat some of them."—"Alms-giving, fastings, austerities, privations of what is naturally agreeable, prayers, spiritual readings."]
5335 (return)
[ Ibid. "Why is confession ordained?"—"To humble the sinner.. . "—"Why again?"—"To submit one's self to the power of the Keys and to the judgment of the priests who have the power to punish and remit sins."]
5336 (return)
[ Bossuet, ibid., Catéchisme de Meaux, VI., 140-142.]
5337 (return)
[ "Manreze du prêtre," by Father Caussette, I., 37. "Do you see that young man of twenty-five who will soon traverse the sanctuary to find the sinners awaiting him? It is the God of this earth who sanctifies him... Were Jesus Christ to descend into the confessional he would say, Ego te absolvo. He is going to say with the same authority, Ego te absolvo. Now this is an act of the supreme power; it is greater, says Saint Augustin, than the creation of heaven and earth."—T. W. Allies, "Journal d'un voyage en France," 1845, p.97. "Confession is the chain which binds all Christian life."]
5338 (return)
[ "Manreze du prêtre," I., 36. "The Mother of God has undoubtedly more credit than you, but she has less authority. Undoubtedly, she accords favors, but she has not given one single absolution."]
5339 (return)
[ Could one imagine that Stalin, that that apostate former student expelled from the Tiflis Theological Seminary, would, on reading Taine's text, have conceived the idea of having communist missionaries, directed by the KGB in Moscow, direct an army of agents inside the capitalist world? (SR.)]
5340 (return)
[ Like a central committee of the communist party? (SR.)]
5341 (return)
[ Prælectiones juris canonici, I., 101. "The power entrusted to St. Peter and the apostles is wholly independent of the community of believers."]
5342 (return)
[ Here Lenin pretended to install the Proletariat and announced its (his own) dictatorship. (SR.)]
5343 (return)
[ Here we have a clear model for an International Communist Party, tasked with the creation of a visible organization whenever this is possible, but with an invisible structure of missionaries, recruiters, controllers, policemen and agents, since any bourgeois state must, once it discovers the party's true aims, forbid it and drive it underground. To the Christian dream of an eternal life in heaven or hell, the communist movement has its promise of a millenary on earth contrasted by the immediate annihilation of any traitor or dangerous opponent. (SR.)]
5344 (return)
[ "Cours alphabétique et méthodique du droit canon," by Abbé André, and "Histoire générale de Église, vol. XIII., by Bercastel et Henrion. The reader will find in these two works an exposition of the diverse statutes of the Catholic Church in other countries. Each of these statutes differs from ours in one or several important articles; the fixed, or even territorial, endowment of the clergy, the nomination to the episcopate by the chapter, or by the clergy of the diocese, or by the bishops of the province, public competition for curacies, irremovability, participation of the chapter in the government of the diocese, restoration of the officialité; return to the prescriptions of the Council of Trent (Cf. especially the Concordats between the Holy See and Prussia, Bavaria, Wurtemberg, Baden, the two Hesses, Belgium, Austria, Spain, and the statutes accepted or established by the Holy See in Ireland and the United States.)]
5345 (return)
[ The brothers Allignol, "De l'État actuel du clergé en France," p.248. "The mind of the desservant is no longer his own. Let him beware of any personal sentiment or opinion!... He must cease being himself and must lose, it may be said, his personality."—Ibid., preface, XIX. "Both of us, placed in remotes country parishes,... are in a position to know the clergy of the second class well, to which, for twenty years, we belong."]
5346 (return)
[ The principal means of action of the State is the right of appointing bishops. The Pope, however, installs them; consequently, the Minister of Worship must have an understanding beforehand with the nuncio, which obliges it to nominate candidates irreproachable in doctrine and morals, but it avoids nominating ecclesiastics that are eminent, enterprising or energetic; once installed and not removable, they would cause trouble. Such, for example, was M. Pie, bishop of Poitiers, nominated by M. de Falloux in the time of the Prince-President, and so annoying during the Empire; in order to keep him in check, M. Levert, the cleverest and most adroit prefect, had to be sent to Poitiers; for many years they waged the most desperate war under proper formalities, each playing against the other the shrewdest and most disagreeable tricks. Finally, M. Levert, who had lost a daughter and was denounced from the pulpit, was obliged, on account of his wife's feelings, to leave the place. (This happened to my own knowledge, as between 1852 and 1867 I visited Poitiers five times.) At the present day, the Catholics complain that the government nominates none but mediocre men for bishops and accepts none others for cantonal curés. (Today, in 1999, we can look back on a century of quarrelling, even war, between Rome and Paris with the separation of the Catholic Church and the State in 1905, sequestration of all church property, impoverishment of the clergy, interdiction of the different orders, papal bulls, ending in 1914 when the State had to concentrate all effort towards winning the war. Today the church is allowed to operate but its influence is much reduced as it the case for all the religions since the advent of the consumer society with television etc. SR.)]
5347 (return)
[ "The Ancient Régime," pp 171, 181, 182. (Ed. Laffont I., p. 129 to 139.)]
5348 (return)
[ M. de Vitrolles, "' Mémoires," I., 15. (This passage was written in 1847.) "Under the Empire, readers were to those of the present day as one to a thousand. Newspapers, in very small number, scarcely obtained circulation. The public informed itself about victories, as well as the conscription, in the articles of the 'Moniteur,' posted by the prefects."—From 1847 to 1891, we all know by our own experience that the number of readers has augmented prodigiously.]
5349 (return)
[ I wonder what Taine would have said of television, that system which allows its producers to make all mankind believe that the lies and figments of the imaginations put in front of them show the true and real world as it is. (SR.)]
5350 (return)
[ An expression by Renan in relation to Abbé Lehir, an accomplished professor of Hebrew.]
5351 (return)
[ Th. W. Allies, rector of Launton, "Journal d'un voyage en France," p.245. (A speech by Father Ravignan, August 3, 1848) "What nation in the Roman church is more prominent at the present day for its missionary labors? France, by far. There are ten French missionaries to one Italian." Several French congregations, especially the "Petites Soeurs des Pauvres" and the "Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes," are so zealous and so numerous that they overflow outside of France and have many establishments abroad.]
5352 (return)
[ "Manreze du prêtre," by Father Caussette, II.,419: "Now that I have placed one of your hands in those of Mary let me place the other in those of Saint Joseph.... Joseph, whose prayers in heaven are what commands to Jesus were on earth. Oh, what a sublime patron, and what powerful patronage!... Joseph, associated in the glory of divine paternity;... Joseph, who counts twenty-three kings among his ancestors!" Along with the month of the year devoted to the adoration of Mary, there is another consecrated to Saint Joseph.]
5353 (return)
[ "État des congrégations," etc. (1876). Eleven congregations or communities of women are devoted to the Holy Family and nineteen others to the Child-Jesus or to the Infancy of Jesus.]
5354 (return)
[ One of these bears the title of "Augustines de l'intérieur de Marie" and another is devoted to the "Coeuragonisant de Jésus."]
5355 (return)
[ At Bourron (Seine-et-Marne), in 1789, which had 600 inhabitants, the number of communicants at Easter amounted to 300; at the present day, out of 1200 inhabitants there are 94]
5356 (return)
[ Th. W. Allies, "Journal d'un voyage en France," III., p. 18: "M. Dufresne (July 1845) tells us that out of 1,000,000 inhabitants in Paris 300,000 attend mass and 50,000 are practising Christians."—(A conversation with Abbé Petitot, curé of Saint-Louis d'Antin, July 7.1847.) "2,000,000 out of 32,000,000 French are really Christians and go to confession."—At the present day (April 1890) an eminent and well-informed ecclesiastic writes: "I estimate the number of those who observe Easter at Paris at about 100,000."—"The number of professing Christians varies a great deal according to parishes: Madeleine, 4,500 out of 29,000 inhabitants; Saint Augustin, 6,500 out of 29,000; Saint Eustache, 1,750 out of 20,000; Bellancourt, 500 out of 10,000; Grenelle, 1,500 out of 47,500; and Belleville, 1,500 out of 60,000 inhabitants."]
5357 (return)
[ Abbé Bougaud, "Le Grand Péril," etc., p.44: "I know a bishop who, on reaching his diocese, tried to ascertain how many of the 400,000 souls entrusted to his keeping performed their Easter duties. He found 37,000. At the present day, owing to twenty years of effort, this number reaches 55,000. Thus, more than 300,000 are practically unbelievers."—"Vie de Mgr. Dupanloup," by Abbé Lagrange, I., 5'. (Pastoral letter by Mgr. Dupanloup, 1851.) "He considers that he is answerable to God for nearly 350,000 souls, of which 200,000 at least do not fulfill their Easter duties; scarcely 45,000 perform this great duty."]
5358 (return)
[ "The Revolution," II.,390. (Ed. Laff. I., p. 177.)]
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").]
BOOK SIXTH. PUBLIC INSTRUCTION.
CHAPTER I. PUBLIC INSTRUCTION
I. Public instruction and its three effects.
Public instruction and its three effects.—Influences of the
master, of the pupils on each other, and of discipline.
—Case in which all three tend towards producing a particular
type of man.
AT fixed intervals a man, in a room, gathers around him children, youths, a group of young people, ten, twenty, thirty or more; he talks to them for one or two hours and they listen to him. They sit alongside of each other, look in each other's faces, touch each other's elbows, feel that they are class-mates, of the same age and occupied with the same tasks. They form a society and in two ways, one with another and all with the master. Hence they live under a statute: every society has one of its own, spontaneous or imposed on it; as soon as men, little or big, come together in any number, in a drawing-room, in a 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.
II. Napoleon's Educational Instruments.
Napoleon's aim.—University monopoly.—Revival and multitude
of private schools.—Napoleon regards them unfavorably.—His
motives.—Private enterprises compete with public
enterprise.—Measures against them.—Previous authorization
necessary and optional suppression of them.—Taxes on free
education in favor of the university.—Decree of November,
1811.—Limitation of secondary teaching in private schools.
—How the university takes away their pupils.—Day-schools as
prescribed.—Number of boarders limited.—Measures for the
restriction or assimilation of ecclesiastical schools.
—Recruits forcibly obtained in prominent and ill-disposed
families.—Napoleon the sole educator in his empire.
Such is the aim of Napoleon:6101
"In the establishment of an educational corps," he says to himself,6102 "my principal aim is to secure the means for directing political and moral opinions."
Still more precisely, he counts on the new institution to set up and keep open for inspection a universal and complete police registry. "This registry must be organized in such a way as to keep notes on each child after age of nine years."6103 Having seized adults he wants to seize children also, watch and shape future Frenchmen in advance; brought up by him, in his hands or in sight, they become ready-made a assistants, docile subjects and more docile than their parents.6104 Amongst the latter, there are still to many unsubmissive and refractory spirits, too many royalists and too many republicans; domestic traditions from family to family contradict each other or vary, and children grow up in their homes only to clash with each other in society afterwards. Let us anticipate this conflict; let us prepare them for concord; all brought up in the same fashion, they will some day or other find themselves unanimous,6105 not only apparently, as nowadays through fear or force, but in fact and fundamentally, through inveterate habit and by previous adaptation of imagination and affection. Otherwise, "there will be no stable political state" in France;6106 "so long as one grows up without knowing whether to be a republican or monarchist, Catholic or irreligious, the State will never form a nation; it will rest on uncertain and vague foundations; it will be constantly exposed to disorder and change."—Consequently, he assigns to himself the monopoly of public instruction; he alone is to enjoy the right to manufacture and sell this just like salt and tobacco; "public instruction, throughout the Empire, is entrusted exclusively to the university. No school, no establishment for instruction whatever," superior, secondary, primary, special, general, collateral, secular or ecclesiastic, "may be organized outside of the imperial university and without the authorization of its chief."6107
Every factory of educational commodities within these boundaries and operating under this direction is of two sorts. Some of them, in the best places, interconnected and skillfully grouped, are national units founded by the government, or at its command, by the communes,— faculties, 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,"6108 he says, "to remain longer as we are, since everybody can start an education shop the same as a cloth shop"
and furnish as he pleases, or as his customers please, this or that piece of stuff, even of poor quality, and of this or that fashion, even extravagant or out of date: hence so many different dresses, and a horrible medley. One good obligatory coat, of stout cloth and suitable cut, a uniform for which the public authority supplies the pattern, is what should go on the back of every child, youth or young man; private individuals who undertake this matter are mistrusted beforehand. Even when obedient, they are only half-docile; they take their own course and have their own preferences, they follow their own taste or that of parents. Every private enterprise, simply because it exists and thrives, constitutes a more or less independent and dissenting group, Napoleon, on learning that Sainte-Barbe, restored under the direction of M. de Lanneau, had five hundred inmates, exclaims:6109 "How does it happen that an ordinary private individual has so many in his house?" The Emperor almost seems jealous; it seems as if he had just discovered a rival in one corner of his university domain; this man is an usurper on the domain of the sovereign; he has constituted himself a centre; he has collected around him clients and a platoon; now, as Louis XIV. said, the State must have no "platoons apart." Since M. de Lanneau has talent and is successful, let him enter the official ranks and become a functionary. Napoleon at once means to get hold of him, his house and his pupils, and orders M. de Fontaines, Grand-Master of the University, to negotiate the affair; M. de Lanneau will be suitably compensated; Sainte-Barbe will be formed into a 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,6110 but again, even when licensed, they live subject to the good-will of the Grand-Master, who can and must close them as soon as he recognizes in them "grave abuses and principles contrary to those professed by the University." Meanwhile, the University supports itself with their funds; since it alone has the right to teach, it may profit by this right, concede for money the faculty of teaching or of being taught alongside of it, oblige every head of an institution to pay so much for himself and so much for each of his pupils; in sum, here as elsewhere, in derogation of the university blockade, as with the continental blockade, the state sells licenses to certain parties. So true is this that, even with superior instruction, when nobody competes with it, it sells them: every graduate who gives a course of lectures on literature or on science must pay beforehand, for the year, 75 francs at Paris and 50 francs in the provinces. Every graduate who begin to lecture on law or medicine must pay beforehand 150 francs at Paris and 100 francs in the provinces.6111 There is the same annual duty on the directors of secondary schools, boarding-schools and private institutions. Moreover, to obtain the indispensable license, the master of a boarding-school at Paris must pay 300 francs, and in a province 200 francs; the principal of an institution in Paris pays 600 francs, and in the provinces 400 francs; besides that, this license, always revocable, is granted only for ten years; at the end of the ten years the titular must obtain a renewal and pay the tax anew. As to his pupils, of whatever kind, boarding scholars, day scholars, or even gratis,6112 the University levies on each a tax equal to the twentieth of the cost of full board; the director himself of the establishment is the one who fixes and levies the tax; he is the responsible collector of it, book-keeper and the debtor. Let him not forget to declare exactly the terms of his school and the number of his pupils; otherwise, there is investigation, verification, condemnation, restitution, fine, censure, and the possible closing of his establishment.
Regulations, stricter and stricter, tighten the cord around his neck and, in 1811, the rigid articles of the last decree draw so tight as to insure certain strangling at short date. Napoleon counts on that.6113 For his lycées, especially at the start, have not succeeded; they have failed to obtain the confidence of families;6114 the discipline is too military, the education is not sufficiently paternal, the principals and professors are only indifferent functionaries, more or less egoist or worldly. Only former subaltern officers, rude and foul-mouthed, serve as superintendents and assistant-teachers. The holders of State scholarships bring with them "habits fashioned out of a bad education," or by the ignorance of almost no education at all,6115 so that "for a child that is well born and well brought up," their companionship is lopsided and their contact as harmful as it is repulsive. Consequently, the lycées during the first years,6116 solely 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;6117 even 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;6118 he is not deprived, indeed, of the younger boys; he may still instruct and keep them; but he must conduct all his pupils over ten years of age to the college or 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 1812,6119 the heads of institutions and the masters of boarding-schools shall receive no resident pupils in their houses above the age of nine years, until the 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,6120 every professor, private tutor, or even common superintendent, must be provided with a special authorization by the University. Staff and discipline, the spirit and matter of the teaching, every detail of study and recreation,6121 all are imposed, conducted and restrained in these so-called free establishments; whatever they may be, ecclesiastic or secular, not only does the University surround and hamper them, but again it absorbs and assimilates them; it does not even leave them any external distinctive appearance. It is true that, in the small seminaries, the exercises begin at the ringing of a bell, and the pupils wear an ecclesiastic dress; but the priest's gown, adopted by the State that adopts the Church, is still a State uniform. In the other private establishments, the uniform is that which it imposes, the lay uniform, belonging to colleges and 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.6122 M. 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.6125 In 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.6126 Napoleon, 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.
III. Napoleon's machinery.
His machinery.—The educating body.—How its members come
to realize their union.—Hierarchy of rank.—How ambition
and amour-propre are gratified.—The monastic principle of
celibacy.—The monastic and military principle of
obedience.—Obligations contracted and discipline enforced.
—The 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";6129 they must belong to the Emperor and not to the Pope, and will form, in the hands of the government, a civil militia composed of "ten thousand persons," administrators and professors of every degree, comprehending schoolmasters, an organized, coherent and lasting militia
As it must be secular, there must be no hold on it through dogma or faith, paradise or hell, no spiritual incitements; consequently, temporal means are to be employed, not less effective, when one knows how to manage them,—self-esteem, pride, (amour propre), competition, imagination, ambition, magnificent hopes and vague dreams of unlimited promotion, in short, the means and motives already maintaining the temper and zeal of the army. "The educational corps must copy the classification of military grades; "an order of promotion," a hierarchy of places is to be instituted; no one will attain superior rank without having passed through the inferior; "no one can become a principal without having been a teacher, nor professor in the higher classes without having taught in the lower ones."—And, on the other hand, the highest places will be within reach of all; "the young, who devoted themselves to teaching, will enjoy the perspective of rising from one grade to another, up to the highest dignities of the State." Authority, importance, titles, large salaries, pre-eminence, precedence,—these are to exist in the University as in other public careers and furnish the wherewithal for the most magnificent dreams.6130 "The feet of this great body6131 will be on the college benches and its head in the senate." Its chief, the Grand-Master, unique of his species, less restricted, with freer hands than the ministers themselves, is to be one of the principal personages of the empire; his greatness will exalt the condition and feeling of his subordinates. In the provinces, on every festive occasion or at every public ceremony, people will take pride in seeing their rector or principal in official costume seated alongside of the general or prefect in full uniform.6132
The consideration awarded to their chief will reflect on them; they will enjoy it along with him; they will say to themselves that they too, like him and those under him, all together, form an 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,6135 not 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 engagement6137 to faithfully observe the statutes and regulations of the University. They must promise obedience to the Grand-Master in everything ordered by him for the service of the Emperor, and for the advantage of education. They must engage not to quit the educational corps and abandon their functions before having obtained the Grand-Master's consent. They are to accept no other public or private salaried function without the authentic permission of the Grand-Master. They are bound to give notice to the Grand-Master and his officers of whatever comes to their knowledge that is opposed to the doctrine and principles of the educational corps in the establishments for public instruction." There are many other obligations, indefinite or precise,6138 of which the sanction is not only moral, but, again, legal, all notable and lasting, an entire surrender of the person who suffers more or less profoundly at having accepted them, and whose compulsory resignation must be assured by the fear of punishment. "Care must be taken6139 to insure severe discipline everywhere: the professors themselves are to be subject in certain cases to the penalty of arrest; they will lose no more consideration on this account than the colonels who are punished in the same manner."6140 It is the least of all penalties; there are others of greater and greater gravity,6141 "the reprimand in presence of an academical board, censure in presence of the University board, transfer to an inferior office, suspension with or without entire or partial deprivation of salary, half-pay or put on the retired list, or stricken off the University roll," and, in the latter case, "rendered incapable of obtaining employment in any other public administration."—"Every member of the University6142 who shall fail to conform to the subordination established by the statutes and regulations, or in respect due to superiors, shall be reprimanded, censured or suspended from his functions according to the gravity of the case." In no case may he withdraw of his own accord, resign at will, and voluntarily return to private life; he is bound to obtain beforehand the Grand-Master's assent; and, if the latter refuses this, he must renew his application three times, every two months, with the formalities, the delays and the importunacy of a long procedure; failing in which, he is not only stricken from the rolls, but again "condemned to a confinement proportioned to the gravity of the circumstances," and which may last a year.
A system of things ending in a prison is not attractive, and is established only after great resistance. "We were under the necessity," says the superior council,6143 "of taking candidates as they could be found, differing infinitely in methods, principles and sentiments, accustomed to almost unlimited pardon or, at least, to being governed by the caprices of parents and nearly all disliking the 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."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 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."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 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 1813,6149 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 underlines6150 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 régime. School life is circumscribed and marked out according to a rigid, unique system, the same for all the colleges and lycées 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 lycée 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 lycée 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 obtained6159 and better, perhaps, in France than in any other country," for if, on leaving the lycée, 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 lycée and at the grand competition of all lycées, 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 kind6160:
"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 élite 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 lycées "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 lycées 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 circulars6167 demand of the lycées boys (des enfants de bonne volonté), 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 lycées 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 principal6168 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 pékin, 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 café, 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 lycées and colleges, about 3000 boys6171 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 lycée, first occupants of the lycée 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 Armée, 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 Majesty6176 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 régime; 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
6101 (return)
[ (and obviously the aim of all other dictatorships. (SR.))]
6102 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, 161. (Speech by Napoleon to the Council of State, March 11, 1806.)]
6103 (return)
[ 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.)]
6104 (return)
[ 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.)]
6105 (return)
[ A. de Beauchamp, Recueil des lois et réglements sur l'enseignement supérior, 4 vol. ( (Rapport of Fourcroy to the Corps Législatif, 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."]
6106 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, 154.]
6107 (return)
[ A. de Beauchamp, ibid. (Decree of March 7, 1808.)—Special and collateral schools which teach subjects not taught in the lycées, for example the living languages, which are confined to filling a gap, and do not compete with the lycées, are subject to previous authorization and to university pay.]
6108 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, p. 170. (Session of the Council of State, March 20, 1806).]
6109 (return)
[ Quicherat, "Histoire de Sainte-Barbe," III., 125.]
6110 (return)
[ 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.)]
6111 (return)
[ A. de Beauchamp, ibid. (Decree of Sep. 17, 1808, arts. 27, 28, 29, 30, and act passed April 7, 1809.)]
6112 (return)
[ Id., ibid. (Decrees of March 17, 1808, art. 134; of Sep. 17, 1808, arts. 25 and 26; of Nov.15, 1811, art. 63).]
6113 (return)
[ 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.]
6114 (return)
[ Eugène Rendu, "Ambroise Rendu et l'Université de France" (1861), pp.25, 26. (Letter of the Emperor to Fourcroy, Floreal 3, year XIII, ordering him to inspect the lycées 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 lycée.... 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 lycée) 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 lycées. In this respect opinion is unanimous."]
6115 (return)
[ "Histoire du Collége 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, "Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de l'instruction publique depuis 1789," I., 391. "The kernel of boarding-scholars, (holders of scholarships) was furnished by the Prytanée. Profound corruption, to which the military régime 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."]
6116 (return)
[ Fabry, ibid., vol. II.,12, and vol. III., 399.]
6117 (return)
[ Decree of Nov.15, 1811, articles 15, 16, 22.]
6118 (return)
[ 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 lycée within three months. There were at this date 400 scholars in Sainte-Barbe.]
6119 (return)
[ Decree of Nov.15, 1811, articles 1, 4, 5, 9, 17 to 19 and 24 to 32.—"Procès-verbaux des séances du conseil de l'Université impériale." (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 lycée, the Grand-Master will order private institutions to be closed until the lycée 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.]
6120 (return)
[ 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]
6121 (return)
[ 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.]
6122 (return)
[ 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."]
6123 (return)
[ Quicherat, III., 128.]
6124 (return)
[ "The Modern Régime," I., 164.]
6125 (return)
[ See, for a comprehension of the full effect of this forced education, "Les Mécontens" by Mérimée, the rôle of Lieutenant Marquis Edward de Naugis.]
6126 (return)
[ "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!"]
6127 (return)
[ "Journal d'un déténu de 1807 à 1814" (I vol., 1828, in English), p.167. (An account given by Charles Choderlos de Laclos, who was then at La Flèche.]
6128 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, 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.)]
6129 (return)
[ 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."]
6130 (return)
[ 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."]
6131 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, ibid.]
6132 (return)
[ "Procès-verbaux des séances du conseil de l'Université." (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.]
6133 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère.]
6134 (return)
[ 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.)]
6135 (return)
[ Decree of March 17, 1808, arts. 101, 102.]
6136 (return)
[ 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 "führerprincip" a principle which gave the Nazi society its terrible efficiency was probably the result. (SR.)]
6137 (return)
[ Decree of March 20, 1808, articles 40-46.]
6138 (return)
[ For example, act of March 31, 1812, On leaves of absence.—Cf. the regulations of April 8, 1810, for the "École de la Maternité," titres ix, x and xi). In this strict and special instance we see plainly what Napoleon meant by "the police" of a school.]
6139 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, Ibid.]
6140 (return)
[ 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.)]
6141 (return)
[ Decree of March 17, 1808, articles 47 and 48.]
6142 (return)
[ Decree of Nov. 15, 1811, articles 66 and 69.]
6143 (return)
[ Procès-verbaux et papiers du conseil supérior de l'Université (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.)]
6144 (return)
[ "Statut sur l'administration, l'ensignement et la police de l'École normale," March 30, 1810, title II, articles 20-23.]
6145 (return)
[ 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 Cornélis de Witt: "Here I am in the convent and prisoner for three years." (SR.)]
6146 (return)
[ I note, however, that the École 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.)]
6147 (return)
[ Villemain, "Souvenirs contemporaines," vol. I., 137-156. ("Une visite à l'École 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."]
6148 (return)
[ Decree of March 17, 1808, art. 110 and the following.]
6149 (return)
[ Circular of Nov. 13, 1813.]
6150 (return)
[ Decree of March 17, 1808, article 38.]
6151 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozere, ibid., 158.]
6152 (return)
[ Id., ibid., 168. (Session of March 20, 1806.)]
6153 (return)
[ Hermann Niemeyer, "Beobactungen auf einer Deportation-Reise nach Frankreich im J. 1807" (Halle, 1824), II.,353.—Fabry, "Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de l'instruction publique," III., 120. (Documents and testimony of pupils showing that religion in the lycées 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."]
6154 (return)
[ Fabry, ibid., III., 175. (Napoleon's own words to a member of his council.)—Pelet de la Lozère, 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."]
6155 (return)
[ Fabry, ibid, III., 120. (Abstract of the system of lycées by a pupil who passed many years in two lycées.) 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."]
6156 (return)
[ 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.)]
6157 (return)
[ 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!'"]
6158 (return)
[ Id., ibid., II.,339.—"Decree of November 15, 1811 art. 17."]
6159 (return)
[ Id., ibid., II.,353.]
6160 (return)
[ 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'état actuel de l'instruction publique," 1816, p.103.]
6161 (return)
[ "Travels in France during the Years 1814 and 1815" (Edinburgh, 1816), vol. I., p. 152.]
6162 (return)
[ "Ambroise Rendu et l'Université de France," by E. Rendu (1861), pp. 25 and 26. (Letter of the Emperor, Floréal 3, year XIII, and report by Fourcroy.)]
6163 (return)
[ "Recueil," etc., by de Beauchamp, I., 151. (Report to the Corps Législatif by Fourcroy, May 6, 1806.)]
6164 (return)
[ "Procès-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 lycées 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."]
6165 (return)
[ Testimony of Alfred de Vigny in "Grandeur et Servitude militaires." Same impression of Alfred de Musset in his "Confession d'un enfant du siècle."]
6166 (return)
[ Quicherat, ibid., p.126.]
6167 (return)
[ "The Modern Régime," I. (Laff. I. p. 550.)]
6168 (return)
[ Hermann Niemeyer, ibid., I., 153.]
6169 (return)
[ "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."]
6170 (return)
[ Véron, "Mémoires d'un bourgeois de Paris," I., 127 (year 1806).]
6171 (return)
[ Guizot, ibid., pp.59 and 61.—Fabry, "Mémoires pour servir à 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 lycées, 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.]
6172 (return)
[ Fabry, ibid., II.,391 (1819). (On the peopling of the lycées and colleges.) "The first nucleus of the boarders was furnished by the Prytanée.... 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."]
6173 (return)
[ Quicherat, ibid., III., 126.]
6174 (return)
[ Hermann Niemeyer, ibid., II.,350.]
6175 (return)
[ Fabry, ibid., III., 109-112.]
6176 (return)
[ Ambroise Rendu, "Essai sur l'instruction publique," (1819), I., 221. (Letter of Napoleon to M. de Fontanes, March 24, 1808.)]
6177 (return)
[ "Mémorial," June 17, 1816.]
6178 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, ibid., 154, 157, 159.]
6179 (return)
[ "Mémorial," 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, Cambacérès, the arch-chancellor, gross, impotent, and, of all men, the least military. "There is Cambacérès," 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 Frères 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 church6205—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 curés 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 'frère 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 Bicêtre 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 lycées.6219 Under the new régime, 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 Ecoles6221), 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 (régents) for me," said he one day in connection with the Ecole normale, "and not littérateurs, 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. Hallé, because M. Hallé 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 régime, 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 Digest6225 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 out6227 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 Napoléon." 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 régime, 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 lycée 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 conférence d'Athenée, 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 régime 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 élite 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 elected6237 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, Grégoire, 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 Jérôme 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 Chénier, 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 Ségur, 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, Thénard and Haüy, 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 Langlés continue his Persian, Indian and Tartar studies; let Quatremère 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 Coraÿ 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, Haüy, Thénard, 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 Médecine. 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 Lacépede 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.
In this respect, the First Consul's intentions are clear from the very first day: In his reconstruction of the Institute6242 he has suppressed "the division of moral and political sciences," and consequently the first four sections of this division, "analysis of sensations and ideas, moral science, social science and legislation, and political economy." He thus cuts off the main branch with its four distinct branches, and what he keeps or tolerates he trims and grafts or fastens on to another branch of the third class, that of the erudites and antiquaries. The latter may very well occupy themselves with political and moral sciences but only "in their relations with history," and especially with ancient history. General conclusions, applicable theories, on account of their generality, to late events and to the actual situation are unnecessary; even as applied to the State in the abstract, and in the cold forms of speculative discussion, they are forbidden. The First Consul, on the strength of this, in connection with "Dernières vues de politique et de finances, published by Necker, has set forth his exact rule and his threatening purpose:
"Can you imagine," says he to Roederer, "that any man, since I became head of the State, could propose three sorts of government for France? Never shall the daughter of M. Necker come back to Paris!"
She would then get to be a distinct center of political opinion while only one is necessary, that of the First Consul in his Council of State. Again, this council itself is only half competent and at best consultative:
"You yourselves do not know what government is.6243 You have no idea of it. I am the only one, owing to my position, that can know what a government is."
On this sphere, and everywhere on its undefined perimeter, afar, as far away as his piercing eye can penetrate, no independent way of thinking must be conceived or, especially, published.
In particular, the foremost and guiding science of the analysis of the human understanding, pursued according to the methods and after the examples furnished by Locke, Hume, Condillac and Destutt de Tracy, ideology is forbidden.
"It is owing to ideology," he says,6244 "to that metaphysical obscurity which, employing its subtleties in trying to get at first causes, seeks to base the legislation of a people on that foundation, instead of appropriating laws to a knowledge of the human heart and the lessons of history, that all the misfortunes of our beautiful France must be attributed."
In 1806, M. de Tracy, unable to print his "Commentaire sur l'Esprit des Lois" in France, sends it to the president of the United States, Jefferson, who translates it into English, publishes it anonymously, and has it taught in his schools.6245 About the same date, the republication of the "Traité d'économie-politique" of J.—B. Say is prohibited, the first edition of which, published in 1804, was soon exhausted.6246 In 1808, all publications of local and general statistics, formerly incited and directed by Chaptal, were interrupted and stopped; Napoleon always demands figures, but he keeps them for himself; if divulged they would prove inconvenient, and henceforth they become State secrets. The same precautions and the same rigor are extended to books on law, even technical, and against a "Précis historique du droit Romain." "This work," says the censorship, "might give rise to a comparison between the progress of authority under Augustus and that going on under the reign of Napoleon, in such a way as to produce a bad effect on public opinion."6247 In effect, nothing is more dangerous than history, for it is composed, not of general propositions that are unintelligible except to the meditative, but of particular facts accessible and interesting to the first one that comes along.
For this reason, not only the science of sensations and of ideas, philosophic law and comparative law, politics and moral law, the science of wealth and statistics, but again, and especially, the history of France, is a State affair, an object of government; for no object affects the government more nearly; no study contributes so much towards strengthening or weakening the ideas and impressions which shape public opinion for or against him.6248 It is not sufficient to superintend this history, to suppress it if need be, to prevent it from being a poor one; it must again be ordered, inspired and manufactured, that it may be a good one.
"There is no work more important.6249... I do not count the expense in this regard. It is even my intention to make the minister ensure that this work is under my protection.."
Above all, the attitude of the authors who write should be made sure of. "Not only must this work be entrusted to authors of real talent, but again to attached men, who will present facts in this true light and prepare healthy instruction by bringing history down to the year VIII." But this instruction can be healthy only through a series of preliminary and convergent judgments, insinuating into all minds the final approval and well-founded admiration of the existing régime. Accordingly, the historian must feel at each line" the defects of the ancient régime, "the influence of the court of Rome, of confessional tickets, of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, of the ridiculous marriage of Louis XIV. with Madame de Maintenon, the perpetual disorder in the finances, the pretensions of the parliament, the want of rules and leadership in the administration,.. in such a way that one breathes on reaching the epoch when one enjoys the benefits of that which is due to the unity of the laws, administration and territory." The constant feebleness of the government under Louis XIV, even, under Louis XV. and Louis XVI., "should inspire the need of sustaining the newly accomplished work and its acquired preponderance." On the 18th of Brumaire (19-11-1799), France came into port; the Revolution must be spoken of only as a final, fatal and inevitable tempest.6250 "When that work, well done and written in a right direction, appears, nobody will have the will or the patience to write another, especially when, far from being encouraged by the police, one will be discouraged by it." In this way, the government which, in relation to the young, has awarded to itself the monopoly of teaching, awards to itself in relation to adults, the monopoly of history.
V. On Censorship under Napoleon.
Measures against writers so called and popularizers.
—Censorship, control of theaters, publications and printing.
—Extent and minuteness of the repression.—Persistency in
direction and impulsion.—The logical completeness and
beauty of the whole system his final object.—How he
accomplishes his own destruction.
If Napoleon in this manner takes precautions against those who think, it is only because their thoughts, should they be written down, might reach the public,6251 and only the sovereign alone has the right to talk in public. Between writer and readers, every communication is intercepted beforehand by a triple and quadruple line of defenses through which a long, tortuous and narrow wicket is the only passage, and where the manuscript, like a bundle of suspicious goods, is overhauled and repeatedly verified after having obtained its free certificate and its permit of circulation. Napoleon declares "the printing-office6252 to be an arsenal which must not be within the reach of everybody... It is very important for me that only those be allowed to print who have the confidence of the government. A man who addresses the public in print is like the man who speaks in public in an assembly, and certainly no one can dispute the sovereign's right to prevent the first comer from haranguing the public."—On the strength of this, he makes publishing a privileged, authorized and regulated office of the State. The writer, consequently, before reaching the public, must previously undergo the scrutiny of the printer and bookseller, who, both responsible, sworn and patented, will take good care not to risk their patent, the loss of their daily bread, ruin, and, besides this, a fine and imprisonment.—In the second place, the printer, the bookseller and the author are obliged to place the manuscript or, by way of toleration, the work as it goes through the press, in the hands of the official censors;6253 the latter read it and make their weekly report to the general director of publications; they indicate the good or bad spirit of the work, the "unsuitable or forbidden passages according to circumstances," the intended, involuntary or merely possible allusions; they exact the necessary suppressions, rectifications and additions. The publisher obeys, the printers furnish proofs, and the author has submitted; his proceedings and attendance in the bureaux are at end. He thinks himself safe in port, but he is not.
Through an express reservation, the director-general always has the right to suppress works, "even after they have been examined, printed and authorized to appear." In addition to this, the minister of the police,6254 who, above the director-general, likewise has his censorship bureau, may, in his own right, place seals on the sheets already printed, destroy the plates and forms in the printing-office, send a thousand copies of the "Germany" by Madame de Staël to the paper-mill, "take measures to see that not a sheet remains," demand of the author his manuscript, recover from the author's friends the two copies he has lent to them, and take back from the director-general himself the two copies for his service locked up in a drawer in his cabinet.—Two years before this, Napoleon said to Auguste de Staël,6255
"Your mother is not bad. She has intelligence, a good deal of intelligence. But she is unaccustomed to any kind of discipline. She would not be six months in Paris before I should be obliged to put her in the Temple or at Bicêtre. I should be sorry to do this, because it would make a noise and that would injure me in public Opinion."
It makes but little difference whether she abstains from talking politics: "people talk politics in talking about literature, the fine arts and morality, about everything in the world; women should busy themselves with their knitting," and men keep silent or, if they do talk, let it be on a given subject and in the sense prescribed.
Of course, the inspection of publications is still more rigorous and more repressive, more exacting and more persistent.—At the theatre, where the assembled spectators become enthusiastic through the quick contagion of their sensibilities, the police cut out of the "Heraclius" of Corneille and the "Athalie" of Racine6256 from twelve to twenty-five consecutive lines and patch up the broken passages as carefully as possible with lines or parts of lines of their own.—On the periodical press, on the newspaper which has acquired a body of readers and which exercises an influence and groups its subscribers according to an opinion, if not political, at least philosophic and literary, there is a compression which goes even as far as utter ruin. From the beginning of the Consulate,6257 sixty out of seventy-three political journals are suppressed; in 1811, the thirteen that still existed are reduced to four and the editors-in-chief are appointed by the minister of police. The property of these journals, on the other hand, is confiscated, while the Emperor, who had taken it, concedes it, one third to his police and the other two thirds to people of the court or littérateurs who are his functionaries or his creatures. Under this always aggravated system the newspapers, from year to year, become so barren that the police, to interest and amuse the public, contrive a pen warfare in their columns between one amateur of French music and one of Italian music.
Books, almost as rigorously kept within bounds, are mutilated or prevented from appearing.6258 Chateaubriand is forbidden to reprint his "Essay on Revolutions," published in London under the Directory. In "L'Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem" he is compelled to cut out "a good deal of declamation on courts, courtiers and certain features calculated to excite misplaced allusions." The censorship interdicts the "Dernier des Abencerrages," where" it finds too warm an interest in the Spanish cause." One must read the entire register to see it at work and in detail, to feel the sinister and grotesque minutia with which it pursues and destroys, not alone among great or petty writers but, again, among compilers and insignificant abbreviators, in a translation, in a dictionary, in a manual, in an almanac, not only ideas but suggestions, echoes, semblances and oversights in thinking, the possibilities of awakening reflection and comparison:
* every souvenir of the ancient régime, this or that mention of Kléber or Moreau, or a particular conversation of Sully and Henry IV.;
* "a game of loto,6259 which familiarizes youth with the history of their country," but which says too much about "the family of the grand-dauphin of Louis XVI. and his aunts";
* the general work of the reveries of Cagliostro and of M. Henri de Saint-Mesmin, very laudatory of the Emperor, excellent "for filling the soul of Frenchmen with his presence, but which must leave out three awkward comparisons that might be detected by the malevolent or the foolish;"
* the "translation into French verse of several of David's psalms," which are not dangerous in Latin but which, in French, have the defect of a possible application, through coincidence and prophecy, to the Church as suffering, and to religion as persecuted;
and quantities of other literary insects hatched in the depths of publication, nearly all ephemeral, crawling and imperceptible, but which the censor, through zeal and his trade, considers as fearsome dragons whose heads must be smashed or their teeth extracted.
After the next brood they prove inoffensive, and, better still, are useful, especially the almanacs,6260 "in rectifying on various points the people's attitudes. It will probably be possible after 1812 to control their composition, and they are filled with anecdotes, songs and stories adapted to the maintenance of patriotism and of devotion to the sacred person of His Majesty and to the Napoleonic dynasty."—To this end, the police likewise improves, orders and pays for dramatic or lyric productions of all kinds, cantatas, ballets, impromptus, vaudevilles, comedies, grand-operas, comic operas, a hundred and seventy-six works in one day, composed for the birth of the King of Rome and paid for in rewards to the sum of 88,400 francs. Let the administration look to this beforehand so as to raise up talent and have it bear good fruit. "Complaints are made because we have no literature;6261 it is the fault of the minister of the interior. Napoleon personally and in the height of a campaign interposes in theatrical matters. Whether far away in Prussia or at home in France, he leads tragic authors by the hand, Raynouard, Legouvé, Luce de Lancival; he listens to the first reading of the "Mort d'Henri IV." and the "États de Blois." He gives to Gardel, a ballet-composer, "a fine theme in the Return of Ulysses." He explains to authors how dramatic effect should, in their hands, become a political lesson; for lack of anything better, and waiting for these to comprehend it, he uses the theatre the same as a tribune for the reading to the spectators of his bulletins of the grand army.
On the other hand, in the daily newspapers, he is his own advocate, the most vehement, the haughtiest, the most powerful of polemics. For a long time, in the "Moniteur," he himself dictates articles which are known by his style. After Austerlitz, he has no time to do this, but he inspires them all and they are prepared under his orders. In the "Moniteur" and other gazettes, it is his voice which, directly or by his spokesmen, reaches the public; it alone prevails and one may divine what it utters! The official acclaim of every group or authority in the State again swell the one great, constant, triumphant adulatory hymn which, with its insistence, unanimity and violent sonorities, tends to bewilder all minds, deaden consciences and pervert the judgment.
"Were it open to doubt," says a member of the tribunate,6262 "whether heaven or chance gives sovereigns on earth, would it not be evident for us that we owe our Emperor to some divinity?"
Another of the choir then takes up the theme in a minor key and thus sings the victory of Austerlitz:
"Europe, threatened by a new invasion of the barbarians, owes its safety to the genius of another Charles Martel."
Similar cantatas follow, intoned in the senate and lower house by Lacépède, Pérignon and Garat, and then, in each diocese, by the bishops, some of whom, in their pastoral letters, raise themselves up to the technical considerations of military art, and, the better to praise the Emperor, explain to their parishioners the admirable combinations of his strategic genius.
And truly, his strategy is admirable, lately against Catholic ideas and now against the secular mind. First of all, he has extended, selected and defined his field of operations, and here is his objective point, fixed by himself:
"On public affairs, which are my affairs in political, social and moral matters, on history, and especially on actual history, recent and modern, nobody of the present generation is to give any thought but myself and, in the next generation, everybody will follow my example."6263
The monopoly of education therefore belongs to him. He has introduced military uniforms, discipline and spirit into all the public and private secondary educational establishments. He has reduced and subjected the ecclesiastical superintendence of primary education to the minimum. He has removed the last vestige of regional, encyclopedic and autonomous universities and substituted for these special and professional schools, He has rendered veritable superior instruction abortive and stifled all spontaneous and disinterested curiosity in youth.—Meanwhile ascending to the source of secular knowledge, he has brought the Institute under his influence. On this government tool he has effected the necessary cuts, appropriated the credit to himself and imposed his favor or disfavor on the masters of science and literature. Then, descending from the source to the canals, constructing dams, arranging channels, applying his constraints and impulsions, he has subjected science and literature to his police, to his censorship and to his control of publishing and printing. He has taken possession of all the media—theatres, newspapers, books, pulpits and tribunes. He has organized all these into one vast industry which he watches over and directs, a factory of public attitudes which works unceasingly and in his hands to the glorification of his system, reign and person.6264 Again here, he is found equal and similar to himself, a stern conqueror making the most of his conquest to the last extreme, a shrewd operator as meticulous as he is shrewd, as resourceful as he is consequent, incomparable in adapting means to ends, unscrupulous in carrying them out,6265 fully satisfied that, through the constant physical pressure of universal and crushing dread, all resistance would be overcome. He is maintaining and prolonging the struggle with colossal forces, but against a historic and natural force lying beyond his grasp, lately against belief founded on religious instinct and on tradition, and now against evidence engendered by realities and by the agency of the testing process. Consequently, obliged to forbid the testing process, to falsify things, to disfigure the reality, to deny the evidence, to lie daily and each day more outrageously,6266 to accumulate glaring acts so as to impose silence, to arouse by this silence and by these lies6267 the attention and perspicacity of the public, to transform almost mute whispers into sounding words and insufficient eulogies into open protestations. In short, weakened by his own success and condemned beforehand to succumb under his victories, to disappear after a short triumph, Napoleon will leave intact and erect the indestructible rival (science and knowledge) whom he would like to crush as an adversary but turn to account as an instrument.6268
6201 (return)
[ Lamennais, "Du Progrès de la Révolution," p.163.]
6202 (return)
[ Any socialist or social-nationalist leader would undoubtedly have been impressed by Napoleon's ability to control and dominate his admiring people and do their best to copy his methods. (SR.)]
6203 (return)
[ "The Modern Régime," I., 247.]
6204 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, p. 159.]
6205 (return)
[ Maggiolo, "Les Écoles en Lorraine avant et aprés 1789," 3rd part, p.22 and following pages. (Details on the foundation or the revival of primary schools in four departments after 1802.) Sometimes, the master is the one who taught before 1789, and his salary is always the same as at that time; I estimate that, in a village of an average size, he might earn in all between 500 and 600 francs a year; his situation improves slowly and remains humble and wretched down to the law of 1833.—There are no normal schools for the education of primary instructors except one at Strasbourg established in 1811 by the prefect, and the promise of another after the return from Elba, April 27, 1815. Hence the teaching staff is of poor quality, picked up here and there haphazard. But, as the small schools satisfy a felt want, they increase. In 1815, there are more than 22,000, about as many as in 1789; in the four departments examined by M. Maggiolo there are almost as many as there are communes.—Nevertheless, elsewhere, "in certain departments, it is not rare to find twenty or thirty communes in one arrondissement with only one schoolmaster.... One who can read and write is consulted by his neighbors the same as a doctor."—("Ambroise Rendu," by E. Rendu, p.107, Report of 1817.)]
6206 (return)
[ Decree of May 1, 1802, articles 2, 4 and 5.—Decree of March 17, 1808, articles 5, 8 and 117.]
6207 (return)
[ E. Rendu, Ibid., pp.39 and 41]
6208 (return)
[ Id., ibid., 41. (Answers of approval of the bishops, letter of the archbishop of Bordeaux, May 29, 1808.) "There are only too many schools whose instructors neither give lessons nor set examples of Catholicism or even of Christianity. It is very desirable that these wicked men should not be allowed to teach."]
6209 (return)
[ Decree of Nov. 15, 1911, article 192.—Cf. the decree of March 17, 1808, article 6. "The small primary schools are those where one learns to read, write and cipher."—Ibid., § 3, article 5, definition of boarding-schools and secondary communal schools. This definition is rendered still more precise in the decree of Nov.15, 1811, article 16.]
6210 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, ibid. 175. (Words of Napoleon before the Council of State, May 21, 180.)]
6211 (return)
[ Alexis Chevalier, "Les Frères des écoles chrétiennes pendant la Révolution," 93. (Report by Portalis approved by the First Consul, Frimaire 10, year XII.)]
6212 (return)
[ Like in the socialist and national-socialist parties and trade unions which were to dominate the Western democracies throughout the 20th century. (SR.)]
6213 (return)
[ "Ambroise Rendu," by E. Rendu, P.42.]
6214 (return)
[ D'Haussonville, "L'Église romaine et le premier Empire," II.,257, 266. (Report of Portalis to the Emperor, Feb. 13, 1806.)]
6215 (return)
[ Here Taine describes what today is often named as being the "state of the art." (SR.)]
6216 (return)
[ Cuvier, "Rapport sur l'instruction publique dans les nouveaux départements de la basse Allemagne, fait en exécution du décret du 13 novembre 1810," pp. 4-8. "The principle and aim of each university is to have courses of lectures on every branch of human knowledge if there are any pupils who desire this... No professor can hinder his colleague from treating the same subjects as himself; most of their increase depends on the remuneration of the pupils which excites the greatest emulation in their work."—The university, generally, is in some small town; the student has no society but that of his comrades and his professors; again, the university has jurisdiction over him and itself exercises its rights of oversight and police. "Living in their families, with no public amusements, with no distractions, the middle-class Germans, especially in North Germany, regard reading, study and meditation as their chief pleasures and main necessity; they study to learn rather than to prepare themselves for a lucrative profession.....The theologian scrutinizes even to their roots the truth of morality and of natural theology. As to positive religion he wishes to know its history and will study in the original tongue sacred writings and all the languages relating to it that may throw light on it; he desires to possess the details of Church history and become acquainted with the usages of one century after another and the motives of the changes which took place.—The law student is not content with a knowledge of the code of his country; in his studies everything must be related to the general principles of natural and political laws. He must know the history of rights at all epochs, and, consequently, he has need of the political history of nations; he must be familiar with the various European constitutions, and be able to read the diplomas and charters of all ages; the complex German legislation obliges him, and will for a long time, to know the canon laws of both religious, of feudal and public law, as well as of civil and criminal law; and if the means of verifying at its sources all that is taught to him are not afforded to him, he regards instruction as cut short and insufficient."]
6217 (return)
[ Louis Liard, "L'Enseignement supérieur en France," pp.307-309]
6218 (return)
[ Two prisons at the time.(SR.)]
6219 (return)
[ Comte Chaptal, "Notes."—Chaptal, a bright scholar, studied in his philosophy class at Rodez under M. Laguerbe, a highly esteemed professor. "Everything was confined to unintelligible discussions on metaphysics and to the puerile subtleties of logic." This lasted two years. Public discussions by the pupils were held three or four hours long; the bishop, the noblesse, the full chapter attended at these scholastic game-cock fights. Chaptal acquired a few correct notions of geometry, algebra and the planetary system, but outside of that, he says, "I got nothing out of it but a great facility in speaking Latin and a passion for caviling."]
6220 (return)
[ Useful qualities for an administrator, anytime anywhere. (SR.)]
6221 (return)
[ The Grande Ecoles today in 1998 produce first of all a special type of engineer, a general engineer, specialist in nothing but highly trained in mathematics, physics and chemistry. This education is found, either in Ecole Centrale, mainly providing private enterprise with engineers, and Polytechnique, mainly providing the State with engineers. Specialist engineers, in construction, chemistry, electronics, electricity etc. are produced by a few dozens prestigious engineering or commercial schools which admit the students who have completed 2 or 3 years of preparatory school and successfully competed for the more popular schools. The special schools Taine talks about are the precursors of a great many of the schools available in France today. The principle of admission by concurs is still in use and produce engineers who are able and willing to work hard, engineers who are competent but often a bit proud and overly sure of themselves. (SR.)]
6222 (return)
[ Louis Liard, "Universités et Facultés," pp. 1-12.]
6223 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, 176 (Session of the Council of State, May 21, 1806).]
6224 (return)
[ Liard, "L'Enseignement supérieur en France," 71, 73. "In the law schools, say the memorials of 1789, there is not the fiftieth part of the pupils who attend the professors' lectures."—Fourcroy," Exposé des motifs de la loi concernant les Ecoles de droit," March 13, 1804. "In the old law faculties the studies were of no account, inexact and rare, the lectures being neglected or not attended. Notes were bought instead of being taken. Candidates were received so easily that the examinations no longer deserved their name. Bachelor's degrees and others were titles bought without study or trouble."—Cf the "Mémoires" of Brissot and the "Souvenirs of d'Audifret-Pasquier," both of them law students before 1789.—M. Léo de Savigny, in his recent work, "Die französischen Rechts facultäten" (p.74 et seq.) refers to other authorities not less decisive.]
6225 (return)
[ Reference is made to the synopsis of the Justitian code of civil and other Roman laws. (SR.)]
6226 (return)
[ Treaty of law written Roman jurists under Justitian in 533. (SR.)]
6227 (return)
[ Decree of March 19, 1807, articles 42, 45.]
6228 (return)
[ The French Supreme Court. (SR.)]
6229 (return)
[ Courcelle-Seneuil, "Préparation à l'étude du droit" (1887), pp. 5, 6 (on the teaching of law by the Faculty of Paris).]
6230 (return)
[ Léo de Savigny, ibid., p. 161.]
6231 (return)
[ Bréal, "Quelques mots sur l'instruction publique" (1892), pp. 327, 341.—Liard, "Universités et Facultés," p.13 et seq.]
6232 (return)
[ Act of Jan.23, 1803, for the organization of the Institute.]
6233 (return)
[ Voltaire's "Essai sur les moeurs" is of 1756; "L'Esprit des Lois" by Montesquieu also, in 1754, and his "Traité des Sensations." The "Emile" of Rousseau is of 1762; the "Traité de la formation mécanique des langues," by de Brosses, is of 1765; the "Physiocratie" by Quesnay appeared in 1768, and the "Encyclopédie" between 1750 and 1765.]
6234 (return)
[ On the equal value of the testing process in moral and physical sciences, David Hume, in 1737, stated the matter decisively in his "Essay on Human Nature." Since that time, and particularly since the "Compte-rendu" by Necker, but especially in our time, statistics have shown that the near or remote determining motives of human action are powers (Grandeurs) expressed by figures, interdependent, and which warrant, here as elsewhere, precise and numerical foresight.]
6235 (return)
[ What an impression Taine's description of Napoleon's set-up must have had on Hitler, Lenin and, possibly Stalin and their successors. (SR.)]
6236 (return)
[ Cf. Liard, "L'Enseignement supérieur en France," vol. I., in full.—Also the law of Brumaire 3, year Iv. (Oct.25, 1795), on the primitive organization of the Institute.]
6237 (return)
[ Decree of Jan. 23, 1803.]
6238 (return)
[ Decree of March 21, 1816]
6239 (return)
[ "Corréspondance de Napoléon," letters to M. de Champagny, Dec.13, 1805, and Jan. 3, 1806. "I see with pleasure the promise made by M. de Lalande and what passed on that occasion."]
6240 (return)
[ De Ségur, "Mémoires," III., 457.—"M. de Chateaubriand composed his address with a good deal of skill; he evidently did not wish to offend any of his colleagues without even excepting Napoleon. He lauded with great eloquence the fame of the Emperor and exalted the grandeur of republican sentiments." In explanation of and excusing his silence and omissions regarding his regicide predecessor, he likened Chénier to Milton and remarked that, for forty years, the same silence had been observed in England with reference to Milton.]
6241 (return)
[ Edmond Leblanc, "Napoléon 1ere et ses institutions civiles eL administratives," pp. 225-233.—Annuaire de l'Institut for 1813]
6242 (return)
[ Law of Oct. 25, 1795, and act of Jan. 23, 1803.]
6243 (return)
[ Roederer, III., 548.—Id., III., 332 (Aug. 2, 1801).]
6244 (return)
[ Welschinger, "La Censure sous le premier Empire," p.440. (Speech by Napoleon to the Council of State, Dec.20, 1812.)—Merlet, "Tableau de la littérature française de 1800 à 1815," I., 128. M. Royer-Collard had just given his first lecture at the Sorbonne to an audience of three hundred persons against the philosophy of Locke and Condillac (1811). Napoleon, having read the lecture, says on the following day to Talleyrand: "Do you know, Monsieur le Grand-Electeur, that a new and very important philosophy is appearing in my University... which may well rid us entirely of the ideologists by killing them on the spot with reason?"—Royer-Collard, on being informed of this eulogium, remarked to some of his friends: "The Emperor is mistaken. Descartes is more disobedient to despotism than Locke."]
6245 (return)
[ Mignet, "Notices et Portraits." (Eulogy of M. de Tracy.)]
6246 (return)
[ J.-B. Say, "Traité d'économie-politique," 2d ed., 1814 (Notice). "The press was no longer free. Every exact presentation of things received the censure of a government founded on a lie."]
6247 (return)
[ Welschinger, p. 160 (Jan. 24, 1810).—Villemain, "Souvenirs contemporains," vol. I., p. 180. After 1812, "it is literally exact to state that every emission of written ideas, every historical mention, even the most remote and most foreign, became a daring and suspicious matter."—(Journal of Sir John Malcolm, Aug. 4, 1815, visit to Langlès, the orientalist, editor of Chardin, to which he has added notes, one of which is on the mission to Persia of Sir John Malcolm) "He at first said to me that he had followed another author: afterwards he excused himself by alleging the system of Bonaparte, whose censors, he said, not only cut out certain passages, but added others which they believed helped along his plans."]
6248 (return)
[ Reading this Lenin and others like him undoubtedly would agree with Napoleon and therefore liberally fund plans to place agents and controllers in all the Universities in the World hence ensuring politically correct attitudes. (SR.)]
6249 (return)
[ Merlet, ibid. (According to the papers of M. de Fontanes, II. 258.)]
6250 (return)
[ Id., Ibid. "Care must be taken to avoid all reaction in speaking of the Revolution. No man could oppose it. Blame belongs neither to those who have perished nor to those who survived it. It was not in any individual might to change the elements and foresee events born out of the nature of things."]
6251 (return)
[ Villemain, Ibid., I., 145. (Words of M. de Narbonne on leaving Napoleon after several interviews with him in 1812.) "The Emperor, so powerful, 50 victorious is disturbed by only one thing in this world and that is by people who talk, and, in default of these, by those who think. And yet he seems to like them or, at least, cannot do without them."]
6252 (return)
[ Welschinger, ibid., p.30. (Session of the Council of State, Dec.12, 1809)]
6253 (return)
[ Welschinger, ibid., pp.31, 33, 175, 190. (Decree of Feb.5, 1810.)—"Revue Critique," Sep. 1870. (Weekly bulletin of the general direction of publicauons for the last three months of 1810 and the first three months of 1814, published by Charles Thursot.)]
6254 (return)
[ Collection of laws and decrees, vol. XII., p.170. "When the censors shall have examined a work and allowed the publication of it, the publishers shall be authorized to have it printed. But the minister of the police shall still have the right to suppress it entirely if he thinks proper."—Welschinger, ibid., pp. 346-374.]
6255 (return)
[ Welschinger, ibid., pp. 173, 175.]
6256 (return)
[ Id., ibid., pp. 223, 231, 233. (The copy of "Athalie" with the erasures of the police still exists in the prompter's library of the Théâtre Français.)—Id., ibid., p 244. (Letter of the secretary-general of the police to the weekly managers of the Théâtre Français, Feb. 1, 1809, In relation to the "Mort d'Hector," by Luce de Lancival.) "Messieurs, His Excellency, the minister-senator, has expressly charged me to request the suppression of the following lines on the stage—'Hector': Déposez un moment ce fer toujours vainqueur, Cher Hector, et craignez de laisser le bonheur."]
6257 (return)
[ Welschinger, ibid., p. 13. (Act of Jan. 17, 1800.)—117, 118. (Acts of Feb. 18, 1811, and Sep. 17, 1813.)—119, 129. (No indemnity for legitimate owners. The decree of confiscation states in principle that the ownership of journals can become property only by virtue of an express concession made by the sovereign, that this concession was not made to the actual founders and proprietors and that their claim is null.)]
6258 (return)
[ Id.. ibid., pp.196, 201.]
6259 (return)
[ "Revue critique," ibid., pp.142, 146, 149.]
6260 (return)
[ Welschinger, ibid., p. 251.]
6261 (return)
[ "Corréspondance de Napoléon Iere." (Letter of the Emperor to Cambacérès, Nov.21, 1806.)—Letters to Fouché, Oct.25 and Dec. 31, 1806.)—Welschinger, ibid., pp.236, 244.]
6262 (return)
[ "Moniteur," Jan. I, 1806. (Tribunate, session of Nivôse 9, year XIV., speeches of MM. Albisson and Gillet.—Senate, speeches of MM. Pérignon, Garat, de Lacépède.)—In the following numbers we find municipal addresses, letters of bishops and the odes of poets in the same strain.—In the way of official enthusiasm take the following two fine examples. ("Debats," March 29, 1811.) "The Paris municipal council deliberated on the vote of a pension for life of 10,000 francs in favor of M. de Govers, His Majesty's second page, for bringing to the Hôtel de Ville the joyful news of the birth of the King of Rome.. .. Everybody was charmed with his grace and presence of mind."—Faber, "Notices sur l'intérieur de France," p.25. "I know of a tolerably large town which could not light its lamps in 1804, on account of having sent its mayor to Paris at the expense of the commune to see Bonaparte crowned."]
6263 (return)
[ Taine here explains the method which was to be copied by all the totalitarian leaders of the 20th century, especially by the ever present communist-socialist-revolutionary organizations and their more or less hidden leaders. (SR.)]
6264 (return)
[ Lenin, Stalin and their successors must all have found this idea interesting and did also proceed to put much of the media in the world under their control. (SR.)]
6265 (return)
[ Faber, ibid., p. 32 (1807). "I saw one day a physician, an honest man, unexpectedly denounced for having stated in a social gathering in the town some observations on the medical system under the existing government. The denunciator, a French employee, was the physician's friend and denounced him because he was afraid of being denounced himself."—Count Chaptal, "Notes." Enumeration of the police forces which control and complete each other. "Besides the minister and the prefect of police Napoleon had three directors-general residing at Paris and also in superintendence of the departments;.. besides, commissioners-general of police in all the large towns and special commissioners in all others; moreover, the gendarmerie, which daily transmitted a bulletin of the situation all over France to the inspector-general; again, reports of his aids and generals, of his guard on supplementary police, the most dangerous of all to persons about the court and to the principal agents of the administration; finally, several special police-bodies to render to him an account of what passed among savants, tradesmen and soldiers. All this correspondence reached him at Moscow as at the Tuileries."]
6266 (return)
[ Faber, ibid. (1807), p.35. "Lying, systematically organized, forming the basis of government and consecrated in public acts,... the abjuring of all truth, of all personal conviction, is the characteristic of the administrators as presenting to view the acts, sentiments and ideas of the government, which makes use of them for scenic effect in the pieces it gives on the theatre of the world... . The administrators do not believe a word they say, nor those administered."]
6267 (return)
[ The following two confidential police reports show, among many others, the sentiments of the public and the usefulness of repressive measures. (Archives nationales, F.7, 3016, Report of the commissioner-general of Marseilles for the second quarter of 1808.) "Events in Spain have largely fixed, and essentially fixed, attention. In vain would the attentive observer like to conceal the truth on this point; the fact is that the Spanish revolution is unfavorably looked upon. It was at first thought that the legitimate heir would succeed to Charles IV. The way in which people have been undeceived has given the public a direction quite opposite to the devoted ideas of His Majesty the Emperor... No generous soul... rises to the level of the great continental cause."—Ibid. (Report for the second quarter of 1809.) "I have posted observers in the public grounds.... As a result of these measures, of this constant vigilance, of the care I have taken to summon before me the heads of public establishments when I have ascertained that the slightest word has been spoken, I attain the end proposed. But I am assured that if the fear of the upper police did not restrain the disturbers, the brawlers, they would publicly express an opinion contrary to the principles of the government.... Public opinion is daily going down. There is great misery and consternation. Murmurs are not openly heard, but discontent exists among citizens generally.... The continental war. the naval warfare, events in Rome, Spain and Germany, the absolute cessation of trade, the conscription, the droits unis... are all so many motives of corruption of the public mind. Priests and devotees, merchants and proprietors, artisans, workmen, the people in fine, everybody is discontented.... In general, they are insensible to the continental victories. All classes of citizens are much more sensitive to the levies of the conscription than to the successes which come from them."]
6268 (return)
[ There is here, 100 years later, a message for us about the enormous force which, under the name of politically correct, is haunting our media, our universities and our political life. (SR.)]
CHAPTER III. EVOLUTION BETWEEN 1814 AND 1890.
I. Evolution of the Napoleonic machine.
History of the Napoleonic machine.—The first of its two
arms, operating on adults, is dislocated and breaks.—The
second, which operates on youth, works intact until 1850.
—Why it remains intact.—Motives of governors.—Motives of
the governed.
After him, the springs of his machine relax; and so do, naturally, the two groups controlled by the machine. The first, that of adult men, frees itself the most and the soonest: during the following half century, we see the preventive or repressive censorship of books, journals and theatres, every special instrument that gags free speech, relaxing its hold, breaking down bit by bit and at last tumbling to the ground. Even when again set up and persistently and brutally applied, old legal muzzles are never to become as serviceable as before. No government will undertake, like that of Napoleon, to stop at once all outlets of written thought; some will always remain more or less open. Even during the rigorous years of the Restoration and of the second Empire the stifling process is to diminish; mouths open and there is some way of public expression, at least in books and likewise through the press, provided one speaks discreetly and moderately in cool and general terms and in a low, even tone of voice. Here, the imperial machine, too aggressive, soon broke down; immediately, the iron arm by which it held adults seemed insupportable to them and they were able more and more to bend, push it away or break it. Today, in 1890, nothing remains of it but its fragments; for twenty years it has ceased to work and its parts, even, are utterly useless.
But, to the contrary, in the other direction, in the second group, on children, on boys, on young men, the second arm, intact down to 1850, then shortened but soon strengthened, more energetic and more effective than ever, maintained its hold almost entirely.
Undoubtedly, after 1814, its mechanism is less rigid, its application less strict, its employment less universal, its operation less severe; it gives less offence and does not hurt as much. For example, after the first Restoration,6301 the decree of 1811 against the smaller seminaries is repealed. They are handed back to the bishops, resume their ecclesiastical character and return to the special and normal road out of which Napoleon forced them to march. The drum, the drill and other exercises too evidently Napoleonic disappear almost immediately in the private and public establishments devoted to common instruction. The school system ceases to be a military apprenticeship and the college is no longer a preparatory annex for the barracks. Soon and for many years, Guizot, Cousin, and Villemain brilliantly hold the chairs at Sorbonne university and teach the highest subjects of philosophy, literature and history admired by attentive and sympathetic audiences. Later, under the monarchy of July, the Institute, mutilated by the First Consul, restores and completes itself. It becomes once more united with the suspect division of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, which after the Consulate, had been missing. In 1833, a minister, Guizot, provides, through a law which has become an institution, for the regular maintenance, the obligatory appropriation, the certain recruitment, and for the quality and universality of primary instruction. At the same time, during eighteen years, the university administration, moderating its pressure or smoothing its sharp points, operates at the three stages of instruction in tolerant or liberal hands, with all the caution compatible with its organization. It does so in such a way as to do a great deal of good without much harm, by half-satisfying the majority which, in its entirety, is semi-believer, semi-freethinker, by not seriously offending anybody except the Catholic clergy and that unyielding minority which, through doctrinal principle or through religious zeal, assigns to education as a directing end and supreme object, the definitive cultivation, rooting and flowering of faith. But, in law as well as in fact, the University of 1808 still subsists; it has kept its rights, it levies its taxes, it exercises its jurisdiction and enjoys its monopoly.
In the early days of the Restoration, in 1814, the government maintained it only provisionally. It promised everything, radical reform and full liberty. It announced that, through its efforts, "the forms and direction of the education of children should be restored to the authority of fathers and mothers, tutors and families."6302 Simply a prospectus and an advertisement by the new pedagogue who installs himself and thus, by soothing words, tries to conciliate parents. After a partial sketch and an ordinance quickly repealed,6303 the rulers discover that the University of Napoleon is a very good reigning tool, much better than that of which they had the management previous to 1789, much easier handled and more serviceable. It is the same with all social tools sketched out and half-fashioned by the Revolution and completed and set a-going by the Consulate and the Empire; each is constructed "by reason," "according to principles," and therefore its mechanism is simple; its pieces all fit into each other with precision; they transmit throughout exactly the impulsion received and thus operate at one stroke, with uniformity, instantaneously, with certitude, oil all parts of the territory; the lever which starts the machine is central and, throughout its various services, the new rulers hold this lever in hand. Apropos of local administration, the Duc d'Angoulême said in 1815,6304 "We prefer the departments to the provinces." In like manner, the government of the restored monarchy prefers the imperial University, sole, unique, coherent, disciplined and centralized, to the old provincial universities, the old scattered, scholastic institution, diverse, superintended rather than governed, to every school establishment more or less independent and spontaneous.
In the first place, it gains thereby a vast staff of salaried dependents, the entire teaching staff,6305 on which it has a hold through its favors or the reverse through ambition and the desire for promotion, through fear of dismissal and concern for daily bread. At first, 22,000 primary teachers, thousands of professors, directors, censors, principals, regents and subordinates in the 36 lycées, 368 colleges and 1255 institutions and boarding-schools. After this, many hundreds of notable individuals, all the leading personages of each university circumscription, the administrators of 28 academies, the professors of the 23 literary faculties, of the 10 faculties of the sciences, of the 9 faculties of law, and of the 3 faculties of medicine. Add to these, the savants of the Collège de France and École Polytechnique, every establishment devoted to high, speculative or practical instruction: these are highest in repute and the most influential; here the heads of science and of literature are found. Through them and their seconds or followers of every degree, in the faculties, lycées, colleges, minor seminaries, institutions, boarding schools, and small schools, beliefs or opinions can be imposed on, or suggested to, 2000 law students, 4000 medical students, 81,000 thousand pupils in secondary education and 700,000 scholars in the primary department. Let us retain and make use of this admirable tool, but let us apply it to our own purposes and utilize it for our service.6306 Thus far, under the Republic and the Empire, its designers, more or less Jacobin, have moved it as they thought best, and therefore moved it to the "left". Let us now move, as it suits us, to the "right."6307 All that is necessary is to turn it in another direction and for good; henceforth," the basis of education6308 shall be religion, monarchy, legitimacy and the charter."
To this end, we, the dominant party, use our legal rights. In the place of bad wheels we put good ones. We purify our staff. We do not appoint or leave in place any but safe men. At the end of six years, nearly all the rectors, proviseurs and professors of philosophy, many other professors and a number of the censors,6309 are all priests. At the Sorbonne, M. Cousin has been silenced and M. Guizot replaced by M. Durosoir. At the Collège de France we have dismissed Tissot and we do not accept M. Magendie. We "suppress" in block the Faculty of Medicine in order that, on reorganizing it, our hands may be free and eleven professors with bad notes be got rid of, among others Pinel, Dubois, de Jussieu, Desgenettes, Pelletan and Vauquelin. We suppress another center of insalubrities, the upper École Normale, and, for the recruitment of our educational body, we institute6310 at the principal seat of each academy a sort of university novitiate where the pupils, few in number, expressly selected, prepared from their infancy, will imbibe deeper and more firmly retain the sound doctrines suitable to their future condition.
We let the small seminaries multiply and fill up until they comprise 50,000 pupils. It is the bishop who founds them; no educator or inspector of education is so worthy of confidence. Therefore, we confer upon him "in all that concerns religion,"6311 the duty "of visiting them himself, or delegating his vicars-general to visit them," the faculty "of suggesting to the royal council of public instruction the measures which he deems necessary." At the top of the hierarchy sits a Grand-Master with the powers and title of M. de Fontanes and with an additional title, member of the cabinet and minister of public instruction, M. de Freyssinous, bishop of Hermopolis,6312 and, in difficult cases, this bishop, placed between his Catholic conscience and the positive articles of the legal statute, "sacrifices the law" to his conscience.6313—This is the advantage which can be taken from the tool of public education. After 1850, it is to be used in the same way and in the same sense; after 1796, and later after 1875, it was made to work as vigorously in the opposite direction. Whatever the rulers may be, whether monarchists, imperialists or republicans, they are the masters who use it for their own advantage; for this reason, even when resolved not to abuse the instrument, they keep it intact; they reserve the use of it for themselves,6314 and pretty hard blows are necessary to sever or relax the firm hold which they have on the central lever.
Except for these excesses and especially after they finish, when the government, from 1828 to 1848, ceases to be sectarian, and the normal play of the institution is no longer corrupted by political interference, the governed accept the University in block, just as their rulers maintain it: they also have motives of their own, the same as for submitting to other tools of Napoleonic centralization.—And first of all, as a departmental and communal institution, the university institution operates wholly alone; it exacts little or no collaboration on the part of those interested; it relieves them of any effort, dispute or care, which is pleasant. Like the local administration, which, without their help or with scarcely any, provides them with bridges, roads, canals, cleanliness, salubrity and precautions against contagious diseases, the scholastic administration, without making any demand on their indolence, puts its full service, the local and central apparatus of primary, secondary, superior and special instruction, its staff and material, furniture and buildings, masters and schedules, examinations and grades, rules and discipline, expenditure and receipts, all at its disposition. As at the door of a table d'hôte, they are told,
"Come in and take a seat. We offer you the dishes you like best and in the most convenient order. Don't trouble yourself about the waiters or the kitchen; a grand central society, an intelligent and beneficent agency, presiding at Paris takes charge of this and relieves you of it. Pass your plate, and eat; that is all you need care about. Besides, the charge is very small."6315
In effect, here as elsewhere, Napoleon has introduced his rigid economical habits, exact accounts and timely or disguised tax-levies.6316 A few additional centimes among a good many others inserted by his own order in the local budget, a few imperceptible millions among several hundreds of other millions in the enormous sum of the central budget, constitute the resources which defray the expenses of public education. Not only does the quota of each taxpayer for this purpose remain insignificant, but it disappears in the sum total of which it is only an item that he does not notice.—The parents, for the instruction of a child, do not pay out of their pockets directly, with the consciousness of a distinct service rendered them and which they indemnify,6317 but 12, 10, 3, or even 2 francs a year; again, through the increasing extension of gratis instruction, a fifth, then a third,6318 and later one half of them are exempt from this charge.
For secondary instruction, at the college or the lycée, they take out of their purses annually only 40 or 50 francs; and, if their son is a boarder, these few francs mingle in with others forming the total sum paid for him during the year, about 700 francs,6319 which is a small sum for defraying the expenses, not only of instruction, but, again, for the support of the lad in lodging, food, washing, light, fire and the rest. The parents, at this rate, feel that they are not making a bad bargain; they are not undergoing extortion, the State not acting like a rapacious contractor. And better yet, it is often a paternal creditor, distributing, as it does, three or four thousand scholarships. If their son obtains one of these, their annual debt is remitted to them and the entire university provision of instruction and support is given to them gratis. In the Faculties, the payment of fees for entrance, examinations, grades and diplomas is not surprising, for the certificates or parchments they receive in exchange for their money are, for the young man, so many positive acquisitions which smooth the way to a career and serve as valuable stock which confers upon him social rank. Besides, the entrance to these Faculties is free and gratuitous, as well as in all other establishments for superior instruction. Whoever chooses and when he chooses may attend without paying a cent.
Thus constituted, the University seems to the public as a liberal, democratic, humanitarian institution and yet economical, expending very little. Its administrators and professors, even the best of them, receive only a small salary—6000 francs at the Muséum and the Collége de France,6320 7500 at the Sorbonne, 5000 in the provincial Faculties, 4000 or 3000 in the lycées, 2000, 1500 and 1200 in the communal colleges—just enough to live on. The highest functionaries live in a very modest way; each keeps body and soul together on a small salary which he earns by moderate work, without notable increase or decrease, in the expectation of gradual promotion or of a sure pension at the end. There is no waste, the accounts being well kept; there are no sinecures, even in the libraries; no unfair treatment or notorious scandals. Envy, notions of equality scarcely exist; there are enough situations for petty ambitions and average merit, while there is scarcely any place for great ambitions or great merit. Eminent men serve the State and the public cheaply for a living salary, a higher rank in the Legion of Honor, sometimes for a seat in the Institute, or for European fame in connection with a university, with no other recompense than the satisfaction of working according to conscience6321 and of winning the esteem of twenty or thirty competent judges who, in France or abroad, are capable of appreciating their labor at its just value.6322
The last reason for accepting or tolerating the University; its work at home, or in its surroundings, develops gradually and more or less broadly according to necessities.—In 1815, there were 22,000 primary schools of every kind; in 1829,6323 30,000; and in 1850, 63,000. In 1815, 737,000 children were taught in them; in 1829, 1,357,000; and in 1850, 3,787,000. In 1815, there was only one normal school for the education of primary teachers; in 1850, there are 78. Consequently, whilst in 1827, 42 out of 100 conscripts could read, there were in 1877, 85; whilst in 1820, 34 out of 100 women could write their names on the marriage contract, in 1879 there are 70.—Similarly, in the lycées and colleges, the University which, in 1815, turned out 37,000 youths, turns out 54,000 in 1848, and 64,000 in 1865;6324 many branches of study, especially history,6325 are introduced into secondary instruction and bear good fruit.—Even in superior instruction which, through organization, remains languid, for parade, or in a rut, there are ameliorations; the State adds chairs to its Paris establishments and founds new Faculties in the provinces. In sum, an inquisitive mind capable of self-direction can, at least in Paris, acquire full information and obtain a comprehensive education on all subjects by turning the diverse university institutions to account.—If there are very serious objections to the system, for example, regarding the boarding part of it (internat), the fathers who had been subject to it accept it for their sons. If there were very great defects in it, for example, the lack of veritable universities, the public which had not been abroad and ignores history did not perceive them. In vain does M. Cousin, in relation to public instruction in Germany, in his eloquent report of 1834, as formerly Cuvier in his discreet report of 1811, point out this defect; in vain does M. Guizot, the minister, propose to remove it:
"I did not find," says he,6326 "any strong public opinion which induced me to carry out any general and urgent measure in higher instruction. In the matter of superior instruction the public, at this time,... was not interested in any great idea, or prompted by any impatient want.... Higher education as it was organized and given, sufficed for the practical needs of society, which regarded it with a mixture of satisfaction and indifference."
In the matter of education, not only at this third stage but again for the first two stages, public opinion so far as aims, results, methods and limitations is concerned, was apathetic. That wonderful science which, in the eighteenth century, with Jean-Jacques, Condillac, Valentin, Hally, Abbé de l'Epée and so many others, sent forth such powerful and fruitful jets, had dried up and died out; transplanted to Switzerland and Germany, pedagogy yet lives but it is dead on its native soil.6327 There is no longer in France any persistent research nor are there any fecund theories on the aims, means, methods, degrees and forms of mental and moral culture, no doctrine in process of formation and application, no controversies, no dictionaries and special manuals, not one well-informed and important Review, and no public lectures. Now an experimental science is simply the summing-up of many diverse experiences, freely attempted, freely discussed and verified. Through the forced results of the university monopoly there are no actual universities: among other results of the Napoleonic institution, one could after 1808 note, the decadence of pedagogy and foresee its early demise. Neither parents, nor masters nor the young cared anything about it; outside of the system in which they live they imagine nothing; they are accustomed to it the same as to the house in which they dwell. They may grumble sometimes at the arrangement of the rooms, the low stories and narrow staircases, against bad lighting, ventilation and want of cleanliness, against the exactions of the proprietor and concierge; but, as for transforming the building, arranging it otherwise, reconstructing it in whole or in part, they never think of it. For, in the first place, they have no plan; and next, the house is too large and its parts too well united; through its mass and size it maintains itself and would still remain indefinitely if, all at once, in 1848, an unforeseen earthquake had not made breaches in its walls.
II. Educational monopoly of Church and State.
Law of 1850 and freedom of instruction.—Its apparent object
and real effects.—Alliance of Church and State.—The real
monopoly.—Ecclesiastical control of the University until
1859.—Gradual rupture of the Alliance.—The University
again becomes secular.—Lay and clerical interests.
—Separation and satisfaction of both interests down to 1876.
—Peculiarity of this system.—State motives for taking the
upper hand.—Parents, in fact, have no choice between two
monopolies.—Original and forced decline of private
institutions.—Their ruin complete after 1850 owing to the
too-powerful and double competition of Church and State.
—The Church and the State sole surviving educators.
—Interested and doctrinal direction of the two educational
systems.—Increasing divergence in both directions.—Their
effect on youth.
The day after the 24th of February 1848,6328 M. Cousin, meeting M. de Remusat on the quay Voltaire, raised his arms towards heaven and exclaimed:
"Let us hurry and fall on our knees in front of the bishops—they alone can save us now!"
While M. Thiers, with equal vivacity, in the parliamentary committee exclaimed: "Cousin, Cousin, do you comprehend the lesson we have received? Abbé Dupanloup is right."6329 Hence the new law.6330 M. Beugnot, who presented it, clearly explains its aims and object: the Government "must assemble the moral forces of the country and unite them with each other to combat with and overthrow the common enemy," the anti-social party, "which, victorious, would have no mercy on anybody," neither on the University nor on the Church. Consequently, the University abandons its monopoly: the State is no longer the sole purveyor of public instruction; private schools and associations may teach as they please. The government will no longer inspect their "education," but only "morality, hygiene, and salubrity;"6331—they are out of its jurisdiction and exempt from its taxes. Therefore, the government establishments and free establishments will no longer be dangerous adversaries, but "useful co-operators;" they will owe and give to each other "good advice and good examples;" it will maintain for both "an equal interest;" henceforth, its University "will be merely an institution supported by it to quicken competition and make this bear good fruit," and, to this end, it comes to an understanding with its principal competitor, the Church.
But in this coalition of the two powers it is the Church which has the best of it, takes the upper hand and points out the way. For, not only does she profit by the liberty decreed, and profit by it almost alone, founding in twenty years afterwards nearly one hundred ecclesiastical colleges and putting the Ignorantin brethren everywhere in the primary schools; but, again, by virtue of the law,6332 she places four bishops or archbishops in the superior council of the University; by virtue of the law, she puts into each departmental academic council the bishop of the diocese and a priest selected by him; moreover, through her credit with the central government she enjoys all the administrative favors. In short, from above and close at hand, she leads, keeps in check, and governs the lay University and, from 1849 to 1859, the priestly domination and interference, the bickering, the repressions, the dismissals,6333 the cases of disgrace, are a revival of the system which, from 1821 to 1828, had already been severe. As under the Restoration, the Church had joined hands with the State to administrate the school-machine in concert with it; but, under the Restoration, she reserves to herself the upper hand, and it is she who works the machine rather than the State. In sum, under the name, the show, and the theoretical proclamation of liberty for all, the University monopoly is reorganized, if not by law, at least in fact, and in favor of the Church.
Towards 1859, and after the war in Italy, regarding the Pope and the temporal power, the hands which were joined now let go and then separate; there is a dissolution of partnership; their interests cease to agree. Two words are coined, both predestined to great fortune, on the one side the "secular" interest and on the other side the "clerical" interest; henceforth, the government no longer subordinates the former to the latter and, under the ministry of M. Duruy, the direction of the University becomes frankly secular. Consequently, the entire educational system, in gross and in its principal features, is to resemble, until 1876, that of the of July.6334 For sixteen years, the two great teaching powers, the spiritual and the temporal, unable to do better, are to support each other but act apart, each on its own ground and each in its own way; only the Church no longer acts through the toleration and gracious permission of the University, but through the legal abolition of the monopoly and by virtue of a written law. The whole composes a passable régime, less oppressive than those that preceded it; in any event, the two millions of devout Catholics who consider unbelief as a terrible evil, the fathers and mothers who subordinate instruction to education,6335 and desire above all things to preserve the faith of their children up to adult age, now find in the ecclesiastical establishments well-run hothouses and protected against draughts of modernity. One urgent need of the first order,6336 legitimate, deeply felt by many men and especially by women, has received satisfaction; parents who do not experience this want, place their children in the lycées; in 1865, in the smaller seminaries and other ecclesiastical schools there are 54,000 pupils and in the State colleges and lycées 64,000,6337 which two bodies balance each other.
But even that is a danger. For, naturally, the teaching State finds with regret that its clients diminish; it does not view the rival favorably which takes away so many of its pupils. Naturally also, in case of an electoral struggle, the Church favors the party which favors it, the effect of which is to expose it to ill-will and, in case of political defeat, to hostilities. Now, the chances are, that, should hostile rulers, in this case, attempt to strike it in its most vulnerable point, that of teaching, they might set aside liberty, and even toleration, and adopt the school machine of Napoleon in order to restore it as best they could, enlarge it, derive from it for their own profit and against the Church, whatever could be got out of it, to use with all their power according to the principles and intentions of the Convention and the Directory. Thus, the compromise accepted by Church and State is simply a provisional truce; to-morrow, this truce will be broken; the fatal French prejudice which erects the State into a national educator is ever present; after a partial and brief slackening of its energy, it will try to recover its ascendancy and recommence its ravages.—And, on the other hand, even under this régime, more liberal than its predecessor, real liberty is much restricted; instead of one monopoly, there are two. Between two kinds of establishments, one secular, resembling a barracks, and the other ecclesiastical, resembling a seminary or convent, parents may choose and that is all. Ordinarily, if they prefer one, it is not because they consider it good, but because, in their opinion, the other is worse, while there is no third one at hand, built after a different type, with its own independent and special character, adapting itself to their tastes and accommodating itself to their necessities.
In the early years of the century there were thousands of secondary schools of every kind and degree, everywhere born or reborn, spontaneous, local, raised up through the mutual understanding of parents and masters, and, consequently, subject to this understanding, diverse, flexible, dependent on the law of supply and demand, competitive, each careful to keep its own patrons, each compelled, like every other private enterprise, to adjust its working to the views and faculties of its clients. It is very probable that, if these had been allowed to exist, if the new legislator had not been radically hostile to permanent corporations, endowments, and mortmain titles; if, through the jealous intervention of his Council of State and the enormous levies of his fiscal system, the government had not discouraged free associations and the free donations to which they might have been entitled, the best of these secondary schools would have survived: those which might have been able to adapt themselves to their surroundings would have had the most vitality; according to a well-known law, they would have prospered in branching off, each in its own sense and in its own way.—Now, at this date, after the demolitions of the Revolution, all pedagogic roads were open and, at each of their starting-points, the runners were ready, not merely the secular but, again, independent ecclesiastics, liberal Gallicans, surviving Jansenists, constitutional priests, enlightened monks, some of them philosophers and half-secular in mind or even at heart, using Port-Royal manuals, Rollin's "Traité des Études" and Condillac's "Cours d'Etudes," the best-tried and most fecund methods of instruction, all the traditions of the seventeenth century from Arnauld to Lancelot and all the novelties of the eighteenth century from Locke to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, all wide-awake or aroused by the demands of the public and by this unique opportunity and eager to do and to do well. In the provinces6338 as at Paris, people were seeking, trying and groping. There was room and encouragement for original, sporadic and multiple invention, for schools proportionate with and suited to various and changing necessities, Latin, mathematical or mixed schools, some for theoretical science and others for practical apprenticeship, these commercial and those industrial, from the lowest standpoint of technical and rapid preparation up to the loftiest summits of speculative and prolonged study.
On this school world in the way of formation, Napoleon has riveted his uniformity, the rigorous apparatus of his university, his unique system, narrow, inflexible, applied from above. We have seen with what restrictions, with what insistence, with what convergence of means, what prohibitions, what taxes, what application of the university monopoly, and with what systematic hostility to private establishments!—In the towns, and by force, they become branches of the lycée and imitate its classes; in this way Sainte-Barbe is allowed to subsist at Paris and, until the abolition of the monopoly, the principal establishments of Paris, Massin, Jauffrey, Bellaguet, existed only on this condition, that of becoming auxiliaries, subordinates and innkeepers for lycée day-scholars; such is still the case to-day for the lycées Bossuet and Gerson. In the way of education and instruction the little that an institution thus reduced can preserve of originality and of pedagogic virtue is of no account.—In the country, the Oratoriens who have repurchased Juilly are obliged,6339 in order to establish a free and durable school of "Christian and national education," to turn aside the civil law which interdicts trusts and organize themselves into a "Tontine Society" and thus present their disinterested enterprise in the light of an industrial and commercial speculation, that of a lucrative and well-attended boarding school. Still at the present day similar fictions have to be resorted to for the establishment and duration of like enterprises.6340
Naturally, under this prohibitive régime, private establishments are born with difficulty; and afterwards, absorbed, mutilated and strangled, they find no less difficulty in keeping alive and thus degenerate, decline and succumb one by one. And yet, in 1815, not counting the 41 small seminaries with their 5000 scholars, there still remained 1,225 private schools, with 39,000 scholars, confronting the 36 lycées and 368 communal colleges which, together, had only 37,000 scholars. Of these 1,255 private schools there are only 825 in 1854, 622 in 1865, 494 in 1876, and, finally, in 1887, 302 with 20,174 scholars; on the other hand, the State establishments have 89,000 schools, and those of the Church amount to 73,000. It is only after 1850 that the decadence of secular and private institutions is precipitated; in effect, instead of one competitor, they have two, the second as formidable as the first one, both enjoying unlimited credit, possessors of immense capital and determined to spend money without calculation, the State, on one side abstracting millions from the pockets of the taxpayers and, on the other side, the Church deriving its millions from the purses of the faithful: the struggle between isolated individuals and these two great organized powers who give instruction at a discount or gratis is too unequal.6341
Such is the actual and final effect of the first Napoleonic monopoly: the enterprise of the State has, by a counter-stroke, incited the enterprise of the clergy; both now complete the ruin of the others, private, different in kind and independent, which, supported wholly by family approbation, have no other object in view than to render families content. On the contrary, along with this purpose, the two survivors have another object, each its own, a superior and doctrinal object, due to its own particular interest and antagonism to the opposite interest; it is in view of this object, in view of a political or religious purpose, that each in its own domicile directs education and instruction like Napoleon, each inculcates on, or insinuates into, young minds its social and moral opinions which are clear-cut and become cutting. Now, the majority of parents, who prefer peace to war, desire that their children should entertain moderate and not bellicose opinions. They would like to see them respectful and intelligent, and nothing more. But neither of the two rival institutions thus limits itself; each works beyond and aside,6342 and when the father, at the end of July,6343 goes for his son at the ecclesiastical college or secular institution, he risks finding in the young man of seventeen the militant prejudices, the hasty and violent conclusions and the uncompromising rigidity of either a "laïcisant" or a "clérical."
III. Internal Vices
The internal vices of the system.—Barrack or convent
discipline of the boarding-school.—Number and proportions
of scholars in State and Church establishments.—Starting
point of the French boarding-school.—The school community
viewed not as a distinct organ of the State but as a
mechanism wielded by the State.—Effects of these two
conceptions.—Why the boarding-school entered into and
strengthened ecclesiastical establishments.—Effects of the
boarding-school on the young man.—Gaps in his experience,
errors of judgment, no education of his will.—The evil
aggravated by the French system of special and higher
schools.
Meanwhile, the innate vices of the primitive system have lasted and, and, among others, the worst of all, the internat6344 under the discipline of barracks or convent, while the university, through its priority and supremacy, in contact with or contiguously, has communicated this discipline at first to its subordinates, and afterward to its rivals.—In 1887,6345 in the State lycées and colleges, there are more than 39,000 boarding-schools (internes) while, in the ecclesiastic establishments, it is worse: out of 50,000 pupils there, over 27,000 are internes, to which must be added the 23,000 pupils of the small seminaries, properly so called, nearly all of them boarders; in a total of 163,000 pupils we find 89,000 internes.6346 Thus, to secure secondary instruction, more than one-half of the youth of France undergo the internat, ecclesiastic or secular. This is peculiar to France, and is due to the way in which Napoleon, in 1806, seized on and perverted all school enterprises.6347
Before 1789, in France, this enterprise, although largely trammeled and impeded by the State and the Church, was not violated in principle nor perverted in essence; still at the present day, in Germany, in England, in the United States, it exists and is developed in accordance with its nature. It is admitted to be a private enterprise,6348 the collective and spontaneous work of several associates voluntarily bound together, old founders, actual and future benefactors, masters and parents and even scholars,6349 each in his place and function, under a statute and according to tradition, in such a way as to continue functioning indefinitely, in order to provide, like a gas company on its own responsibility, at its own risk and expense, a provider of services for those who want it; in other terms, the school enterprise must, like any other undertaking, render acceptable what it offers thereby satisfying the needs of its clients.—Naturally, it adapts itself to these needs; its directors and those concerned do what is necessary. With hands free, and grouped around an important interest evidently for a common purpose, mutually bound and veritable associates not only legally but in feeling, devoted to a local enterprise and local residents for many years, often even for life, they strive not to offend the profound repugnance of the young and of families. They therefore make the necessary arrangements internally and with the parents.6350
That is why, outside of France, the French internat, so artificial, so forced, so exaggerated, is almost unknown. In Germany, out of one hundred pupils in the gymnases, which correspond to our lycées, there are scarcely ten boarders lodged and fed in the gymnase; the rest, even when their parents do not live near by, remain day-scholars, private guests in the families that harbor them, often at a very low price and which take the place of the absent family. No boarders are found in them except in a few gymnases like Pforta and by virtue of an ancient endowment. The number, however, by virtue of the same endowment, is limited; they dine, in groups of eight or ten,6351 at the same table with the professors lodged like themselves in the establishment, while they enjoy for a playground a vast domain of woods, fields and meadow.—The same in England, at Harrow, Eton and Rugby. Each professor, here, is keeper of a boarding-house; he has ten, twenty and thirty boys under his roof, eating at his table or at a table the head of which is some lady of the house. Thus, the youth goes from the family into the school, without painful or sudden contrast, and remains under a system of things which suits his age and which is a continuation, only enlarged, of domestic life.6352
The French college or lycée is quite the opposite. It operates against the true spirit of the school, and has done so for eighty years being an enterprise of the State, a local extension of a central enterprise, one of the hundred branches of the great State university trunk, possessing no roots of its own and with a directing or teaching staff composed of functionaries similar to others, that is to say transferable,6353 restless and preoccupied with promotion, their principal motive for doing well being the hope of a higher rank and of getting a better situation. This almost separate them in advance from the establishment in which they labor and,6354 besides that, they are led, pushed on, and restrained from above, each in his own particular sphere and in his limited duty. The principal (proviseur) is confined to his administrative position and the professor to his class, expressly forbidden to leave it. No professor is "under any pretext to receive in his house as boarders or day-scholars more than ten pupils."6355 No woman is allowed to lodge inside the lycée or college walls, all,—proviseur, censor, cashier, chaplain, head-masters and assistants, fitted by art or force to each other like cog-wheels, with no deep sympathy, with no moral tie, without collective interests, a cleverly designed machine which, in general, works accurately and smoothly, but with no soul because, to have a soul, it is of prime necessity to have a living body. As a machine constructed at Paris according to a unique pattern and superposed on people and things from Perpignan to Douai and from Rochelle to Besançon, it does not adapt itself to the requirements of the public; it subjects its public to the exigencies, rigidity and uniformity of its play and structure. Now, as it acts mechanically only, through outward pressure, the human material on which it operates must be passive, composed, not of diverse persons, but of units all alike; its pupils must be for it merely numbers and names.—Owing to this our internats, those huge stone boxes set up and isolated in each large town, those lycées parceled out to hold three hundred, four hundred, even eight hundred boarders, with immense dormitories, refectories and playgrounds, recitation-rooms full to overflowing, and, for eight or ten years, for one half of our children and youths, an anti-social unnatural system apart, strict confinement, no going out except to march in couples under the eyes of a sub-teacher who maintains order in the ranks, promiscuity and life in common, exact and minute regularity under equal discipline and constant constraint in order to eat, sleep, study, play, promenade and the rest,—in short, COMMUNISM.
From the University this system is propagated among its rivals. In conferring grades and passing examinations, it arranges and overburdens the school program of study; hence, it incites in others what it practices at home, the over-training of youth, and a factitious, hot-house education. On the other hand, the internat is, for those who decide on that, less troublesome than the day-school;6356 also, the more numerous the boarders in any one establishment, the less the expense; thus, in order to exist in the face of the university establishments, there must be internats and internats that are full. Ecclesiastical establishments willingly resign themselves to all this; they are even inclined that way; the Jesuits were the first ones, under the old monarchy, who introduced cloistered and crowded boarding-houses. In its essence, the Catholic church, like the French State, is a Roman institution, still more exclusive and more governmental, resolved to seize, hold on to, direct and control man entirely, and, first of all, the child, head and heart, opinions and impressions, in order to stamp in him and lastingly the definitive and salutary forms which are for him the first condition of salvation. Consequently, the ecclesiastical cage is more strict in its confinement than the secular cage; if the bars are not so strong and not so rough, the grating, finer and more yielding, is more secure, closer and better maintained; they do not allow any holes or relaxation of the meshes; the precautions against worldly and family interference, against the mistakes and caprices of individual effort, are innumerable, and form a double or even triple network. For, to school discipline is added religious discipline, no less compulsory, just as rigid and more constant—daily pious exercises, ordinary devotions and extraordinary ceremonies, spiritual guidance, influence of the confessional and the example and behavior of a staff kept together around the same work by the same faith. The closer the atmosphere, the more powerful the action; the chances are that the latter will prove decisive on the child sequestered, sheltered and brought up in a retort, and that its intellect, faith and ideas, carefully cultivated, pruned and always under direction, will exactly reproduce the model aimed at.—For this reason, in 1876, 33,000 out of 46,000 pupils belonging to the 309 ecclesiastical establishments of secondary instruction, are internes,6357 and the Catholic authorities admit that, in the 86 small seminaries, no day-scholars, no future lay persons, are necessary.
This conclusion is perhaps reasonable in relation to the 23,000 pupils of the small seminaries, and for the 10,000 pupils in the great seminaries; it is perhaps reasonable also for the future military officers formed by the State at La Flèche, Saint-Cyr, Saumur, and on the Borda.6358 Whether future soldiers or future priests, their education fits them for the life they are to lead; what they are to become as adults, they already are as youths and children; the internat, under a convent discipline or that of the barracks, qualifies them beforehand for their profession. Since they must possess the spirit of it they must contract its habits. Having accepted the form of their pursuit they more easily accept its constraints and all the more that the constraints of the regiment will be less for the young officer who recently was at Saint-Cyr, and for the young ministrant in the rural parish who recently was in the great seminary.—It is quite the reverse for the 75,000 other internes of public or private establishments, ecclesiastic or secular, for the future engineers, doctors, architects, notaries, attorneys, advocates and other men of the law, functionaries, land-owners, chiefs and assistants in industry, agriculture and commerce. For them the internat affords precisely the opposite education required for a secular and civil career. These carry away from the prolonged internat a sufficient supply of Latin or of mathematics; but they are lacking in two acquisitions of capital import: they have been deprived of two indispensable experiences. On entering society the young man is ignorant of its two principal personages, man and woman, as they are and as he is about to meet them in society. He has no idea of them, or rather he has only a preconceived, arbitrary and false conception of them.—He has not dined, commonly, with a lady, head of the house, along with her daughters and often with other ladies; their tone of voice, their deportment at table, their toilette, their greater reserve, the attentions they receive, the air of politeness all around, have not impressed on his imagination the faintest lines of an exact notion; hence, there is something wanting in him in relation to how he should demean himself; he does not know how to address them, feels uncomfortable in their presence; they are strange beings to him, new, of an unknown species.—In a like situation, at table in the evening, he has never heard men conversing together: he has not gathered in the thousand bits of information which a young growing mind derives from general conversation:
* about careers in life, competition, business, money, the domestic fireside and expenses;
* about the cost of living which should always depend on income;
* about the gain which nearly always indicates the current rates of labor and of the social subjection one undergoes;
* about the pressing, powerful, personal interests which are soon to seize him by the collar and perhaps by the throat;
* about the constant effort required the incessant calculation, the daily struggle which, in modern society, makes up the life of an ordinary man.
All means of obtaining knowledge have been denied him, the contact with living and diverse men, the images which the sensations of his eyes and ears might have stamped on his brain. These images constitute the sole materials of a correct, healthy conception; through them, spontaneously and gradually, without too many deceptions or shocks, he might have figured social life to himself, such as it is, its conditions, difficulties, and its opportunities: he has neither the sentiment of it nor even a premonition. In all matters, that which we call common sense is never but an involuntary latent summary, the lasting, substantial and salutary depot left in our minds after many direct impressions. With reference to social life, he has been deprived of all these direct impressions and the precious depot has never been formed in him.—e He has scarcely ever conversed with his professors; their talk with him has been about impersonal and abstract matters, languages, literature and mathematics. He has spoken but little with his teachers, except to contest an injunction or grumble aloud against reproof. Of real conversation, the acquisition and exchange of ideas, he has enjoyed none, except with his comrades: if, like him, all are internes, they can communicate to each other only their ignorance. If day-scholars are admitted, they are active smugglers or willing agents who bring into the house and circulate forbidden books and obscene journals, along with the filthy provocative and foul atmosphere of the streets.—Now, with excitement of this kind or in this manner, the brains of these captives, as puberty comes on and deliverance draws near, work actively and we know in what sense6359 and in what counter-sense, how remote from observable and positive truth, how their imagination pictures society, man and woman, under what simple and coarse appearances, with what inadequacy and presumption, what appetites of liberated serfs and juvenile barbarians, how, as concerns women, their precocious and turbid dreams first become brutal and cynical,6360 how, as concerns men, their unballasted and precipitous thought easily becomes chimerical and revolutionary.6361 The downhill road is steep on the bad side, so that, to put on the brake and stop, then to remount the hill, the young man who takes the management of his life into his own hands, must know how to use his own will and persevere to the end.
But a faculty is developed only by exercise, and the French internat is the engine the most effective for hindering the exercise of this one.—The youth, from the first to the last day of his internat, has never been able to deliberate on, choose and decide what he should do at any one hour of his schooldays; except to idle away time in study-hours, and pay no attention at recitations, he could not exercise his will. Nearly every act, especially his outward attitudes, postures, immobility, silence, drill and promenades in rank, is only obedience to orders. He has lived like a horse in harness, between the shafts of his cart; this cart itself, kept straight by its two wheels, must not leave the rectilinear ruts hollowed out and traced for it along the road; it is impossible for the horse to turn aside. Besides, every morning he is harnessed at the same hour, and every evening he is unharnessed at the same hour; every day, at other hours, he has to rest and take his ration of hay and oats. He has never been under the necessity of thinking about all this, nor of looking ahead or on either side; from one end of the year to the other, he has simply had to pull along guided by the bridle or urged by the whip, his principal motives being only of two kinds: on the one hand more or less hard guidance and urgings, and on the other hand his recalcitrance, laziness and fatigue; he has been obliged to choose between the two. For eight or ten years, his initiative is reduced to that—no other employment of his free will. The education of his free will is thus rudimentary or nonexistent.
On the strength of this our (French) system supposes that it is complete and perfect. We cast the bridle on the young man's neck and hand him over to his own government. We admit that, by extraordinary grace, the scholar has suddenly become a man; that he is capable of prescribing and following his own orders; that he has accustomed himself to weighing the near and remote consequences of his acts, of imputing them to himself, of believing himself responsible for them; that his conscience, suddenly emancipated, and his reason, suddenly adult, will march straight on athwart temptations and immediately recover from slips. Consequently, he is set free with an allowance in some great city; he registers himself under some Faculty and becomes one among ten thousand other students on the sidewalks of Paris.—Now, in France, there is no university police force to step in, as at Bonn or Göttingen, at Oxford or Cambridge, to watch his conduct and punish him in the domicile and in public places. At the schools of medicine, Law, Pharmacy, Fine-Arts, Charters, and Oriental Languages, at the Sorbonne and at the École Centrale, his emancipation is sudden and complete. When he goes from secondary education to superior education he does not, as in England and in Germany, pass from restricted liberty to one less restricted, but from a monastic discipline to compete independence. In a furnished room, in the promiscuity and incognito of a common hotel, scarcely out of college, the novice of twenty years finds at hand the innumerable temptations of the streets, the taverns, the bars, public balls, obscene publications, chance acquaintances, and the liaisons of the gutter. Against all this his previous education has disarmed him. Instead of creating a moral force within him, the long and strict internat has maintained moral debility. He yields to opportunity, to example; he goes with the current, he floats without a rudder, he lets himself drift. As far as hygiene, or money, or sex, is concerned, his mistakes and his follies, great or small, are almost inevitable, while it is an average chance if, during his three, four or five years of full license, he does not become entirely corrupt.
IV. Cramming and Exams Compared to Apprenticeship
Another vice of the system.—Starting-point of superior
instruction in France.—Substitution of special State
schools for free encyclopedic universities.—Effect of this
substitution.—Examinations and competitions.—Intense,
forced and artificial culture.—How it reaches an extreme.
—Excess and prolongation of theoretical studies.
—Insufficiency and tardiness of practical apprenticeship.
—Comparison of this system with others, between France before
1789 and England and the United States.—Lost forces.
—Mistaken use and excessive expenditure of mental energy.—
—The entire body of youth condemned to it after 1889.
Let us now consider another effect of the primitive institution, not less pernicious. On leaving the lycée after the philosophy class, the system supposes that a general education is fully obtained; there is not question of a second one, ulterior and superior, that of universities. In place of these encyclopedic universities, of which the object is free teaching and the free progress of knowledge, it establishes special State schools, separate from each other, each confined to a distinct branch, each with a view to create, verify and proclaim a useful capacity, each devoted to leading a young man along, step by step, through a series of studies and tests up to the title or final diploma which qualifies him for his profession, a diploma that is indispensable or, at least, very useful since, without it, in many cases, one has no right to practice his profession and which, thanks to it, in all cases, enables one to enter on a career with favor and credit, in fair rank, and considerably promoted.—On entering most careers called liberal, a first diploma is exacted, that of bachelor of arts, or bachelor of sciences, sometimes both, the acquisition of which is now a serious matter for all French youth, a daily and painful preoccupation. To this end, when about sixteen, the young man works, or, rather, is worked upon. For one or two years, he submits to a forced culture, not in view of learning and of knowing, but to answer questions well at an examination, or tolerably well, and to obtain a certificate, on proof or on semblance of proof, that he has received a complete classical education.—Next after this, at the medical or law school, during the four prescribed years, sixteen graduated inscriptions, four or five superposed examinations, two or three terminal verifications, oblige him to furnish the same proof, or semblance of proof, to verify, as each year comes round, his assimilation of the lessons of the year, and thus attest that, at the end of his studies, he possesses about the entire scope and diversity of knowledge to which he is restricted.
In the schools where the number of pupils is limited, this culture, carried still farther, becomes intense and constant. In the École Centrale and in the commercial or agronomic schools, in the Polytechnique or Normale, he is there all day and all night,—he is housed in a barracks.—And the pressure on him is twofold—the pressure of examinations and that of competition. On entering, on leaving, and during his stay there, not only at the end of each year but every six or three months, often every six weeks, and even every fortnight, he is rated according to his compositions, exercises and interrogatories, getting so many marks for his partial value, so many for his total value and according to these figures, classed at a certain rank among his comrades who are his rivals. To descend on the scale would be disadvantageous and humiliating; to ascend on the scale is advantageous and glorious. Driven by this motive, so strong in France, his principal aim is to go up or, at least, not to go down; he devotes all his energy to this; he expends none of it on either side or beyond; he allows himself no diversion, he abstains from taking any initiative; his restrained curiosity never ventures outside of the circle traced for him; he absorbs only what he is taught and in the order in which it is taught; he fills himself to the brim, but only to disgorge at the examination and not to retain and hold on to; he runs the risk of choking and when relieved, of remaining empty. Such is the régime of our Grande Ecoles. They are systematic, energetic and prolonged system of gardening; the State, the gardener-in-chief, receiving or selecting plants which it undertakes to turn out profitably, each of its kind. To this end, it separates the species, and ranges each apart on a bed of earth; and here, all day long, it digs, weeds, rakes, waters, adds one manure after another, applies its powerful heating apparatus and accelerates the growth and ripening of the fruit. On certain beds it plants are kept under glass throughout the year; in this way it maintains them in a steady, artificial atmosphere, forcing them to more largely imbibe the nutritive liquids with which it floods the ground, thus causing them to swell and become hypertrophied, so as to produce fruits or vegetables for show, and which it exposes and which bring it credit; for all these productions look well, many of them superb, while their size seems to attest their excellence; they are weighted beforehand and the official labels with which they are decorated announce the authentic weight.
During the first quarter, and even the first half, of the (19th) century, the system remained almost unobjectionable; it had not yet pushed things to excess. Down to 1850 and later, all that was demanded of the young, in their examinations and competitions, was much less the extent and minutia of knowledge than proofs of intelligence and the promise of capacity: in a literary direction, the main object was to verify whether the candidate, familiar with the classics, could write Latin correctly and French tolerably well; in the sciences, if he could, without help, accurately and promptly solve a problem; if, again unaided, he could readily and accurately to the end, state a long series of theorems and equations without divergence or faltering; in sum, the object of the test was to verify in him the presence and degree of the mathematical or literary faculty.—But, since the beginning of the century, the old subdivided sciences and the new consolidated sciences have multiplied their discoveries and, necessarily, all discoveries end in finding their way into public instruction. In Germany, for them to become installed and obtain chairs, encyclopedic universities are found, in which free teaching, pliant and many-sided, rises of itself to the level of knowledge.6362 With us, for lack of universities, they have had only special schools6363; here only could a place be found for them and professors obtained. Henceforth, the peculiar character of these schools has changed: they have ceased to be strictly special and veritably professional.—Each school, being an individuality, has developed apart and on its own account; its aim has been to install and furnish under its own roof all the general, collateral, accessory and ornamental studies which, far or near, could be of service to its own pupils. No longer content with turning out competent and practical men, it has conceived a superior type, the ideal model of the engineer, physician, jurist, professor or architect. To produce this extraordinary and desirable professional, it has designed some excessively difficult impressive lectures.6364 To be able to make use of these, it has given the young man the opportunity not only to acquire abstract, multiple, technical knowledge, and information, but also the complementary culture and lofty general ideas, which render the specialist a true savant and a man of a very broad mind.
To this end, it has appealed to the State. The State, the contractor for public instruction, the founder of every new professional chair, appoints the occupant, pays the salary and, when in funds, is not ill-disposed, for it thus gains a good reputation, an increase of granting power and a new functionary. Such is the why and wherefore, in each school, of the multiplication of professorships: schools of law, of medicine, of pharmacy, of charters, of fine arts, polytechnic, normal, central, agronomic and commercial schools, each becoming, or tending to become, a sort of university on a small scale, bringing together within its walls the totality of teachings which, if the student profits by them, renders him in his profession an accomplished personage. Naturally, to secure attendance at these lectures, the school, in concert with the State, adds to the exigencies of its examinations, and soon, for the average of intellects and for health, the burden imposed by it becomes too heavy. Particularly, in the schools to which admission is gained only through competitions the extra load is still more burdensome, owing to the greater crowd striving to pass; there are now five, seven and even eleven candidates for one place.6365 With this crowd, it has been found necessary to raise and multiply the barriers, urge the competitors to jump over them, and to open the door only to those who jump the highest and in the greatest number. There is no other way to make a selection among them without incurring the charge of despotism and nepotism. It is their business to have sturdy legs and make the best of them, then to submit to methodical training, to practice and train all year and for several years in succession, in order to pass the final test, without thinking of any but the barriers in front of them on the race-course at the appointed date, and which they must spring over to get ahead of their rivals.
At the present day6366, after the complete course of classical studies, four years in school no longer suffice for obtaining the degrees of a doctor in medicine or doctor in law. Five or six years are necessary. Two years are necessary between the baccalauréat ès-lettres and the various licenses ès-lettres or sciences, and from these to the corresponding aggrégations two, three years, and often more. Three years of preparatory studies in mathematics and of desperate application lead the young man to the threshold of the École Polytechnique; after that, after two years in school and of no less sustained effort, the future engineer passes three not less laborious years at the École des Ponts et Chaussées or des Mines, which amounts to eight years of professional preparation.6367 Elsewhere, in the other schools, it is the same thing with more or less excess. Observe how days and hours are spent during this long period.6368 The young men have attended lecture-courses, masticated and re-masticated manuals, abbreviated abridgments, learned by heart mementos and formulae, stored their memories with a vast multitude of generalities and details. Every sort of preliminary information, all the theoretical knowledge which, even indirectly, may serve them in their future profession or which is of service in neighboring professions, are classified in their brains, ready to come forth at the first call, and, as proved by the examination, disposable at a minute; they possess them, but nothing otherwise or beyond. Their education has all tended to one side; they have undergone no practical apprenticeship. Never have they taken an active part in or lent a hand to any professional undertaking either as collaborators or assistants.
* The future professor, a new aggrégé at twenty-four years of age, who issues from the École Normale, has not yet taught a class, except for a fortnight in a Paris lycée.
* The future engineer who, at twenty-four or twenty-five years of age leaves the École Centrale, or the École des Ponts, or École des Mines, has never assisted in the working of a mine, in the heating of a blast furnace, in the piercing of a tunnel, in the laying-out of a dike, of a bridge or of a roadway. He is ignorant of the cost and has never commanded a squad of workmen.
* If the future advocate or magistrate to be has put up with being a notary's or lawyer's clerk, he will at twenty-five years of age, even if he is a doctor of law with his insignia of three "white balls," know nothing of the business; he merely knows his codes; he has never examined pleadings, conducted a case, drawn up an act or liquidated an estate.
* From eighteen to thirty, the future architect who competes for a prix de Rome may stay in the École des Beaux-Arts, draw plan after plan there, and then, if he obtains the prix, pass five years at Rome, make designs without end, multiply plans and restorations on paper, and at last, at thirty-five years of age, return to Paris with the highest titles, architect of the government, and with the aspiration to erect edifices without having taken even a second or third part in the actual construction of one single house.—
None of these men so full of knowledge know their trade and each, at this late hour, is expected to act as an expert, improvising,6369 in haste and too fast, encountering many drawbacks at his own expense and at the expense of others, along with serious risks for the first tasks he undertakes.
Before 1789, says a witness of both the ancient and the modern régime, 6370 young Frenchmen did not thus pass their early life. Instead of dancing attendance so long on the threshold of a career, they were inducted into it very early in life and at once began the race. With very light baggage and readily obtained "they entered the army at sixteen, and even fifteen years of age, at fourteen in the navy, and a little later in special branches, artillery or engineering. In the magistracy, at nineteen, the son of a conseiller-maître in parliament was made a conseiller-adjoint without a vote until he reached twenty-five; meanwhile, he was busy, active and sometimes was made a reporter of a case. No less precocious were the admissions to the Cour des Comptes, to the Cour des Aides, to inferior jurisdictions and into the bureaus of all the financial administrations." Here, as elsewhere, if any rank in law was exacted the delay that ensured was not apparent; the Faculty examinations were only for forms sake; for a sum of money, and after a more or less grave ceremonial, a needed diploma was obtained almost without study.6371—Accordingly, it was not in school, but in the profession, that professional instruction was acquired; strictly speaking, the young man for six or seven years, instead of being a student was an apprentice, that is to say a working novice under several master-workmen, in their workshop, working along with them and learning by doing, which is the best way of obtaining instruction. Struggling with the difficulties of the work he at once became aware of his incompetence;6372 he became modest and was attentive; with his masters, he kept silent, and listened, which is the only way to understand. If he was intelligent he himself discovered what he lacked; as he found this out he felt the need of supplying what he needed; he sought, set his wits to work, and made choice of the various means; freely and self-initiating he helped himself in his general or special education. If he read books, it was not resignedly and for a recitation, but with avidity and to comprehend them. If he followed lecture-courses it was not because he was obliged to, but voluntarily, because he was interested and because he profited by it.—Chancellor Pasquier was magistrate at seventeen (in 1784), attended at the lycée the lectures of Garat, La Harpe, Fourcroy and Duparcieux and, daily, at table or in the evening, listened to his father and his friends discussing matters which, in the morning, had been argued in the Palais de Justice or in the Grand-Chambre. He imbibed a taste for his profession. Along with two or three prominent advocates and other young magistrates like himself, he inscribed his name for lectures at the house of the first president of the first court of inquiry. Meanwhile, he went every evening into society; he saw there with his own eyes the ways and interests of men and women. On the other hand, at the Palais de Justice, a conseiller- écoutant he sat for five years, alongside of the conseiller-juges and often, the reporter of a case, he gave his opinion. After such a novitiate, he was competent to form a judgment in civil or criminal cases with experience, competency and authority. From the age of twenty-five, he was prepared for and capable of serious duties. He had only to live and perfect himself to become an administrator, deputy or minister, a dignitary as we see under the first Empire, under the Restoration, under the July monarchy, that is to say the best informed, well-balanced, judicious political character and, at length, the man of highest consideration of his epoch.6373
Such is also the process which, still at the present day (1890), in England and in America secures future ability in the various professions. In the hospital, in the mine, in factories, with the architect, with the lawyer, the pupil, taken very young, goes through his apprenticeship and subsequent stages about the same as a clerk with us in an office or an art-student in the studio. Preliminarily and before entering it, he has attended some general seminary lecture which serves him as a ready-made basis for the observations he is about to make. Meanwhile, there are very often technical courses within reach, which he may attend at his leisure in order to give shape to his daily experiences as these happen to accumulate. Under a régime of this stamp practical capacity grows and develops of itself, just to that degree which the faculties of the pupil warrant, and in the direction which his future aims require, through the special work to which he wishes for the time being to adapt himself. In this way, in England and in the United States, the young man soon succeeds in developing all he is good for. From the age of twenty-five and much sooner, if the substance and bottom are not wanting, he is not only a useful subordinate, but again a spontaneous creator, not merely a wheel but besides this a motor force. In France, where the inverse process has prevailed and become more and more Chinese at each generation, the total of the force lost is immense.
The most productive period of human life extends from fifteen or sixteen up to twenty-five or twenty-six; here are seven or eight years of growing energy and of constant production, buds, flowers and fruit; during this period the young man sketches out his original ideas. But, that these ideas may be born in him, sprout, and flourish they must, at this age, profit by the stimulating or repressive influence of the atmosphere in which they are to live later on; here only are they formed in their natural and normal environment; their germs depend for their growth on the innumerable impressions due to the young man's sensations, daily, in the workshop, in the mine, in the court-room, in the studio, on the scaffolding of a building, in the hospital, on seeing tools, materials and operations, in talking with clients and workmen, in doing work, good or bad, costly or remunerative; such are the minute and special perceptions of the eyes and the ears, of touch and even smell which, involuntarily gathered in and silently elaborated, work together in him and suggest, sooner or later, this or that new combination, economy, perfection or invention.6374 The young Frenchman, just at this fecund age, is deprived of all these precious contacts, of all these assimilating and indispensable elements. During seven or eight years, he is shut up in school, remote from the direct and personal experience which might have given him an exact and vivifying notion of men and things, and of the various ways of handling them. All this time his inventive faculties are deliberately sterilized; he can be nothing but a passive recipient; whatever he might have produced under the other system he cannot produce under this one; the balance of debit and credit is utter loss.—Meanwhile, the cost has been great. Whilst the apprentice, the clerk busy with his papers in his office, the interne with his apron standing by the bedside of the patient in the hospital, pays by his services, at first for his instruction, then for his breakfast, and ends in gaining something besides, at least his pocket-money, the student under the Faculty, or the pupil in a special school is educated and lives at the expense of his family or of the State; he gives back in exchange not work that is useful to mankind, none that is worth anything on the market; his actual consumption is not compensated for by his actual production. Undoubtedly, he cherishes the hope that some day or other he will obtain compensation, that we will refund later and largely both capital and interest, and all the advances made; in other words, his future services are discounted and, as far as he is concerned, he speculates on a long credit.—It remains to be seen whether the speculation is a good one; whether, at last, the receipts will cover the expenses, in short, what will be the net or average returns on the man thus fashioned.6375
Now, among the forces expended, the most important to take into account is the time and attention of the pupil, the sum of his efforts, this or that quantity of mental energy; he has only a limited provision of this, and, not only is the proportion of this which the system consumes excessive, but, again, the application of it which the system enforces is not remunerative. The provision is exhausted and by a wrong use of it, with scarcely any profit.—In our lycées, the pupil sits at his task more than eleven hours a day; in a certain ecclesiastical college it is twelve hours, and, from the age of twelve years, through the necessity of being first in competition as well as for securing the greatest number of admissions through various examinations.—At the end of this secondary education there is a graduated scale of successive test, and first the baccalauréat. Fifty out of one hundred candidates fail and the examiners are indulgent.6376 This proves, first of all, that the rejected have profited by their studies; but it likewise proves that the program of the examination is not adapted to the general run of minds, nor to the native faculties of the human majority; that many young men capable of learning by the opposite method learn nothing by this one; that education, such as it is, with the kind and greatness of the mental labor it imposes, with its abstract and theoretical style, is beyond the capacity of the average mind.—Particularly, during the last year of classical studies, the pupils have had to follow the philosophy lectures: in the time of M. Laromiquière, this might be useful to them; in the time of M. Cousin, the course, so far, did but little harm; at the present day, impregnated with neo-Kantism, it injects into minds of eighteen, seventeen, and even sixteen years, a metaphysical muddle as cumbersome as the scholasticism of the fourteenth century, terribly indigestible and unhealthy for the stomachs of novices; the swallow even to bursting and throw it off at the examination just as it comes, entirely raw for lack of the capacity to assimilate it.—Often, after failure at the baccalauréat, or on entering the preparatory or Grande Écoles, the young people go into, or are put into, what they call "a box" or an "oven" a preparatory internat, similar to the boxes in which silkworms are raised and to the ovens where the eggs are hatched. In more exact language it is a mechanical "gaveuse"6377 in which they are daily crammed; through this constant, forced feeding, their real knowledge is not increased, nor their mental vigor; they are superficially fattened and, at the end of the year, or in eighteen months, they present themselves on the appointed day, with the artificial and momentary volume they need for that day, with the bulk, surface, polish and all the requisite externals, because these externals are the only ones that the examination verifies and imposes.6378 Less harshly, but in the same manner and with the same object, operate the special education services which, inside our colleges and lycées, prepare young men for the École de Saint-Cyr and for the polytechnic, naval, central, normal, agricultural, commercial and forestry schools; in these too, the studies are cramming machines which prepare the pupil for examination purposes. In the like manner, above secondary education, all our special schools are public cramming machines;6379 alongside of them are private schools advertised and puffed in the newspapers and by posters of the walls, preparing young men for the license degree in Law and for the third or fourth examinations in Medicine. Some day or other, others will probably exist to prepare them for Treasury inspectors, for the "Cour des Comptes," for diplomacy, by competition, the same as for the medical profession, for a hospital surgeon and for aggregation in law, medicine, letters or sciences.
Undoubtedly, some minds, very active and very robust, withstand this régime; all they have been made to swallow is absorbed and digested. After leaving school and having passed through all grades they preserve the faculty of learning, investigating and inventing intact, and compose the small élite of scholars, litterateurs, artists, engineers and physicians who, in the international exposition of superior talent, maintain France in its ancient rank.6380—But the rest, in very great majority, nine out of ten at least, have lost their time and trouble, many years of their life and years that are useful, important and even decisive: take at once one-half or two-thirds of those who present themselves at the examinations, I mean the rejected, and then, among the admitted who get diplomas, another half or two-thirds that is to say, the overworked. Too much has been required of them by exacting that, on such a day, seated or before the blackboard, for two entire hours, they should be living repertories of all human knowledge; in effect, such they are, or nearly so, that day, for two hours; but, a month later, they are so no longer; they could not undergo the same examination; their acquisitions, too numerous and too burdensome, constantly drop of their minds and they make no new ones. Their mental vigor has given way, the fecund sap has dried up; the finished man appears, often a finished man content to be put away, to be married, and plod along indefinitely in the same circle, entrenched in his restricted vocation and doing his duty, but nothing more. Such are the average returns—assuredly, the profits do not make up for the expenses. In England and in America where, as before 1789 in France, the inverse method is followed, the returns are equal or superior,6381 and they are obtained with greater facility, with more certainty, at an age less tardy, without imposing such great and unhealthy efforts on the young man, such large expenditure by the State, and such long delays and sacrifices on families.6382
Now, in the four Faculties of Law, Medicine, Science and Letters, there are this year 22,000 students; add to these the pupils of the special schools and those who study with the hope of entering them, in all probably 30,000. But there is no need of counting them; since the suppression of the one-year voluntariat, the entire body of youths capable of study, who wish to remain only one year in barracks and not remain there to get brutalized during three years, flocks to the benches of the lycée or to those of a Faculty.6383 The sole object of the young man is not, as before, to reach the baccalauréat; it is essential that he should be admitted, after a competition, into one of the special schools, or obtain the highest grades or diplomas in one of the Faculties; in all cases he is bound to successfully undergo difficult and multiplied examinations. At present time (1890), there is no place in France for an education in the inverse sense, nor for any other of a different type. Henceforth, no young man, without condemning himself to three years of barrack life, can travel at an early age for any length of time, or form his mind at home by free and original studies, stay in Germany and follow speculative studies in the universities, or go to England or to America to derive practical instruction from factory or farm. Captured by our system, he is forced to surrender himself to the mechanical routine which fills his mind with fictitious tools, with useless and cumbersome acquisitions that impose on him in exchange an exorbitant expenditure of mental energy and which is very like to convert him into a mandarin.
V. Public instruction in 1890.
Public instruction since 1870.—Agreement between the
Napoleonic and Jacobin conception.—Extension and
aggravation of the system.—The deductive process of the
Jacobin mind.—Its consequences.—In superior and in
secondary instruction.—In primary instruction.—Gratuitous,
obligatory and secular instruction.
Such is the singular and final result brought about by the institution of the year X (or 1801), due to the intervention of the grossly leveling Jacobin spirit.6384 Indeed, since 1871, and especially since 1879, this spirit, through Napoleonic forms, has given breath, impulse and direction, and these forms suit it. On the principle that education belongs to the State, Napoleon and the old Jacobins were in accord; what he in fact established they had proclaimed as a dogma; hence the structure of his university-organisation was not objectionable to them; on the contrary, it conformed to their instincts. Hence, the reason why the new Jacobins, inheritors of both instinct and dogma, immediately adopted the existing system; none was more convenient, better calculated to meet their views, better adapted in advance to do their work. Consequently, under the third Republic,6385 as under anterior governments, the school machinery continues to turn and grind in the same rut. Through the same working of its mechanism, under the same impulse of its unique and central motor, conforming to the same Napoleonic and Jacobin idea of the teaching State, it is a formidable concept which, more intrusive every year, more widely and more rigorously applied, more and more excludes the opposite concept. This would be the remission of education to those interested in it, to those who possess rights, to parents, to free and private enterprises which depend only on personal exertions and on families, to permanent, special, local corporations, proprietary and organized under status, governed, managed, and supported by themselves. On this model, a few men of intelligence and sensibility, enlightened by what is accomplished abroad, try to organize regional universities in our great academic centers. The State might, perhaps, allow, if not the enterprise itself, then at least something like it, but nothing more. Through its right of public administration, through the powers of its Council of State, through its fiscal legislation, through the immemorial prejudices of its jurists, through the routine of its bureaus, it is hostile to a corporate personality. Never can such a project be considered a veritable civil personage; if the State consents to endow a group of individuals with civil powers, it is always on condition that they be subject to its narrow tutelage and be treated as minors and children. —Besides, these universities, even of age, are to remain as they are, so many dispensaries of diplomas. They are no longer to serve as an intellectual refuge, an oasis at the end of secondary instruction, a station for three or four years for free curiosity and disinterested self-culture. Since the abolition of the volontariat for one year, a young Frenchman no longer enjoys the leisure to cultivate himself in this way; free curiosity is interdicted; he is too much harassed by a too positive interest, by the necessity of obtaining grades and diplomas, by the preoccupations of examinations, by the limitations of age; he has no time to lose in experiments, in mental excursions, in pure speculations. Henceforth, our system allows him only the régime to which we see him subject, namely the rush, the puffing and blowing, the gallop without stopping on a race-course, the perilous jumps at regular distances over previously arranged and numbered obstacles. Instead of being restricted and attenuated, the disadvantages of the Napoleonic institution spread and grow worse, and this is due to the way in which our rulers comprehend it, the original, hereditary way of the Jacobin spirit.
When Napoleon built his University he did it as a statesman and a man of business, with the foresight of a contractor and a practical man, calculating outlay and receipts, means and resources, so as to produce at once and with the least expense, the military and civil tools which he lacked and of which he always had too few because he consumed too many: to this precise, definite purpose he subjected and subordinated all the rest, including the theory of the educational State; she was for him simply a résumé, a formula, a setting. On the contrary, for the old Jacobins, she was an axiom, a principle, an article in the Social Contract; by this contract, the State had charge of public education; it had the right and its duty was to undertake this and manage it. The principle being laid down, as convinced theorists and blindly following the deductive method, the derived consequences from it and rushed ahead, with eyes shut, into practical operation, with as much haste as vigor, without concerning themselves with the nature of human materials, of surrounding realities, of available resources, of collateral effects, nor of the total and final effect. Likewise with the new Jacobins of the present day, according to them, since instruction is a good thing,6386 the broader and deeper it is the better; since broad and deep instruction is very good, the State should, with all its energy and by every means in its power, inculcate it on the greatest possible number of children, boys and adolescents. Such, henceforth, is the word of command from on high, transmitted down to the three stages of superior, secondary and primary instruction.6387
Consequently, from 1876 to 1890,6388 the State expends for superior instruction, in buildings alone, 99,000,000 francs. Formerly, the receipts of the Faculties about covered their expenses; at the present day, the State allows them annually 6,000,000 francs more than their receipts. It has founded and supports 221 new (professional) chairs, 168 complementary courses of lectures, 129 conférences and, to supply the attendants, it provides, since 1877, 300 scholarships for those preparing for the license and, since 1881, 200 scholarships for those preparing for the aggrégation. Similarly, in secondary instruction, instead of 81 lycées in 1876, it has 100 in 18876389; instead of 3,820 scholarships in 1876, it distributes, in 1887, 10,528; instead of 2,200,000 francs expended for this branch of instruction in 1857, it expends 18,000,000 in 1889.—This overload of teaching caused overloaded exams: it was necessary to include more science than in the past to curriculum of the grades delivered and determined by the State. "This was what was then done whenever possible."6390 Naturally, and through contagion, the obligation of possessing more knowledge descended to secondary instruction. In effect, after this date, we see neo-Kantian philosophy descending like hail from the highest metaphysical ether down upon the pupils in the terminal class of the lycées, to the lasting injury of the seventeen-year old brains. Again, after this date, we see in the class of special mathematics6391 an abundance of complicated, confusing problems so that, today, the candidate for the Polytechnic School must, to gain admission, expound theorems that were only mastered by his father after he got there.—Hence, "boxes" and "ovens", private internats, the preparatory secular or ecclesiastical schools and other "scholastic cramming-machines"; hence, the prolonged mechanical effort to introduce into each intellectual sponge all the scientific fluid it can contain, even to saturation, and maintain it in this extreme state of perfection if only for two hours during an examination, after which it may rapidly subside and shrink. Hence, that mistaken use, that inordinate expenditure, that precocious waste of mental energy, and that entire pernicious system which overburden for a substantial period the young, not for their advantage, but, on reaching maturity, to their intellectual detriment.
To reach the uncultivated masses, to address popular intellect and imagination, one must use absolute, simple slogans. In the matter of primary instruction, the simplest and most absolute slogan is that which promises and offers it to all children, boys and girls, not merely universal, but again, complete and gratuitous. To this end, from 1878 to 1891,6392 the State has expended for school buildings and installations 582,000,000 francs; for salaries and other expenses it furnished the latter year 131,000,000. Somebody pays for all this, and it is the tax-payer, and by force; aided by gendarmes, the collector puts his hand forcibly into all pockets, even those containing only sous, and withdraws these millions. Gratuitous instruction sounds well and seems to designate a veritable gift, a present from the great vague personage called the State, and whom the general public dimly sees on the distant horizon as a superior, independent being, and hence a possible benefactor. In reality, his presents are made with our money, while his generosity consists in the fine name with which he here gilds his fiscal exactions, a new constraint added to so many others which he imposes on us and which we endure.6393—Besides, through instinct and tradition, the State is naturally inclined to multiply constraints, and this time there is no concealment. From six to thirteen years of age, primary instruction becomes obligatory.6394 The father is required to prove that his children receive it, if not at the public school at least in a private school or at home. During these seven years it continues, and ten months are devoted to it each year. The school takes and keeps the child three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon; it pours into these little heads all that is possible in such a length of time, all that they can hold and more too,—spelling, syntax, grammatical and logical analysis, rules of composition and of style, history, geography, arithmetic, geometry, drawing, notions of literature, politics, law, and finally a complete moral system, "civic morality."
It is obviously very useful for every adult to be able to read, write and reckon. Who, then, can criticize a Government because it insists that all children be taught these basic skills? But for the same reason and on the same principle, provision could be made for swimming-schools in every village and town on the sea-coast, or on the streams and rivers; every boy should be obliged to learn how to swim.—That it may be useful for every boy and girl in the United States to pass through the entire system of primary instruction is peculiar to the United States and is comprehensible in an extensive and new country where multiplied and diverse pursuits present themselves on all sides;6395 where every career may lead to the highest pinnacle; where a rail-splitter may become president of the republic; where the adult often changes his career and, to afford him the means for improvising a competency at each change, he must possess the elements of every kind of knowledge; where the wife, being for the man an object of luxury, does not use her arms in the fields and scarcely ever uses her hands in the household.6396—It is not the same in France. Nine out of ten pupils in the primary school are sons or daughters of peasants or of workmen and will remain in the condition of their parents; the girl, adult, will do washing and cooking all her life at home or abroad; the son, adult, confined to his occupation will work all his life in a shop or on his own or another's field. Between this destiny of the adult and the plenitude of his primary instruction, the disproportion is enormous; it is evident that his education does not prepare him for the life he has to lead; but for another life, less monotonous, under less restraint, more cerebral, and of which a faint glimpse disgusts him with his own;6397 at least, it will disgust him for a long time and frequently, until the day comes when his school acquisitions, wholly superficial, shall have evaporated in contact with the ambient atmosphere and no longer appear to him other than empty phrases; in France, for an ordinary peasant or workman, so much the better if this day comes early.6398
At the very least, three quarters of these acquisitions are for him superfluous. He derives no advantage from them, neither for inward satisfaction or for getting ahead in the world; and yet they must all be gone through with. In vain would the father of a family like to curtail his children's mental stores to useful knowledge, to reading, writing and arithmetic, to giving to these just the necessary time, at the right season, three months for two or three winters, to keep his twelve-year-old daughter at home to help her mother and take care of the other children, to keep his boy of ten years for pasturing cattle or for goading on the oxen at the plow.6399 In relation to his children and their interests as well as for his own necessities, he is suspect, he is not a good judge; the State has more light and better intentions than he has. Consequently, the State has the right to constrain him and in fact, from above, from Paris, the State does this. Legislators, as formerly in 1793, have acted according to Jacobin procedure, as despotic theorists. They have formed in their minds a uniform, universal, simple type, that of a child from six to thirteen years as they want to see it, without adjusting the instruction they impose on it to its prospective condition, making abstraction of his positive and personal interest, of his near and certain future, setting the father aside, the natural judge and competent measurer of the education suitable to his son and daughter, the sole authorized arbiter for determining the quality, duration, circumstances and counterpoise of the mental and moral manipulation to which these young lives, inseparable from his own, are going to be subject away from home.—Never, since the Revolution, has the State so vigorously affirmed its omnipotence, nor pushed in encroachments on and intrusion into the proper domain of the individual so far, even to the very center of domestic life. Note that in 1793 and 1794 the plans of Lepelletier de Saint-Fargeau and of Saint-Just remained on paper; the latter for ten years have been in practical operation.63100
At bottom, the Jacobin is a sectarian, propagator of his own faith, and hostile to the faith of others. Instead of admitting that that people's conceptions are different and rejoicing that there are so many of them, each adapted to the human group which believes in it, and essential to believers to help them along, he admits but one, his own, and he uses power to force it upon adherents. He also has his own creed, his catechism, his imperative formula, and he imposes them.— Henceforth,63101 education shall be not only free and obligatory but again secular and nothing but secular. Thus far, the great majority of parents, most of the fathers and all of the mothers, were desirous that it should at the same time be religious. Without speaking of professing Christians, many heads of families, even lukewarm, indifferent or skeptical, judge that this mixture of the two is better for children, and especially for girls. According to them, knowledge and faith should not enter into these young minds separate, but combined and as one aliment; at least, in the particular case in which they were concerned, this, in their view, was better for the child, for themselves, for the internal discipline of the household, for good order at home for which they were responsible, for the maintenance of respect, and for the preservation of morals. For this reason, the municipal councils, previous to the laws of 1882 and 1886, still free to choose instruction and teachers as they pleased, often entrusted their school to the Christian Brethren or Sisters under contract for a number of years, at a fixed price, and all the more willingly because this price was very low.63102 Hence, in 1886, there were in the public schools 10,029 teachers of the Christian Brethren and 39,125 of the Sisters. Now, since 1886, the law insists that public instruction shall be not only secular, but that lay teachers only shall teach; the communal schools, in particular, shall be all secularized, and, to complete this operation, the legislator fixes the term of delay; after that, no member of a congregation, monk or nun, shall teach in any public school.
Meanwhile, each year, by virtue of the law, the communal schools are secularized by hundreds, by fair means or foul; although this is by right a local matter, the municipal councils are not consulted; the heads of families have no voice in this private, domestic interest which touches them to the quick, and such a sensitive point. And likewise, in the cost of the operation their part is officially imposed them; at the present day,63103 in the sum-total of 131,000,000 francs which primary instruction costs annually, the communes contribute 50,000,000 francs; from 1878 to 1891, in the sum-total of 582,000,000 francs expended on school buildings, they contributed 312,000,000 francs.—If certain parents are not pleased with this system they have only to subscribe amongst themselves, build a private school at their own expense, and support Christian Brothers or Sisters in these as teachers. That is their affair; they will not pay one cent less to the commune, to the department or to the State, so that their tax will be double and they will pay twice, first for the primary instruction which they dislike, and next for the primary instruction which suits them.—Thousands of private schools are founded on these conditions. In 1887,63104 these had 1,091,810 pupils, about one fifth of all children inscribed in all the primary schools. Thus one fifth of the parents do not want the secular system for their children; at least, they prefer the other when the other is offered to them; but, to offer it to them, very large donations, a multitude of voluntary subscriptions, are necessary. The distrust and aversion which this system, imposed from above excites can be measured by the number of parents and children and by the greatness of the donations and subscriptions. Note, moreover, that in many of the other communes, in all places where the resources, the common understanding and the generosity of individual founders and donators are not sufficient, the parents, even distrustful and hostile, are now constrained to send their children to the school which is repugnant to them.—In order to be more precise, imagine an official and daily journal entitled Secular journal, obligatory and gratuitous for children from six to thirteen, founded and supported by the State, at an average cost of 582,000,000 francs to set it agoing, and 131,0000,000 francs of annual expenditure, the whole taken from the purses of taxpayers, willingly or not; take it for granted that the 6,000,000 children, girls and boys, from six to thirteen, are forced subscribers to this journal, that they get it every day except Sundays, that, every day, they are bound to read the paper for six hours. The State, through toleration, allows the parents who do not like the official sheet to take another which suits them; but, that another may be within reach, it is necessary that local benefactors, associated together and taxed by themselves, should be willing to establish and support it; otherwise, the father of a family is constrained to read the secular journal to his children, which he deems badly composed and marred by superfluities and shortcomings, in brief edited in an objectionable spirit. Such is the way in which the Jacobin State respects the liberty of the individual.
On the other hand, through this operation, it has extended and fortified itself; it has multiplied the institutions it directs and the persons whom it controls. To direct, inspect, augment and diffuse its primary instruction, the State has maintained 173 normal schools for teachers, male and female, 736 schools and courses of lectures in primary, superior and professional instruction, 66,784 elementary schools, 3,597 maternal schools, and about 115,000 functionaries, men and women.63105 Through these 115,000 officials, representatives and megaphones, Secular Reason, which is enthroned at Paris, sends its voice even to the smallest and most remote villages. It is this Reason, as our rulers define it, with the inclinations, limitations and prejudices they have need of, the near-sighted and half-domesticated grand-daughter of that other formidable sightless, brutal and mad grandmother, who, in 1793 and 1794, sat under the same name and in the same place. With less of violence and blundering, but by virtue of the same instinct and with the same one-sidedness, the latter employs the same propaganda. She too wants to seize the new generations, and through her programs and manuals, her insinuations and summaries of the Ancient Régime, the Revolution and the Empire, by her perceptions of recent or contemporary matters, through her formulae and suggestions in relation to moral, social and political affairs, it is of her and she alone, that she preaches and glorifies.
VI. Summary.
Total and actual effect of the system.—Increasing
unsuitableness between early education and adult life.
—Change for the worse in the mental and moral balance of
contemporary youth.
In this manner does the education by the State end. (in 1890) When a matter is taken out of the hands of those who are concerned and handed over to a third and differently motivated party, it cannot end well; sooner or later, this basic defect will dominate and lead to unexpected results. In this case a growing disparity between education and life. On the three levels of instruction, infancy, adolescence and youth, the actual theoretical and direct instruction is extended and overloaded with the examination, the grade, the diploma and the certificate in view only. To this end any and all means is used; through the application of an unnatural and anti-social system competition, through excessive delay in practical apprenticeship, through the internat, through artificial stimulation and mechanical cramming, and through overwork. There is no consideration of the future, of the adult epoch and the duties of the complete man. The real world in which the young man is about to enter, the state of society to which he must adapt or resign himself, the human struggle in which he must defend himself or keep erect is left out. For this new life he is neither armed, equipped, drilled and hardened. That solid common sense, that determination and those steady nerves, indispensable tools in life, are not dispensed by our schools; quite the contrary; far from qualifying him for his approaching independence the schools disqualify him for it. Accordingly, his entrance into the world and his first steps on the field of practical life are generally a series of painful failures; as a consequence he remains bruised, often for a long time, offended sometimes permanently crippled. This is a rude and dangerous ordeal; the moral and mental balance is altered and risks never being restored; his illusions vanish too suddenly and too completely. His deceptions have been too great and his disappointment too severe. Sometimes, among close friends, embittered and worn out like himself, he is tempted to tell us:
"Through your education you have led us to believe, or you have let us believe, that the world is made in a certain fashion. You have deceived us. It is much uglier, more dull, dirtier, sadder and harder, at least in our opinion and to our imagination: you judge us as overexcited and disordered; if so, it is your fault. For this reason, we curse and scoff at your world and reject your pretended truths which, for us, are lies, including those elementary and primordial verities which you declare are evident to common sense, and on which you base your laws, your institutions, your society, your philosophy, your sciences and your arts."
This is what our contemporary youth, through their tastes, opinions, vague desires in letters, arts and life, have loudly proclaimed for the past fifteen years.63106 (Written in 1890.)
It is only fair to the French to note that they have, since the law called Debré in 1959 allowed the Catholic schools to operate freely with teachers paid by the state provided they,
* use qualified teachers,
* have a contract with the government submitting to inspection of their buildings etc.,
* submit to government study programs,
* regular accepted hours etc. (SR.)
6301 (return)
[ Ordinance of Oct. 4, 1814.]
6302 (return)
[ Liard, "L'Enseignement supérieur pendant la Restauration." (Rev. des deux Mondes, number for Feb.15, 1892.) Decree of April 8, 1814.]
6303 (return)
[ Ordinance of April 17, 1815 (to suppress the university pay and separate the sole University into seventeen regional universities.) This ordinance, dating from the last days of the first Restoration, is repealed the first days of the second Restoration, Aug. 15, 1815.]
6304 (return)
[ "The Modern Régime," p.316. (Laff. II 581-582.)]
6305 (return)
[ Basset, censor of studies in the Charlemagne college, "Coup d'oeil général sur l'Éducation et l'Instruction publique en France" (1816), p. 21. (State of the University in 1815.)]
6306 (return)
[ Today, in year 2000, the educational machinery in France employs more than 1 million teachers and, as all children are in school from the age of 3 to at least 16 years of age, there are more than 12 million children and students under the tutelage of the state. (SR.)]
6307 (return)
[ Political party terms.]
6308 (return)
[ Ordinance of Feb.21, 1821, article 13, and Report by M. de Corbières: "The youth clamour for a religious and moral direction.. .. The religious direction belongs by right to the highest pastors: it is proper to ask from them for these establishments (the university colleges) for constant supervision and to legally call on them to suggest all measures that they may deem necessary."]
6309 (return)
[ Liard, "L'Enseignement supérieur," 840 (Speech by Benjamin Constant in the Chamber of Députés, May 18th, 1827).]
6310 (return)
[ Ordinances of Novem. 21, 1822, article I, and Feb. 2, 1823, article II.]
6311 (return)
[ Ordinances of Sep. 6, 1822, and of Feb. 21st, 1821, title VI, with report by M. de Corbières.]
6312 (return)
[ Liard, ibid., p. 840. (Circular addressed to the rectors by Monseigneur Freyssinous immediately after his installation:) "In summoning a man of sacerdotal character to the head of public instruction, His Majesty has made all France well aware of his great desire to have the youth of his kingdom brought up in monarchical and religious sentiments.... Whoever has the misfortune to live without religion, or not to be devoted to the reigning family, ought to be sensible of what he lacks in becoming a worthy instructor of youth. He is to be pitied and is even culpable."—"Ambroise Rendu," by Eug. Rendu, p. III (circular to rectors in 1817). "Make it known to the MM. the bishops and to all ecclesiastics that, in the work of education, you are simply auxiliaries, and that the object of primary instruction is above all to fortify religious instruction."]
6313 (return)
[ De Riancey, "Histoire de l'instruction publique," II.,312. (Apropos of the lectures by Guizot and Cousin, stopped by Mgr. de Freyssinous:) "He did not believe that a Protestant and a philosopher could treat the most delicate questions of history and science with impartiality, and through a fatal effect of the monopoly he found himself placed between his conscience and the law. On this occasion he sacrificed the law."]
6314 (return)
[ Liard, ibid., p.837. After 1820, "a series of measures are passed which, little by little, give back its primitive constitution to the University and even end in incorporating it more closely with power than under the Empire."]
6315 (return)
[ Here Taine describes the very principle of democratic government in a welfare state. "Do not worry, demand and we supply, the rich will pay!!!" Taine understood and foresaw the riches which the industrial society could be made to produce but neither he nor anyone else could foresee that Human Rights should include central heating, housing, running hot and cold water, television, free health care, a car and worldwide tourism..(SR.)]
6316 (return)
[ See "The Modern Régime," I., pp.183, 202.]
6317 (return)
[ Maggiolo, "des Ecoles en Lorraine." (Details on several communal schools.) 3rd part, pp. 9-50.—Cf. Jourdain, "le Budget de l'Instruction publique," 1857, passim. (Appropriation by the State for primary instruction in 1829, 100,000 francs; in 1832, 1,000,000 francs; in 1847, 2,400,000 francs;—for secondary instruction, in 1830, 920,000 francs; in 1848, 1,500,000 francs; in 1854, 1,549,241 francs. (The towns support their own communal colleges.)—Liard," Universités et Facultés," p. II. In 1829, the budget of Faculties does not reach 1,000,000 francs; in 1848, it is 2,876,000 francs.]
6318 (return)
[ Law of Floreal 11, year X, article 4.—"Rapport sur la statistique comparée de l'enseignement primaire," 1880, vol. II.,p. 133;—31 per cent of the pupils in the public schools were gratuitously admitted in 1837; 57 per cent in 1876-77. The congregationists admit about two thirds of their scholars gratuitously and one third for pay.]
6319 (return)
[ Cf. Jourdain, Ibid., pp. 22, 143, 161.]
6320 (return)
[ Cf. Jourdain, Ibid., p.287. (The fixed salary and examination-fees are included in the above figures.) In 1850, the regular salary of the professor in the Paris Medical Faculty is reduced from 7000 to 6000 francs. In 1849, the maximum of all the salaries of the Law professors is limited to 12,000 francs.]
6321 (return)
[ Read, among other biographies, "Ambroise Rendu," by Eug. Rendu.]
6322 (return)
[ This, in France, lasted until the Communists in 1946 insisted as a price for their participation in governing France that the right to strike for civil servants be inserted in the French Constitution. In this way Stalin was sure to trouble France a great deal. (SR.)]
6323 (return)
[ "Rapport sur la statistique comparée de l'enseignement primaire," 1880, vol. II.,pp.8, 110, 206.—Law of March 15, 1850, "Exposé des motifs," by M. Beugnot.]
6324 (return)
[ "Revue des Deux Mondes," number of Aug.15, 1869, pp. 909, 911. (Article by M. Boissier.)]
6325 (return)
[ Act of Nov. 9, 1818. (Down to 1850 and after, the University so arranged its teaching (in high school) as not to come in conflict with the clergy on the debatable grounds of history. For example, at the end of the 8th grade the history of the Roman Empire after Augustus was rapidly passed over and then, in the 9th grade, they began again with the invasion of the barbarians. The origins of Christianity and the entire primitive history of the Christian Church were thus avoided. For the same reason, modern history ended in 1789.]
6326 (return)
[ M. Guizot, "Mémoires," vol. II.]
6327 (return)
[ An eminent university personage, a political character and man of the world, said to me in 1850: "Pedagogy does not exist. There are only personal methods which each finds out for himself and eloquent phrases for effect on the public."—Bréal, "Quelques mots sur l'instruction publique" (1872), p. 300: "France produces more works on sericiculture than on the direction of colleges; rules and a few works already ancient suffice for us."]
6328 (return)
[ On this day the monarchy of King Louis-Phillippe collapsed and the Republic was declared. (SR.)]
6329 (return)
[ "L'Église et l'État sous la monarchie de juillet," by Thureau-Dangin, 481-483.]
6330 (return)
[ Law of March 15, 1850 (Report by M. Beugnot).]
6331 (return)
[ Law of March 15, 1850, art. 21.]
6332 (return)
[ Law of March 15, 1850, article 21.]
6333 (return)
[ "Ambroise Rendu et l'Université de France," by E. Rendu, p.128 (January, 1850). The discretionary power given to the prefects to punish "the promoters of socialism" among the teachers in the primary schools.—Six hundred and eleven teachers revoked.—There was no less repression and oppression in the secondary and higher departments of instruction.]
6334 (return)
[ Kingdom of July, (Louis-Philippe from 1830 to 24-2-1848.) (SR.)]
6335 (return)
[ De Riancey, ibid., II.., 476. (Words of M. Saint-Marc Girardin.) "We instruct, we do not bring up (children); we cultivate and develop the mind, not the heart."—Similar evidence, as for instance that of M. Dubois, director of the Ecole Normale and of M. Guizot, minister of public instruction. "Education is not up to the level of instruction." (Exposition of the intent of the law of 1836.)]
6336 (return)
[ De Riancey, ibid., II., 401, 475.—Thureau-Dangin, ibid., 145 and 146.—(Words of a fervent Catholic, M. de Montalembert, on the trial of the Free School, Sept.29, 1831.) "It is with a heart still distressed with these souvenirs (personal) that I here declare that, were I a father, I would rather see my children crawl their whole life in ignorance and idleness than expose them to the horrible risk I ran myself of obtaining a little knowledge at the cost of their father's faith, at the price of everything that is pure and fresh in their soul and of honor and virtue in their breast."—(Testimony of a zealous Protestant, M. de Gasparin.) "Religious education does not really exist in the colleges. I remember with horror how I was on finishing my national education. Were we good citizens? I do not know. But it is certain that we were not Christians."—Testimony of a free-thinker, Sainte-Beuve.) "In mass, the professors of the University, without being hostile to religion, are not religious. The pupils feel this, and they leave this atmosphere, not fed on irreligion, but indifferent.... One goes away from the University but little of a Christian."]
6337 (return)
[ Boissier, ibid., p.712]
6338 (return)
[ In my youth, I was able to talk with some of those who lived during the Consulate. All agreed in opinion. One, an admirer of Condillac and founder of a boarding-school, had written for his pupils a number of small elementary treatises, which I still possess.]
6339 (return)
[ Charles Hamel, "Histoire de Juilly," pp. 413, 419 (1818).—Ibid., 532, 665 (April 15, 1846.) The Tontine Association replaced by a limited association (40 years) with a capital of 500,000 francs in 1000 shares of 500 francs each, etc.]
6340 (return)
[ For example, "Monge," the "École Alsacienne," the "École libre des Sciences Politiques." Competent jurists recommend the founders of a private school to organize it under the form of a commercial association, with profit for its aim and not the public good. If the founders of the school wish to maintain the free management of it they must avoid declaring it "of public utility."]
6341 (return)
[ The "École Alsacienne" has been supported for some years mainly by a subsidy of 40,000 francs allotted by the State. This year the State furnishes, "Monge" and "Sainte-Barbe" with subsidies of 130,000 and 150,000 francs, without which they would become bankrupt and close their doors. The State probably thus supports them so as to have a field of pedagogic experiences alongside of its lycées, or to prevent their being bought by some Catholic corporation.]
6342 (return)
[ Even when the masters are conciliatory or reserved the two institutions face each other and the pupils are aware of the antagonism; hence, they turn a cold shoulder to the pupils, education and ideas of the rival institution. In 1852, and on four circular journeys from 1863 to 1866, I was able to observe these sentiments which are now very manifest.]
6343 (return)
[ The period of the annual school examinations in France.—Tr.]
6344 (return)
[ This word means something more than an ordinary "boarding-school," as the reader will see by the text, and is therefore retained as untranslatable.—Tr.]
6345 (return)
[ Expositione universelle of 1889, "Rapport du jury," group II., 1st part, P.492.—Documents collected in the bureaus of public instruction for 1887. (To the internes here enumerated must be added those of private secular establishments, 8958 out of 20,174 pupils.)—Bréal, "Excursions pedagogiques," pp.293, 298.]
6346 (return)
[ All these figures are today in 1998, 100 years later, no longer valid, they are only included in order to understand Taine's insights into human nature and education in general. In 1994-5 there were, in the State lycées and colleges over 4 millions students and only those whose parents live too far from the schools, or some 9%, are boarders. (SR.)]
6347 (return)
[ Today, in 1998, the number of pupils living on French school premises amount to approximatively 10%, mostly because the parents live too far away from the school. (SR.)]
6348 (return)
[ Bréal, ibid., pp. 10, 13. Id., "Quelques mots sur l'instruction publique," p. 286. "The internat is nearly unknown in Germany.... The director (of the gymnase) informs parents where families can be found willing to receive boarders and he must satisfy himself that their hospitality is unobjectionable.... In the new gymnases there is no room for boarders."—Demogeot et Montucci, "Rapport sur l'enseignement secondaire en Angleterre et en Ecosse," 1865.—(I venture also to refer the reader to my "Notes sur l'Angleterre," for a description of Harrow-on-the-Hill and another school at Oxford, made on the spot.)]
6349 (return)
[ Taine, "Notes sur l'Angleterre," P.139. The pupils of the superior class (sixth form), especially the first fifteen of the class (monitors), the first pupil in particular, have to maintain order, insure respect for the rules and, taking it all together, take the place of our maitres d'étude.]
6350 (return)
[ Bréal, "Quelques mots, etc.," pp.281, 282. The same in France, "before the Revolution,... except in two or three large establishments in Paris, the number of pupils was generally sufficiently limited.... At Port-Royal the number of boarders was never over fifty at one time."—"Before 1764, most of the colleges were day-schools with from 15 to 80 pupils," besides the scholarships. and peasant boarders, not very numerous.—"An army of boarders, comprising more than one half of our bourgeois class, under a drill regulated and overlooked by the State, buildings holding from seven to eight hundred boarders—such is what one would vainly try to find anywhere else, and which is essentially peculiar to contemporary France."]
6351 (return)
[ Bréal, ibid., 287, id., "Excursions pedagogiques," p. 10. "I took part (with these pupils) in a supper full of gayety in the room of the celebrated Latinist, Corssen, and I remember the thought that passed through my mind when recurring to the meal we silently partook of at Metz, two hundred of us, under the eye of the censor and general superintendent, and menaced with punishment, in our cold, monastic refectory."]
6352 (return)
[ Even though Taine had visited Eton and other English schools, he appears to have a somewhat rosy picture of life inside these institutions. I have been 9 years to a similar school and can assure the reader that the headmaster's wife is no suitable substitute for a real mother and her table does not replace one's own home. The rector of my school once stated that boarding schools should only be resorted to when one could not remain at home. It was my impression that this school had two effects upon me: the first that I wanted, in spite of good grades, to stop my studies and get a job and the second that I became, like Taine, an opponent to the system. Later on in life I should come to appreciate all the useful things like languages, literature, math and physics which I had learned in this well-organized school. I also came to understand that much worse than harsh discipline is no discipline and no learning at all, something which happened to my children when they attended, for one year only, the American School in Bangkok. (SR.)]
6353 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, "Opinions de Napoleon au Conseil d'État," p.172. (Session of April 7, 1807:) "The professors are to be transferred from place to place in the Empire according to necessity." —Decree of May 1, 1802, article 21: "The three functionaries in charge of the administration and the professors of the lycées may be transferred from the weakest to the strongest lycées and from inferior to superior places according to the talent and zeal they show in their functions."]
6354 (return)
[ A splendid description which also fits the international civil servants working for the United Nations. I know this because I was one for 32 years of my life. I suspect it also fits members of the police forces, secret or not. (SR.)]
6355 (return)
[ Act of Jan. 11, 1811.—Decree of March 17, 1808, articles 101 and 102.]
6356 (return)
[ Boissier ("Revue du Deux Mondes," Aug. 15, 1869, p. 919): "The externe lycées cost and the interne lycées bring in."]
6357 (return)
[ "Statistique de l'enseigncnient secondaire" (46,816 pupils, of which 33,092 internes and 13,724 externes).—Abbé Bougaud, "Le Grand Péril de l'Eglise du France," p. 135.—"Moniteur," March 14, 1865, Speech of Cardinal Bonnechose in the Senate.]
6358 (return)
[ Name of the navy school-ship at Brest.—TR.]
6359 (return)
[ Bréal, "Quelques mots, etc.," p. 308: "We need not be surprised that our children, once out of the college, resemble horses just let loose, kicking at every barrier and committing all sorts of capers. The age of reason has been artificially retarded for them five or six years."]
6360 (return)
[ On the tone and turn of conversation among boys in school on this subject in the upper classes and even earlier, I can do no more than appeal to the souvenirs of the reader.—Likewise, on another danger of the internat, not less serious, which cannot be mentioned. (Here Taine undoubtedly refers to homosexuality. (SR.))]
6361 (return)
[ Bréal, "Excursions pédagogiques," pp. 326, 327. (Testimony of two university graduates.) "The great college virtue is comradeship, which comprises a bond of union among the pupils and hatred of the master." (Bessot:) "Punishment irritates those who undergo it and engenders punishment. The pupils become wearied: they fall into a state of mute irritability coupled with contempt for the system itself and for those who apply it. Unruliness furnishes them with the means of avenging themselves or at least to relax their nerves; they commit disorders whenever they can commit them with impunity.... The interdiction of an act by authority is sufficient to excite the glory of committing it." (A. Adam, "Notes sur l'administration du'un lycée.")—Two independent and original minds have recounted their impressions on this subject, one, Maxime Du Camp, who passed through the lycée system, and the other, George Sand, who would not tolerate if for her son. (Maxime Du Camp, "Souvenirs littéraires," and George Sand, "Histoire de ma vie.")]
6362 (return)
[ All this was in 1890, a long time ago, and if there was much to learn then, how much do we not have to learn now? It helped, however, to reduce the curriculum, that Latin and Greek was removed from middle and senior high school programs and that international Socialism through the Politically Correct movement, either forbade or rewrote history, art and literature. In science, however, the young engineers and scientists have a lot more to learn today and that in all branches of science and especially in electronics. (SR.)]
6363 (return)
[ The so-called "Grandes Ecoles" which exist today and which continue to form the French administrative, commercial and scientific elite. They cannot be done away with since the French universities have become accessible for an ever increasing number of students since nearly 50% of the population pass their "bac" or final high school exam. The level of this exam has decreased year after year and only the preparatory schools for the Grande Ecoles continue to insist on verifying diligence and attention. (SR.)]
6364 (return)
[ Taine expresses this in the following manner: "elle a imaginé quantité de cours surérogatoires et de luxe,.." (SR.)]
6365 (return)
[ This year (1892) 1750 candidates were entered or 240 vacancies in the École Polytechnique, 230 for 30 places in the École des Beaux-Arts (section of Architecture) and 266 for 24 places in the École Normale (section of Literature).]
6366 (return)
[ 1890.]
6367 (return)
[ In France today, in 2000, there are still preparatory schools which, in two or three years after their baccalaureat, prepare the young applicants for the various competetive entrance examinations to the "Grande Ecoles". 4000 specially selected students vie annually with each other for the 400 places in the École Polytechnique. (SR.)]
6368 (return)
[ I was once, writes Taine, an examiner for admission to a large special school and speak from experience.. Taine was well placed to know about the system since he was first in the competetive entrance exam (concours) to the École Normale Superior, and had also passed all his other studies with great brilliance. (SR.)]
6369 (return)
[ A practical apprenticeship in the Faculty of Medicine is less retarded; the future doctors, after the third year of their studies, enter a hospital for two years, ten months of each year or 284 days of service, including an "obstetrical stage" of one months. Later, on competing for the title of physician or surgeon in the hospitals and for the aggrégation of the Faculty, the theoretical preparation is as onerous as that of other careers.]
6370 (return)
[ "Souvenirs" by Chancellor Pasquier. (Written in 1843). (Étienne Dennis Pasquier (Paris 1767—id. 1862) was a high official under Napoleon, and President of the upper house under Louis-Phillippe and author of "L'Histoire de mon temps", published posthumously in 1893. Librarie Plon, Paris 1893. On page 16 and 17 in volume I he fully confirms Taine's views. (SR.)]
6371 (return)
[ Idem., Nobody attended the Lectures of the Law faculty of Paris, except sworn writers who took down the professor's dictation and sold copies of it. "These were nearly all supported by arguments communicated beforehand... At Bourges, everything was got through within five or six months at most."]
6372 (return)
[ "Souvenirs" by Chancellor Pasquier, vol. I. p. 17. Nowadays, "the young man who enters the world at twenty-two, twenty-three or twenty-four years of age, thinks that he has nothing more to learn; he commonly starts with absolute confidence in himself and profound disdain for whoever does not share in the ideas and opinions that he has adopted. Full of confidence in his own force, taking himself at his own value, he is governed by one single thought, that of displaying this force and this estimate himself immediately so as to demonstrate what he is worth." This must have been written around 1830. (SR.)]
6373 (return)
[ This last quality is given by Sainte-Beuve.]
6374 (return)
[ Dunoyer, "De la liberté du travail" (1845), II.,119. The extraordinary progress of England in the mechanical arts, according to English engineers, "depends much less on the theoretical knowledge of scholars than on the practical skill of the workmen who always succeed better in overcoming difficulties than cultivated minds." For example, Watt, Stephenson, Arkwright, Crampton and, in France, Jacquart.]
6375 (return)
[ Today, in year 2000, the socialist revolutionaries have, through the Human Rights activities broken the chain between the generations, forbidden the parents, the teachers and the supervisors to correct and discipline their children and apprentices. The French educational system, perfectly equal, still survives and is probably the best in existence since it insists on teaching the students even if a lot of the curriculum is a dead loss. The final product is still a useful citizen and functionary, something which make France tick. (SR.)]
6376 (return)
[ Bréal, "Quelques mots," etc.,, p. 336. (He quotes M. Cournot, a former rector, inspector-general, etc.:) "The Faculties know that they would be subject to warnings on the part of the authorities as well as to comparisons and regrettable desertions on the part of the pupils if the proportion between candidates and admissions did not vary between 45 and 50%... When the proportion of postponements reaches between 50 and 555 the examiners admit with groans, considering the hard times, candidates of which they would reject at least one half their hands were not tied." (This was 100 years ago, today less than 30% on the average, but more than 70% in certain bad areas, fail their Baccalauréat. The curriculum has, however, been lightened so that about 50% of the population may end up passing their baccalauréat. Democracy oblige. (SR.))]
6377 (return)
[ A machine for the forced feeding of ducks and geese to make their liver grow to excessive proportions.]
6378 (return)
[ An old professor, after thirty years of service, observed to me by way of summing up: "One half, at least, of our pupils are not fitted to receive the instruction we give them."]
6379 (return)
[ Lately, the director of one of these schools remarked with great satisfaction and still greater naïveté: "This school is superior to all others of its kind in Europe, for nowhere else is what we teach taught in the same number of years."]
6380 (return)
[ But what if Taine was mistaken? What if he, like so many other highly talented and intelligent men, took his own superb intelligence and imagination for granted? What if the talent of such men is inherited? We know from identical twins how many of our particularities have been given to us at birth. What if most men are lazy and especially intellectually so, what if we can only be made to learn and think when under great stress, the stress introduced by fear of dismissal or hope of promotion or riches? Then the French system is perhaps hard, perhaps expensive but certainly useful in producing the great number of hardworking and competent and passively obedient supervisors and civil servants that any large organization needs. (SR.)]
6381 (return)
[ "Souvenirs", by Pasquier (Etienne-Dennis, duc), chancelier de France, in VI volumes, Librarie Plon, Paris 1893. Although pupils were admitted in the preparatory Schools very early, "our navy, engineer and artillery officers were justly esteemed the best instructed in Europe, as able practically as theoretically; the position occupied by artillery and engineer officers from 1792 in the French army sufficiently attests this truth. And yet they did not know one tenth of those who now issue from the preparatory schools. Vauban himself would have been unable to undergo the examination for admission into the Polytechnic School." There is then in our system "a luxury of science, very fine in itself, but which is not necessary to insure good service on land or at sea." The same in civil careers, with the bar, in the magistracy, in the administration and even in literature and the sciences. The proof of this is found in the men of great talent who, after 1789, were prominent in the Constituent Assembly. In the new-born University there was not one half of the demand for attainments as is now exacted. There is nothing like our over-loaded baccalauréat, and yet there issued from it Villemain, Cousin, Hugo, Lamartine, etc. No École Polytechnique existed, and yet at the end of the eighteenth century in France, we find the richest constellation of savants, Lagrange, Laplace, Monge, Fourcroy, Lavoisier, Berthollet, Haüy, and others. (Since the date of these souvenirs (1843) the defects in the French system have gotten worse.]
6382 (return)
[ In England and in the United States the architect and engineer produce more than we do with greater pliancy, fertility, originality and boldness of invention, with a practical capacity at least equal and without having passed six, eight or ten years in purely theoretical studies.—Cf. Des Rousiers, "La Vie Américaine," p. 619: "Our polytechnicians are scientific erudites.... The American engineer is not omniscient as they were, he is special." "But, in his specialty he has profound knowledge; he is always trying to make it more perfect by additions, and he does more than the polytechnician to advance his science" or his art. (Since Taine noted this times have changed; I once put my 3 older sons into the American school in Bangkok (in 1972), and not only did they not learn anything during their year there, they actually lost some of their reading and writing skills and I had to remove them as soon as I could. (SR.)).]
6383 (return)
[ In 1889 a law called Freycinet, France introduced 3 years of military service for all young men. Students and married men were, subject to certain conditions, released after one year of service. (SR.)]
6384 (return)
[ To facilitate his or her comprehension the reader might replace the word Jacobin with the expression Socialist, Marxist, national-socialist or Communist since they are all heirs to the heritage left by the French Revolutionaries. (SR.)]
6385 (return)
[ IIIrd Republique lasted from 14-9-1870 until 13-7-1940. (SR.)]
6386 (return)
[ Instruction is good, not in itself, but through the good it does, and especially to those who possess or acquire it. If, simply by raising his finger, a man could enable every French man or woman to read Virgil readily and demonstrate Newton's binomial theory, this man would be dangerous and ought to have his hands tied; for, should he inadvertently raise his finger, manual labor would be repugnant and, in a year or two, become almost impossible in France.]
6387 (return)
[ And so it happened. After the second world war, when international Marxism became installed its agents throughout the Western world, compulsory, unified education was pushed from the age of 14 to 16 and a majority of young remained in school till after their 18th birthday, an education which successfully made them believe that the attitudes and values they were taught were the only valid ones. (SR.)]
6388 (return)
[ Liard, "Universités et Facultés," p. 39 and following pages.—"Rapport sur la statistique comparée de l'instruction," vol. II. (1888).—"Exposition universelle de 1889" ("Rapport du jury," groupe II., part I., p.492.)]
6389 (return)
[ In 1994 there were in France 1389 public and 841 private lycées (SR.)]
6390 (return)
[ Liard, ibid., p. 77.]
6391 (return)
[ Also called the preparatory classes, the so-called math-sup and math-spe of the preparatory schools attached to the state lycées and attended by selected 18-20 year-old students. (SR.)]
6392 (return)
[ These figures were obtained in the bureaux of the direction of primary instruction.—The sum-total of 582,000,000 francs is composed of 241,000,000, furnished directly by the State, 28,000,000 furnished by the departments, and 312,000, 000 furnished by the communes. The communes and departments being, in France, appendices of the State, subscribe only with its permission and under its impulsion. Hence the three contributions furnish only one.—Cf. Turlin, "Organisation financière et budget de l'Instruction primaire," p. 61. (In this study, the accounts are otherwise made up. Certain expenses being provided for by annuities are carried into the annual expenditure:) "From June 1, 1878, to Dec. 31, 1887, expenses of first installation, 528 millions; ordinary expenses in 1887, 173 millions."]
6393 (return)
[ Law of June 16, 1881 (on gratuitous education).]
6394 (return)
[ Law of March 28, 1882 (on obligatory education).]
6395 (return)
[ National temperament must here be taken into consideration as well as social outlets. Instruction out of proportion with and superior to condition works differently with different nations. For the German adult it is rather soothing and a derivative; with the adult Frenchman it is especially an irritant or even an explosive.]
6396 (return)
[ It might be interesting to note what Mark Twain wrote on India education about the same period when Taine wrote this text: "apparently, then, the colleges of India were doing what our high schools have long been doing—richly over-supplying the market for highly educated service; and thereby doing a damage to the scholar, and through him to the country. At home I once made a speech deploring the injuries inflicted by the High School in making handicrafts distasteful to boys who would have been willing to make a living at trades and agriculture if they had but had the good luck to stop with the common school. But I made no converts. Not one, in a community overrun with educated idlers who were above following their fathers' mechanical trades, yet could find no market for their book-knowledge."]
6397 (return)
[ Among the pupils who receive this primary instruction the most intelligent, who study hardest, push on and pass an examination by which they obtain the certificate that qualifies them for elementary teaching. The consequences are as follows. Comparative table of annual vacancies in the various services of the prefecture of the Seine and of the candidates registered for these places. ("Débats," Sep. 16, 1890:) Vacancies for teachers, 42; number of registered candidates, 1,847. Vacancies for female teachers, 54; number of candidates, 7,139.—7,085 of these young women, educated and with certificates, and who cannot get these places, must be content to marry some workman, or become housemaids, and are tempted to become lorettes. (From the church of Notre Dame de Lorette in Paris in the neighborhood of which many young, pretty women of easy virtue were to be found. (SR.))]
6398 (return)
[ Taine wrote this when compulsory education in France kept the children in school until their 13th year. Today in year 2000 they must stay until they are 16 years old but more often continue until they are 19—23 years old. (SR.)]
6399 (return)
[ In certain cases, the school commission may grant exemptions. But there art two or three parties in each commune, and the father of a family must stand well with the dominant party to obtain them.]
63100 (return)
[ After the second world war the world, helped by the United Nations, have pushed obligatory education further and further, and the number of dissatisfied youth have consequently increased and increased. (SR.)]
63101 (return)
[ Law of March 28, 1882, and Oct. 30, 1886.]
63102 (return)
[ "Journal des Débats," Sep. 1, 1891. Report of the Commission on Statistics: "In 1878-9 the number of congregationist schools was 23,625 with 2,301,943 pupils."]
63103 (return)
[ Bureaux of the direction of public instruction, budget of 1892.]
63104 (return)
[ "Exposition universelle" of 1889. "Rapport général," by M. Alfred Picard, p. 367. At the same date, the number of pupils in the public schools was 4,500,119.—"Journal des Débats," Sep. 12, 1891, Report of the commission of statistics. "From 1878-79 to 1889-90, 5,063 public congregationist schools are transformed into secular schools or suppressed; at the time of their transformation they enumerated in all 648,824 pupils.—Following upon this secularization, 2,839 private congregationist schools are opened as competitors and count in 1889-90, 354,473 pupils."—In ten years public secular instruction gains 12,229 schools and 973,380 pupils; public congregationist instruction loses 5,218 schools and 550,639 pupils. On the other hand, private congregationist instruction gains 3,790 schools and 413,979 pupils."]
63105 (return)
[ Turlin, ibid, p. 61. (M. Turlin enumerates "104,765 functionaries," to which must be added the teaching, administrative and auxiliary staff of teachers of the 173 normal schools and their 3000 pupils, all gratuitous). (In 1994 there were 247 000 primary school teachers (instituteurs) in public schools in France. Taine could not foresee that the French schools and universities should become an enormous industry, the number of teachers and universities multiplied by ten and the number of government functionaries multiplied by 20 and that the annual 50 000 vacancies should find more than a million candidates, the young overeducated persons dreaming of becoming functionaries and hence "safe" for life. (SR.))]
63106 (return)
[ In this respect, very instructive indications may be found in the autobiography of Jules Valès, "l'Enfant," "le Bachelier," and "l'Insurge." Since 1871, not only in literature do the successful works of men of talent but, again, the abortive attempts of impotent innovators and blasted half-talents, converge to this point."]
End of The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6
