This was the state of affairs when, towards the end of the Second Empire, a vigorous reform movement set in. Some young Frenchmen had visited Germany; they had been struck by the superiority of the German university system over the Napoleonic system of Faculties and special schools. Certainly France, with its defective organisation, had produced many men and many works, but it now began to be held that "in all kinds of enterprises the least possible part should be left to chance," and that "when an institution proposes to train professors of history and historians, it ought to supply them with the means of becoming what it intends them to be." M. V. Duruy, minister of Public Education, supported the partisans of a renaissance of the higher studies. But he did not think it practicable to interfere, for the purpose either of remodelling, of fusing, or of suppressing them, with the existing institutions,--the Collège de France, the Faculties of Letters, the École normale supérieure, the École des chartes, all of which were consecrated by the services they had rendered, and by the lustre they received from the eminent men who had been, or were, connected with them. He changed nothing, he added. He crowned the somewhat heterogeneous edifice of existing institutions by the creation of an "École pratique des hautes études," which was established at the Sorbonne in 1868. The École pratique des hautes études (historical and philological section) was intended by those who founded it to prepare young men for research of a scientific character. It was not meant to be subservient to the interests of the professions, and there was to be no popularisation. Students were not to go there to learn the results obtained by science, but, for the same purpose which takes the chemical student to the laboratory, to be initiated into the technical methods by which new results can be obtained. Thus the spirit of the new institution was not without some analogy to that of the primitive tradition of the Collège de France. It was endeavoured to do there, for all the branches of universal history and philology, what had long been done at the École des chartes for the limited domain of French mediæval history. II. As long as the Faculties of Letters were satisfied to be as they were (that is, without students), and as long as their ambition did not go beyond their traditional functions (the holding of public lectures, the conferring of degrees), the organisation of the higher teaching of the historical sciences in France remained in the condition which we have described. When the Faculties of Letters began to seek a new justification for their existence and new functions, changes became inevitable.