We must not, however, omit to notice its civil character, the combination of which with its military object forms its peculiar feature, and has greatly contributed to its reputation. Amongst its founders were men, who though ardent revolutionists, were thirsting for the restoration of schools and learning, which for a time had been totally extinguished. The chief of these, besides Carnot, were Monge and Fourcroy, Berthollet and Lagrange. Of Carnot and Lagrange, one amongst the first of war ministers, the other one of the greatest of mathematicians, we need not say more. Berthollet, a man of science and practical skill, first suggested the school; Monge, the founder of Descriptive Geometry, a favorite _savant_ of Napoleon though a zealous republican, united to real genius that passion for teaching and for his pupils, which makes the _beau idéal_ of the founder of a school; and Fourcroy was a man of equal practical tact and science, who at the time had great influence with the convention, and was afterwards intrusted by Napoleon with much of the reorganization of education in France. When the school first started there was scarcely another of any description in the country. For nearly three years the revolution had destroyed every kind of teaching. The attack upon the old schools, in France, as elsewhere, chiefly in the hands of the clergy, had been begun by a famous report of Talleyrand’s, presented to the legislative assembly in 1791, which recommended to suppress all the existing academies within Paris and the provinces, and to replace them by an entirely new system of national education through the country. In this plan a considerable number of military schools were proposed, where boys were to be educated from a very early age. When the violent revolutionists were in power, they adopted the destructive part of Talleyrand’s suggestions without the other. All schools, from the university downwards, were destroyed; the large exhibitions or _Bourses_, numbering nearly 40,000, were confiscated or plundered by individuals, and even the military schools and those for the public works (which were absolutely necessary for the very roads and the defense of the country) were suppressed or disorganized. The school of engineers at Mézières (an excellent one, where Monge had been a professor,) and that of the artillery at La Fère, were both broken up, whilst the murder of Lavoisier, and the well known saying in respect to it, that “the Republic had no need of chemists,” gave currency to a belief, which Fourcroy expressed in proposing the Polytechnic, “that the late conspirators had formed a deliberate plan to destroy the arts and sciences, and to establish their tyranny on the ruins of human reason.”