France -- Civilization; France -- Politics and government; France -- Social life and customs -- 19th century
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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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