France -- Civilization; France -- Politics and government; France -- Social life and customs -- 19th century
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
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