The passion for national unity manifested itself, among other things, in a demand for a system of national education. The great men of the Assembly and of the Convention bent their shoulders to the task. For the first time in the history of the nation it was recognized that after the leveling of classes, the only guarantee for social order in the future was to be found in the education of the masses. Accordingly, they outlined a grand scheme of graded instruction. The foundation was popular education by the primary school; then came a system of middle or secondary schools; and then instruction by professional faculties, including a magnificent normal school for the training of teachers, and a polytechnic institution of the first order. The whole was to be crowned by a museum, the College of France, and the Institute. Education was to be gratuitous and obligatory. The essential feature of the entire plan was the character of the primary school, which was not to teach merely the necessary rudiments of reading, writing, and ciphering, but the introductory elements of the complete encyclopedia of instruction. The whole structure was purely secular, and no account was taken of the education of females after the age of eight. It was declared that young girls should be trained by their parents, and entirely at home. Condorcet alone believed in the intellectual equality of the sexes. Lakanal secured a decree for mixed schools, under certain conditions, in which the daughters of the republic should have the same instruction as its sons "as far as their sex would permit"; but they were to be chiefly occupied with spinning, dressmaking, and the domestic arts then considered the chief ones proper to their sex. Some parts of the enormous design were put into operation, but it was found to transcend the abilities of an unsettled people. Talleyrand pared down its dimensions, but at the fall of the Directory nothing had been accomplished except the foundation of the polytechnic school. [Illustration: NAPOLEON AS FIRST CONSUL Profile in sepia by Lemoine. Belonging to M. Petit Napoleon Exposition, 1895.]