书城公版The Origins of Contemporary France
19097600001155

第1155章

The monopoly of education therefore belongs to him. He has introduced military uniforms, discipline and spirit into all the public and private secondary educational establishments. He has reduced and subjected the ecclesiastical superintendence of primary education to the minimum. He has removed the last vestige of regional, encyclopedic and autonomous universities and substituted for these special and professional schools, He has rendered veritable superior instruction abortive and stifled all spontaneous and disinterested curiosity in youth. - Meanwhile ascending to the source of secular knowledge, he has brought the Institute under his influence. On this government tool he has effected the necessary cuts, appropriated the credit to himself and imposed his favor or disfavor on the masters of science and literature. Then, descending from the source to the canals, constructing dams, arranging channels, applying his constraints and impulsions, he has subjected science and literature to his police, to his censorship and to his control of publishing and printing. He has taken possession of all the media - theatres, newspapers, books, pulpits and tribunes. He has organized all these into one vast industry which he watches over and directs, a factory of public attitudes which works unceasingly and in his hands to the glorification of his system, reign and person.[64] Again here, he is found equal and similar to himself, a stern conqueror making the most of his conquest to the last extreme, a shrewd operator as meticulous as he is shrewd, as resourceful as he is consequent, incomparable in adapting means to ends, unscrupulous in carrying them out,[65] fully satisfied that, through the constant physical pressure of universal and crushing dread, all resistance would be overcome. He is maintaining and prolonging the struggle with colossal forces, but against a historic and natural force lying beyond his grasp, lately against belief founded on religious instinct and on tradition, and now against evidence engendered by realities and by the agency of the testing process. Consequently, obliged to forbid the testing process, to falsify things, to disfigure the reality, to deny the evidence, to lie daily and each day more outrageously,[66] to accumulate glaring acts so as to impose silence, to arouse by this silence and by these lies[67] the attention and perspicacity of the public, to transform almost mute whispers into sounding words and insufficient eulogies into open protestations. In short, weakened by his own success and condemned beforehand to succumb under his victories, to disappear after a short triumph, Napoleon will leave intact and erect the indestructible rival (science and knowledge) whom he would like to crush as an adversary but turn to account as an instrument.[68]

______________________________________________________________________Notes:

[1] Lamennais, "Du Progrès de la Révolution," p.163.

[2] Any socialist or social-nationalist leader would undoubtedly have been impressed by Napoleon's ability to control and dominate his admiring people and do their best to copy his methods. (SR.)[3] "The Modern Régime," I., 247.

[4] Pelet de la Lozère, p. 159.

[5] Maggiolo, "Les écoles en Lorraine avant et aprés 1789," 3rd part, p.22 and following pages. (Details on the foundation or the revival of primary schools in four departments after 1802.) Sometimes, the master is the one who taught before 1789, and his salary is always the same as at that time; I estimate that, in a village of an average size, he might earn in all between 500 and 600 francs a year; his situation improves slowly and remains humble and wretched down to the law of 1833. - There are no normal schools for the education of primary instructors except one at Strasbourg established in 1811 by the prefect, and the promise of another after the return from Elba, April 27, 1815. Hence the teaching staff is of poor quality, picked up here and there haphazard. But, as the small schools satisfy a felt want, they increase. In 1815, there are more than 22,000, about as many as in 1789; in the four departments examined by M. Maggiolo there are almost as many as there are communes. - Nevertheless, elsewhere, "in certain departments, it is not rare to find twenty or thirty communes in one arrondissement with only one schoolmaster. . . . One who can read and write is consulted by his neighbors the same as a doctor." -("Ambroise Rendu," by E. Rendu, p.107, Report of 1817.)[6] Decree of May 1, 1802, articles 2, 4 and 5. - Decree of March 17, 1808, articles 5, 8 and 117.

[7] E. Rendu, Ibid., pp.39 and 41

[8] Id., ibid., 41. (Answers of approval of the bishops, letter of the archbishop of Bordeaux, May 29, 1808.) "There are only too many schools whose instructors neither give lessons nor set examples of Catholicism or even of Christianity. It is very desirable that these wicked men should not be allowed to teach."[9] Decree of Nov. 15, 1911, article 192. - Cf. the decree of March 17, 1808, article 6. "The small primary schools are those where one learns to read, write and cipher." -Ibid., § 3, article 5, definition of boarding-schools and secondary communal schools. This definition is rendered still more precise in the decree of Nov.15, 1811, article 16.

[10] Pelet de la Lozère, ibid. 175. (Words of Napoleon before the Council of State, May 21, 180.)[11] Alexis Chevalier, "Les Frères des éco1es chrétiennes pendant la Révolution, " 93. (Report by Portalis approved by the First Consul, Frimaire 10, year XII.)[12] Like in the socialist and national-socialist parties and trade unions which were to dominate the Western democracies throughout the 20th century. (SR.)[13] "Ambroise Rendu," by E. Rendu, P.42.