XVIII. M. GUIZOT'S MINISTRY OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION.

IN FRANCE, FROM 1832-1837.*

I. PRIMARY INSTRUCTION.

I FILLED the ministry of Public Instruction for four years, from October · 11, 1832, to January, 1837. During that time I entered upon every question which belonged or applied to that department. I am anxious to retrace what I accomplished, what I commenced without carrying through, and what I intended to achieve. Throughout the same period I was also engaged in all the struggles of interior and external policy, in all the vicissitudes of the composition and destiny of the cabinet. I shall exempt from this battle of the events and passions of the day, such matters as relate only to Public Instruction.

There is a fact which has been too little regarded. Amongst us, and in our days, the ministry of Public Instruction is the most popular of all governmental departments, and that which the people look upon with the highest favor and expectation. A good symptom in our age, when men, it is said, are exclusively occupied with their actual and material interests. The ministry of Public Instruction has nothing whatever to do with the material and actual interests of the generation which possesses the world for the moment. It is consecrated to succeeding races-to their intelligence and destiny. Our age and our country, therefore, are not so indifferent as they are accused of being to moral order and to the future.

Family duties and feelings exercise at present an extensive sway. I say duties and feelings, not the family spirit or sympathy of class, such as it existed under our old society. Legal and political family ties are weakened; natural and moral bonds have increased in strength. Never did parents live so affectionately and intimately with their children; never were they so completely engaged with their instruction and prospects. Although profusely mingled with error and evil, the violent shock which, in this sense, Rousseau and his school have given to minds and manners, has not been profitless, and salutary traces still remain. Egotism, corruption, and worldly frivolity assuredly are not rare. foundations of the family tie have lately been and still are exposed to senseless and perverse attacks. Nevertheless, looking upon our social system in general, and on those millions of existences which pass noiselessly on, but really constitute France, the domestic virtues and affections predominate, and are more than ever exemplified in the constant and active solicitude of parents for the education of their children.

• From Guizot's "Memoirs to Illustrate the History of my Life."

The very

An idea connects itself with these sentiments, and gives them a new empire. The idea that personal merit is now the first controlling influence, as it is the primary condition of success in life, and that this quality is indispensable. We have witnessed, during three-fourths of a century, the incompetence and fragility of all the advantages derived from accident, birth, riches, or traditionary rank. We have seen, at the same time, in every stage and fluctuation of society, a crowd of men raise themselves and take high places, by the sole force of intelligence, character, knowledge and exertion. In conjunction with the sad and injurious impressions which this violent and perpetual confusion of places and persons excites in the mind, a great moral lesson presents itself—the conviction that man can vindicate his own value, and that his destiny essentially depends on individual worth. In spite of all that our manners retain of weakness and inconsistency, there is at present in French society a general and profound sentiment, acting powerfully in the bosoms of families, which gives to parents more judgment and foresight in the education of their children, and which they could not have acquired without these rude warnings of contemporary experience: judgment and foresight even more necessary in the classes already well treated by fortune, than in others less favored. A great geologist, M. Elie de Beaumont, has brought us into close acquaintance with the revolutions of our globe. The inequalities of its surface are formed by interior fermentation; volcanoes have produced mountains. Let not the classes which occupy the social eminences delude themselves. A corresponding fact is passing under their feet. Human society continues to ferment even in its lowest depths, and struggles to eject from its bosom new elevations. This extensive and hidden ebullition, this ardent and universal movement of ascent, forms the essential characteristic of all democratic associations; it is, in truth, democracy itself. In presence of this fact, what would become of the classes already endowed with social advantages—the longdescended, the rich, the great, and the favored of every description, if to the gifts of fortune they added not the claims of personal merit? If they did not by study, labor, acquirement, and energetic habits of mind and life, render themselves equal in every career to the immense competition they have to encounter, and which can only be overcome by grappling with it vigorously?

It is to this condition of our society, to an instinctive appreciation of its necessities, to the sentiment of ambitious or provident solicitude which reigns in families, that the ministry of Public Instruction owes its popularity All parents interest themselves warmly in the abundance and healthfulness of the source from which their children are to be nourished.

By the side of this powerful domestic interest, a great public consideration also places itself. Necessary to families, the ministry of Public Instruction is not less important to the state.

The grand problem of modern society is the government of minds. It has frequently been said in the last century, and it is often repeated now,

that minds ought not to be fettered, that they should be left to their free operation, and that society has neither the right nor the necessity of interference. Experience has protested against this haughty and precip itate solution. It has shown what it was to suffer minds to be unchecked, and has roughly demonstrated that even in intellectual order, guides and bridles are necessary. The very men who have maintained, here and elsewhere, the principle of total unrestraint, have been the first to renounce it as soon as they experienced the burden of power. Never were minds more violently hunted down, never less open to self-instruction and spontaneous development; never have more systems been invented, or greater efforts been made to subjugate them, than under the rule of those parties who had demanded the abolition of all intermeddling in the domains of intellect.

But if, for the advantage of progress, as well as for good order in soci ety, a certain government of minds is always necessary, the conditions and means of this government are neither at all times nor in all places the same. Within our own experience they have greatly changed.

Formerly, the church alone possessed the control of minds. She united, at once, moral influence and intellectual supremacy. She was charged equally to feed intelligence and to govern souls. Science was her domain as exclusively as faith. All this is over. Intelligence and science have become expanded and secularized. Laical students have entered in crowds into the field of the moral sciences, and have cultivated it with brilliancy. They have almost entirely appropriated mathematics and natural philosophy. The church has not wanted erudite ecclesiastics; but the learned world, professors and public, has become more secular than clerical. Science has ceased to dwell habitually under the same roof with faith; she has traversed the world. She has moreover become a practical force, fertile in daily application for the uses of all classes of society.

In becoming more laical, intelligence and science have aspired to greater liberty. This was the natural consequence of their power, popularity, and pride, which increased together. And the public has sustained them in their pretension, for it speedily discovered that its own liberty was intimately connected with theirs; and soon after, that liberty conferred on the masters of thought and science a just reward for the new powers they had placed at the disposal of society, and for the common benefits they had conferred on all.

Whether we receive them with congratulations or regret; whether we agree or differ upon their consequences; whether we blind or alarm ourselves as to their danger-here are certain and irrevocable facts. Intelligence and science will never again become essentially ecclesiastical; neither will they be satisfied without an extensive field of free exercise.

But precisely because they are now more laical, more powerful, and more free than formerly, intelligence and science could never remain beyond the government of society. When we say government, we do not necessarily imply positive and direct authority. Washington said,

"influence is not government;" and in the sense of political order he was right. Influence there would not suffice. Direct and promptly effective action is necessary. With intellectual order the case is different. Where minds are concerned, it is preeminently by influence that government should be exercised. Two facts, as I think, are here necessary: one, that the powers devoted to intellectual labor, the leaders of science and literature, should be drawn towards the government, frankly assembled around it, and induced to live in natural and habitual relations with constitutional authority; the other, that the government should not remain careless or ignorant of the moral development of succeeding generations, and that as they appear upon the scene, it should study to establish intimate ties between them and the state, in the bosom of which God has placed their existence. For the progress of intellectual order, it is the legitimate and necessary duty of civil government to promote great establishments for science, and great schools for public instruction, on regulated conditions, and supported by the highest public authority.

By what means can we at present, in France, secure this action of the government, and satisfy a vital requirement of society? Formerly, France possessed, in great number, special establishments, supported by themselves; universities, and learned or scholastic corporations, which, without depending on the state, were, however, connected with it by ties more or less intimate or apparent; sometimes demanding its support, and at others, not able entirely to withdraw from its intervention; and thus conferring on the civil power an actual although an indirect and limited influence on the intellectual life and education of society. The University of Paris, the Sorbonne, the Benedictines, the Oratorians, the Lazarists, the Jesuits, and many other corporate bodies and schools scattered through the provinces, were assuredly not branches of public administration, and were often the causes of serious embarrassment. Before they disappeared in the revolutionary tempest, several of these establishments had fallen into abuse or insignificance, which destroyed their moral credit and obliterated their services. But for ages they had seconded the intellectual development of French society, and had coöperated profitably in its government. Being nearly all old proprietaries, attached to their traditions, and founded with a religious object, they had instincts of order and authority as well as of independence. In the aggregate, they constituted a mode of action by the state on the intellectual life and education of the people: a confused and incoherent mode, which had its difficulties and vices, but was not deficient either in dignity or efficacy.

From 1789 to 1800, three celebrated bodies, true sovereigns of their time, the Constituent Assembly, the Legislative Assembly, and the National Convention, undertook to bestow on France a grand system of public instruction. Three persons of eminent and very opposite abilities, M. de Talleyrand, M. de Condorcet, and M. Daunou, were successively commissioned to draw up a report and present a plan on this important question, with which the enlightened spirits engaged in revolutionary struggles delighted to occupy themselves, as if to find in this field of

speculation and philosophic hope, some relief from the violence of the times. The reports of these three brilliant men, representing the society, the politics, and the science of their age, are remarkable works, both in their common character and in their different and distinctive features. In all three, man alone reigns supreme in this world, and the Revolution of 1789 is the date of his accession to the throne. He ascends confident in his omnipotence, regulates human society as a master, for the future as well as for the present, and feels assured of fashioning it according to his own will. In the report to which M. de Talleyrand has affixed his name, the pride of mind predominates, combined with benevolent ardor, but without passion or hesitating doubt. Public instruction is there called "a power which embraces every thing, from the games of infancy to the most imposing fêtes of the nation; every thing calls for a creation in this branch; its essential characteristic ought to be universality, whether in persons or things; the state must govern theological studies as well as all others; evangelical morality is the noblest present which the Divinity has bestowed on man; the French nation does honor to itself in rendering this homage." The Institute, the successor of all the academies, is proposed as the supreme school, the pinnacle of public education; it is to be at once a learned and instructing body, and the administrative organ of all other scientific and literary establishments.

Between the report of M. de Talleyrand to the Constituent Assembly and that of M. de Condorcet to the Legislative Assembly, the filiation is visible. They have traveled along the same declivity, but the space included is immense. With the latter, philosophical ambition has given way to revolutionary excitement. A special and exclusive feeling of policy governs the work; equality is its principle and sovereign end. "The order of nature," says Condorcet, "includes no distinctions in society beyond those of education and wealth. To establish amongst citizens an equality in fact, and to realize the equality confirmed by law, ought to be the primary object of national instruction. In every degree, and in all public establishments, the teaching should be entirely gratuitous; instruction without charge should be the first consideration in respect of social equality." The report and plan of Condorcet are entirely devoted to this tyrannical notion of equality, which penetrates even to the heart of the great national association of science and art destined to crown the edifice. "No member can belong to two classes at the same time; this is injurious to equality."

In the report of M. Daunou to the National Convention, liberty assumes a larger share than equality. He reproaches his predecessors with not having sufficiently acknowledged and secured its rights. In the plan of M. de Talleyrand, he found "too much respect for old forms, too many bonds and impediments." "Condorcet," he said, "proposed to institute in some degree an academic church." M. Daunou desires no public organization of scientific or literary instruction. The state, according to him, should only interfere with elementary and professional training. Beyond that, "liberty of education, liberty of private seminaries, liberty