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The French Educational System – Lycées and Colleges – The University of Paris – The College of France

THE three principal establishments in France connected with “superior instruction” are the College of France, an independent institution where lectures free to everyone are delivered by the first literary and scientific men of the country; the University of France, whose chief function is to confer degrees; and the Sorbonne, which, when it does not mean the building of that name, is used to denote collectively the three faculties of which the Sorbonne may be considered the headquarters. As regards secondary instruction, the lyceums (lycées) are public schools maintained by the state; the colleges (collèges), public schools supported by the municipalities throughout France. In the innumerable colleges, of which every provincial town of the least importance possesses one, the studies are absolutely identical; a source of infinite satisfaction to a certain Minister of Public Instruction, who is reported one day to have exclaimed, “It is gratifying to reflect that at this moment in every college of France the opening lines of the second book of the Æneid are being construed.”

The future masters for the different lyceums and colleges are all educated in a special school known as the École Normale, founded under the First Republic, and where, according to the government order calling it into existence, the students have not only to receive instruction, but to be taught the art of imparting it.

It should be noted that all the lyceums or government schools are in Paris, with the exception only of the Lyceum of Versailles. As regards the localisation of schools and academies of all kinds, it will be observed that the French system is entirely opposed to the English. Our public schools, like our universities, are in provincial towns; those of France are all concentrated in the capital. Up to the time of the Revolution, France had universities, many of them celebrated, at Toulouse, Montpelier, Orleans, Cahors, Angers, Orange, Perpignan, Aix, Poitiers, Caen, Valence, Nantes, Basançon, Bourges, Bordeaux, Angoulême, Reims, Douai, Pont-â-Mousson, Rennes, Pau, Strasbourg, and Nancy. In the year 1794 a decree of the convention suppressed at one blow the whole of the provincial universities. The idea of one university directing all public instruction in France, and taking its orders from one central authority, the Minister of Public Instruction, suited admirably the views of the first Napoleon, who maintained, with improvements of his own, the educational system introduced by the Revolution.

There is now nothing in France corresponding to an English university, with its different colleges. Until the year 1850 a candidate for the degree of bachelor of arts, or bachelor of letters, was obliged to show that he had studied for at least one year in each of the two upper classes of a lyceum. The government lyceums thus correspond in a certain measure to the colleges of an English university. But in the year just mentioned all certificates of study were abolished, and candidates for a degree had now simply to prove themselves capable of passing the required examination. The effect of this reform, certainly favourable to students of limited means, was at the same time to call into existence a host of private establishments corresponding to those of our crammers.

The College of France, as already mentioned, is in no way connected with the modern University of Paris. It was toward 1530 that Francis I., at the solicitation of Guillaume Budé and Jean du Bellay, instituted, apart from the ancient university, two free chairs, one for Greek, and the other for Hebrew. According to a national tradition, the university dates from Charlemagne, who in any case occupied himself with educational improvements and created at Paris some important schools. But the formal privileges granted to the university by the Crown can be traced only to the reign of Philippe Augustus at the very beginning of the thirteenth century. Up to that time the schools in France were dependent on the churches and monasteries; in Paris on the metropolitan cathedral. But towards the end of the twelfth century the cathedral schools had become too small for the number of students. Thus the most celebrated masters delivered free lectures on the hill of Saint-Geneviève, where now stands the Panthéon. The students, in spite of complaints raised by the Bishop of Paris, attended the open-air lectures in crowds, and in order to regularise this relative liberation of the schools from the authority of the Church, Philippe Augustus founded, under the name of Universitas parisiensis magistrorum et scholarum, a teaching institution which was independent alike of the Church and of the ordinary civil and criminal jurisdiction.

The left bank of the Seine, formerly known, and with reason, as the University bank, became more and more numerously inhabited, and was soon covered with dwelling-houses, schools, and churches. The teaching of the Paris University was in a measure international, as is sufficiently indicated by its official division into four nations: nation of France, nation of Picardy, nation of Normandy, and nation of England, which became nation of Germany in 1437, when Paris was at length delivered from the English domination by Charles VII.

The liberal spirit in which the schools of the University of Paris were thrown open to foreigners could not fail to bear fruit. The students of all countries, hastening in those distant days to Paris, made it the intellectual capital, and at the same time the most popular city of continental Europe. In the course of less than a century were seen on the benches, or, to be literal, standing on the straw, of the schools of Paris, Albertus Magnus from Germany, Duns Scotus from Scotland, Raymond Lulli from Spain, Roger Bacon from England, Brunetto Latini and his pupil, Dante Alighieri, from Italy. “Eldest daughter of our Kings,” was the name given to the University of Paris throughout France.

The history of the Paris University, with its exclusive privileges and its special government by its own authorities, abounds in stories of dissensions and open combats between the students and the townspeople. These town-and-gown fights were often attended by fatal results. Occasionally too the universities had to struggle against the Church, and especially against the Order of Jesuits, the object of the Jesuits being to get everywhere into their hands the instruction of the rising generation, so that they might eradicate, at least in the future, all germs of Protestantism.

The order founded by Ignatius Loyola made every endeavour to subjugate the university, which, however, refused to admit the Jesuits, even as students. But they were allowed to establish a college of their own; and in 1564 the rector of the university, Julien de Saint-Germain, who was well-disposed towards the Jesuits, without consulting the different nations, admitted them to “letters of scholarity,” the equivalent apparently of degrees. The University of Paris protested, and brought the question before the Parliament of Paris, which, however, came to no decision; and thenceforward war between the university and the Jesuits was carried on with scarcely any intermission.

Some idea of the life led by the professors and students of the university may be gathered from the edicts of restriction from time to time issued in connection with the institution. Under Henry III., when the discipline of the university had somewhat declined, the use of any language for teaching purposes except Latin was forbidden. The members of colleges were no longer to have women in their service, and from all colleges fencing-masters were to be excluded. The university, with some hesitation, took part against the Reformation; but after the victory of Henry IV., it sent a deputation to wait upon him, and while expressing its regret for any annoyance it might have caused him, joined with him in declaring war against the Jesuits, whom he hated, regarding them as the promoters of more than one of the attempts made against his life. The Jesuits were now banished from France, but at the same time new statutes were given to the university, by one of which it was forbidden to receive any student who did not belong to the Catholic religion. Other statutes proscribed dancing, fencing, and acting.

In 1603 the king permitted the return of the Jesuits on certain conditions which they were not likely to observe. Under the reign of Louis XIV. the struggle between the university and the Jesuits was particularly severe; and to an “apologia” issued by a friend of the Order the theological faculty of the university replied in these terms: —

“The whole Church looks upon you as usurpers of the power of its pastors; all your actions are attempts against the sanctity of their character. You disparage them in the pulpit, you defame them in your books, you attack them in general, and slander them in particular. The years of your society can be counted by your continual rebellions against the successors of the apostles; you rise up against them in conspiracy and with arrogance.” Nevertheless the Jesuits, when one of them became confessor to the king, regained credit and favour, and gave to their college the name of Louis the Great.

Under Louis XIV. an edict regulated the teaching of law in the university, and ordered that Roman law and French law should be taught concurrently. Already, however, the history of this institution was drawing to a close; the “Eldest daughter of the Kings” was destined not to survive the fall of the monarchy. A decree of the Convention dated March 20, 1794, suppressed the University of Paris, together with the numerous provincial universities which had existed up to this time.

Of France’s three great teaching institutions, the Collège de France is the youngest. To return for a moment to this establishment. Its professors, to the number of twenty-eight, teach the language and literature of mediæval France, the Greek language and literature, Latin prose and Latin verse, the Hebrew, Chaldaic, Syriac, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literatures, the Sanscrit and Chinese languages and literatures, the language and literature of the Slavonians, the modern languages and literature of Western Europe; history, morality, and the law of nations; comparative legislation and political economy, archæology, mathematics, astronomy, general and experimental physics, medicine, chemistry, the natural history of organic and inorganic bodies, and comparative embryogeny. Among the celebrated lecturers of the College of France may be mentioned, in modern times, Michelet, Quinet, Mickiewicz, the Polish poet (who here delivered an admirable, if at times somewhat mystical, series of lectures on the Slavonians), and finally Renan.

Just opposite the College of France is the Collège du Plessis. “From my window at the College of France,” says M. Renan, in the preface to his “Abbesse de Jouarre,” “I witness daily the fall, stone by stone, of the last walls of the Collège du Plessis, founded by Geoffroi du Plessis, secretary to King Philippe the Long in 1517, enlarged in the seventeenth century by Richelieu, and in the eighteenth one of the centres of the best philosophical culture. There Turgot, the greatest man in our history, received his education from the Abbé Sigorgne, the first in France to grasp perfectly the ideas of Newton. The Collège du Plessis was closed in 1790. In 1793 and 1794 it became the saddest of the Paris prisons. There the “suspects” were confined, condemned in a sense beforehand; whence they only issued in order to go to the revolutionary tribunal or to death. I often try to imagine the language these walls, now torn open by the builders engaged in reconstruction, must have heard; those grassplots whose last trees have just been cut down. I think of the conversations which must have been held in those large halls of the ground floor during the hours immediately preceding the summons; and I have conceived a series of dialogues which, if I wrote them, I should call ‘Dialogues of the Last Night.’ The hour of death is essentially philosophical; at that hour everybody speaks well, everyone is in the presence of the Infinite, and is not tempted to make phrases. The condition of good dialogue is the sincerity of the personages. Now, the hour of death is the most sincere – when one approaches death in happy circumstances, entirely oneself, that is to say; sound in mind and body, without previous debilitation. The work I now offer the public is probably the only one of this series that I shall execute.”