y
drilled, while the lessons began and ended with the roll of drums. The
numbers of the _lycees_ and of their pupils rapidly increased; but the
progress of the secondary and primary schools, which could boast no
such attractions, was very slow. In 1806 only 25,000 children were
attending the public primary schools. But two years later elementary
and advanced instruction received a notable impetus from the
establishment of the University of France.

There is no institution which better reveals the character of the
French Emperor, with its singular combination of greatness and
littleness, of wide-sweeping aims with official pedantry. The
University, as it existed during the First Empire, offers a striking
example of that mania for the control of the general will which
philosophers had so attractively taught and Napoleon so profitably
practised. It is the first definite outcome of a desire to subject
education and learning to wholesale regimental methods, and to break
up the old-world bowers of culture by State-worked steam-ploughs. His
aims were thus set forth:

"I want a teaching body, because such a body never dies, but
transmits its organization and spirit. I want a body whose teaching
is far above the fads of the moment, goes straight on even when the
government is asleep, and whose administration and statutes become
so national that one can never lightly resolve to meddle with
them.... There will never be fixity in politics if there is not a
teaching body with fixed principles. As long as people do not from
their infancy learn whether they ought to be republicans or
monarchists, Catholics or sceptics, the State will never form a
nation: it will rest on unsafe and shifting foundations, always
exposed to changes and disorders."

Such being Napoleon's designs, the new University of France was
admirably suited to his purpose. It was not a local university: it was
the sum total of all the public teaching bodies of the French Empire,
arranged and drilled in one vast instructional array. Elementary
schools, secondary schools, _lycees_, as well as the more advanced
colleges, all were absorbed in and controlled by this great teaching
corporation, which was to inculcate the precepts of the Catholic
religion, fidelity to the Emperor and to his Government, as guarantees
for the welfare of the people and the unity of France. For educational
purposes, France was now divide