rroundings and ascertain
the internal or external conditions, or "necessary relationships," which
determine its failure or its bloom. For men who live together in society
and in a State, no study is so important; it alone can furnish them with
a clear, demonstrable idea of what society and the State are; and it is
in the law schools that this capital idea must be sought by an educated
student body. If they do not find it there, they invent one to suit
themselves. As 1789 drew near, the antiquated, poor, barren, teaching
of law, fallen into contempt and almost null,[6224] offered no sound,
accredited doctrine which could impose itself on young minds, fill their
empty minds and prevent the intrusion of utopic dreams. And intrude it
did: in the shape of Rousseau's anti-social Utopia, in his anarchical
and despotic Social Contract. To hinder it from returning, the best
thing to do was not to repeat the same mistake, not to leave the lodging
empty, to install in it a fixed occupant beforehand, and to see that
this fixed occupant, which is science, may at all times represent its
title of legitimate proprietor, its method analogous to that of the
natural sciences, its studies of detail from life and in the texts, its
restricted inductions, its concordant verifications, its progressive
discoveries. This in order that, confronting every chance system and
without these titles, minds may of themselves shut their doors, or only
open them provisionally, and always with a care to make the intruder
present his letters of credit: here we have the social service rendered
by the instruction in Law as given in the German mode, as Cuvier had
just described it. Before 1789, in the University of Strasbourg, in
France, it was thus given; but, in this condition and to this extent, it
is not suitable under the new regime, and still less than under the old
one.

Napoleon, in his preparation of jurists, wants executants and not
critics; his faculties must furnish him with men able to apply and not
to give opinions on his laws. Hence, in the teaching of the law, as he
prescribes it, there must be nothing of history, of political economy or
of comparative law; there must be no exposition of foreign legislation,
of feudal or custom law, or of canon law; no account of the
transformations which governed public and private law in Rome down to
the Digest[6225] and, after that, in France, down to the recent codes.
But nothing on remote origins, on succes