, even of age, are to remain as they are,
so many dispensaries of diplomas. They are no longer to serve as an
intellectual refuge, an oasis at the end of secondary instruction, a
station for three or four years for free curiosity and disinterested
self-culture. Since the abolition of the volontariat for one year, a
young Frenchman no longer enjoys the leisure to cultivate himself in
this way; free curiosity is interdicted; he is too much harassed by
a too positive interest, by the necessity of obtaining grades and
diplomas, by the preoccupations of examinations, by the limitations of
age; he has no time to lose in experiments, in mental excursions, in
pure speculations. Henceforth, our system allows him only the regime to
which we see him subject, namely the rush, the puffing and blowing, the
gallop without stopping on a race-course, the perilous jumps at regular
distances over previously arranged and numbered obstacles. Instead of
being restricted and attenuated, the disadvantages of the Napoleonic
institution spread and grow worse, and this is due to the way in which
our rulers comprehend it, the original, hereditary way of the Jacobin
spirit.

When Napoleon built his University he did it as a statesman and a man
of business, with the foresight of a contractor and a practical man,
calculating outlay and receipts, means and resources, so as to produce
at once and with the least expense, the military and civil tools which
he lacked and of which he always had too few because he consumed too
many: to this precise, definite purpose he subjected and subordinated
all the rest, including the theory of the educational State; she was for
him simply a resume, a formula, a setting. On the contrary, for the
old Jacobins, she was an axiom, a principle, an article in the Social
Contract; by this contract, the State had charge of public education;
it had the right and its duty was to undertake this and manage it. The
principle being laid down, as convinced theorists and blindly following
the deductive method, the derived consequences from it and rushed ahead,
with eyes shut, into practical operation, with as much haste as vigor,
without concerning themselves with the nature of human materials, of
surrounding realities, of available resources, of collateral effects,
nor of the total and final effect. Likewise with the new Jacobins of the
present day, according to them, since instruction is a good thing,[6386]
the broader and deeper it