iversities, established in the principal cities of the kingdom, were
to be substituted for the one general University of the Empire. Each of
these local colleges was to have a complete and separate organization,
both as regarded the different degrees of instruction and the various
scholastic establishments within its jurisdiction. Over the seventeen
Universities a Royal Council and a great Normal School were appointed,
one to superintend the general course of public teaching, and the other
to train up for professors the chosen scholars who had prepared
themselves for that career, and who were to be supplied from the local
Universities. There were two motives for this reform. The first was a
desire to establish, in the departments, and quite independent of Paris,
leading centres of learning and intellectual activity; the second, a
wish to abolish the absolute power which, in the Imperial University,
held sole control over the establishments and the masters, and to bring
the former under a closer and more immediate authority, by giving the
latter more permanence, dignity, and independence in their respective
positions. These were sound ideas, to carry out which the decree of the
17th of February, 1815, was but a timid rather than an extended and
powerful application. The local Universities were too numerous. France
does not supply seventeen natural centres of high learning. Four or five
would have sufficed, and more could not have been rendered successful or
productive. The forgotten reform which I am here recalling had yet
another fault. It was introduced too soon, and was the result, at once
systematic and incomplete, of the meditations of certain men long
impressed with the deficiencies of the University system, and not really
the fruit of public impulse and opinion. Another influence also appeared
in it, that of the clergy, who silently commenced at that time their
struggle with the University, and adroitly looked for the extension of
their personal power in the progress of general liberty. The decree of
the 17th of February, 1815, opened this arena, which has since been so
fiercely agitated. The Abbe de Montesquiou hastened to bestow on the
clergy an early gratification, that of seeing one of their most justly
esteemed members, M. de Beausset, formerly Bishop of Alais, at the head
of the Royal Council. The Liberals of the University gladly seized this
occasion of increasing their action and independence; and the King,