he postponed the interests
of public education to other, and from his point of view more pressing,
concerns.

The Concordat re-established the Church in France, but it did not
re-endow the Church on a scale which would have enabled it at once to
reconstruct its own educational system. In fact, the Concordat can
hardly be said to have re-endowed the Church at all. Under the
thirteenth article the Pope formally recognized the title of the
purchasers of 'national property' in France to vast domains, the
property through purchase, donations, or bequest of the Church, which
had been made 'national property' only by the simple processes of
exiling or murdering the owners and confiscating their estates. In
consideration of this recognition, the State bound itself by Article
XIV. of the Concordat to 'ensure to the bishops and the curates salaries
befitting their functions,' and by Article XV. to 'protect the right of
the Catholics of France to re-endow the churches.'

As to the 'rising generation' of the French people the government of
Napoleon concerned itself much more with the conscription than with the
reconstruction of the schools, and though the Churches, both Catholic
and Protestant, took this work in hand very early in the century, it was
necessarily with inadequate means.

Under the First Consulate a general law regulating public instruction
was enacted, on May 1, 1802. Another was enacted shortly afterwards,
and in 1808 appeared the famous decree of the Emperor founding the
University system of France. Heaven knows how many schemes for founding
this University system had been elaborated and submitted to him before,
only to be torn up as 'ideological.' Cuvier affirms that he drew up
twenty-three such schemes one after another.

This decree of March 17, 1808, forbade the establishment of private
schools without the authority of the Government, set up three degrees of
public instruction, primary, secondary and superior, organised a body of
Inspectors-General, and, in short, 'laicized' public education in France
effectually as a machine to be controlled by the Imperial Government.

Under the ancient Monarchy, France possessed twenty-four Universities.
The Convention suppressed them all at a blow on September 15, 1793. This
was little more than three months after the Convention itself had been
'suppressed' and forced to kiss the hand that smote it by Henriot and
his cannoniers on June 28, 1793. A law abolishing the f