e of historical instruction. The whole series of lessons,
determined by the programme, formed the "course." The pupil was expected
to write as he listened (this was called "taking notes") and to compose
a written account of what he had heard (this was the _redaction_). But
as the pupils were not taught how to take notes, nearly all of them were
content to write very rapidly, from the professor's dictation, a rough
draft, which they copied out at home in the form of a _redaction_,
without any endeavour to grasp the meaning either of what they heard or
what they transcribed. To this mechanical labour the most zealous added
extracts copied from books, generally with just as little reflection.

In order to get the facts judged essential into the pupils' heads, the
professor used to make a very short version of the lesson, the "summary"
or "abstract," which he dictated openly, and caused to be learnt by
heart. Thus of the two written exercises which occupied nearly the whole
time of the class, one (the summary) was an overt dictation, the other
(the _redaction_) an unavowed dictation.

The only means adopted to check the pupils' work was to make them repeat
the summary word for word, and to question them on the _redaction_, that
is to make them repeat approximately the words of the professor. Of the
two oral exercises one was an overt, the other an unavowed repetition.

It is true the pupil was given a book, the _Precis d'histoire_,[234] but
this book had the same form as the professor's course, and instead of
serving as a basis for the oral instruction, merely duplicated it, and,
as a rule, duplicated it badly, for it was not intelligible to the
pupil. The authors of these text-books,[235] adopting the traditional
methods of "abridgments," endeavoured to accumulate the greatest
possible number of facts by omitting all their characteristic details
and summarising them in the most general, and therefore vague,
expressions. In the elementary books nothing was left but a residue of
proper names and dates connected by formulae of a uniform type; history
appeared as a series of wars, treaties, reforms, revolutions, which only
differed in the names of peoples, sovereigns, fields of battle, and in
the figures giving the years.[236]

Such, down to the end of the Second Empire, was historical instruction
in all French institutions, both secular and ecclesiastical--with a few
exceptions, whose merit is measured by their rarity, for