ntry, within the last thirty years. The process has been
gradual, as it ought to have been, and has consisted in a succession of
slight modifications. But although a rational continuity has been
observed in the steps taken, the great number of these steps has not
failed, in these last days, to astonish, and even to offend, the public.
Public opinion, to which appeal has been made in favour of reforms, has
been somewhat surprised by being appealed to so often, and perhaps it is
not superfluous to indicate here, once more, the general significance
and the inner logic of the movement which we are witnessing.

I. Before the last years of the Second Empire, the higher teaching of
the historical sciences was organised in France on no coherent
system.[244]

There were chairs of history in different institutions, of different
types: at the College de France, in the Faculties of Letters, and in the
"special schools," such as the Ecole normale superieure and the Ecole
des chartes.

The College de France was a relic of the institutions of the _ancien
regime_. It was founded in the sixteenth century in opposition to the
scholastic Sorbonne, to be a refuge for the new sciences, and had the
glorious privilege of representing historically the higher speculative
studies, the spirit of free inquiry, and the interests of pure science.
Unfortunately, in the domain of the historical sciences, the College de
France had allowed its traditions to be obliterated up to a certain
point. The great men who taught history in this illustrious institution
(J. Michelet, for example), were not technical experts, nor even men of
learning, in the proper sense of the word. The audiences which they
swayed by their eloquence were not composed of students of history.

The Faculties of Letters formed part of a system established by the
Napoleonic legislator. This legislator, in creating the Faculties, by no
means entertained the design of encouraging scientific research. He had
no great love for science. The Faculties of Law, of Medicine, and so on,
were intended by him to be professional schools supplying society with
the lawyers, physicians, and so on, which it needs. But three of the
five Faculties were unable, from the beginning, to perform the part
allotted them, while the other two, Law and Medicine, successfully
performed theirs. The Faculties of Catholic Theology did not train the
priests needed by society, because the State consented to the educ