y the Ecole normale incapable of utilising
documents?... Formerly, in short, students of history, on leaving the
Ecole, were not prepared either to teach history, which they had learned
in a great hurry, or to investigate difficult questions."[245]

As for the Ecole des chartes, which was founded under the Restoration,
it was, from a certain point of view, a special school like the others,
designed in theory to train those useful functionaries, archivists and
librarians. But professional instruction was early reduced to a strict
minimum, and the Ecole des chartes was organised on a very original
plan, with a view to provide a rational and complete apprenticeship for
the young men who proposed to study mediaeval French history. The pupils
of the Ecole des chartes did not follow any course of "mediaeval
history," but they learnt all that is necessary for doing work on the
solution of the still open questions of mediaeval history. Here alone, in
virtue of an accidental anomaly, the subjects which are preliminary and
auxiliary to historical research were systematically taught. We have
already had occasion to note the effects of this circumstance.[246]

This was the state of affairs when, towards the end of the Second
Empire, a vigorous reform movement set in. Some young Frenchmen had
visited Germany; they had been struck by the superiority of the German
university system over the Napoleonic system of Faculties and special
schools. Certainly France, with its defective organisation, had produced
many men and many works, but it now began to be held that "in all kinds
of enterprises the least possible part should be left to chance," and
that "when an institution proposes to train professors of history and
historians, it ought to supply them with the means of becoming what it
intends them to be."

M. V. Duruy, minister of Public Education, supported the partisans of a
renaissance of the higher studies. But he did not think it practicable
to interfere, for the purpose either of remodelling, of fusing, or of
suppressing them, with the existing institutions,--the College de
France, the Faculties of Letters, the Ecole normale superieure, the
Ecole des chartes, all of which were consecrated by the services they
had rendered, and by the lustre they received from the eminent men who
had been, or were, connected with them. He changed nothing, he added. He
crowned the somewhat heterogeneous edifice of existing institutions by
the creat