cular instruction.

Such is the singular and final result brought about by the institution
of the year X (or 1801), due to the intervention of the grossly leveling
Jacobin spirit.[6384] Indeed, since 1871, and especially since 1879,
this spirit, through Napoleonic forms, has given breath, impulse and
direction, and these forms suit it. On the principle that education
belongs to the State, Napoleon and the old Jacobins were in accord;
what he in fact established they had proclaimed as a dogma; hence the
structure of his university-organisation was not objectionable to them;
on the contrary, it conformed to their instincts. Hence, the reason why
the new Jacobins, inheritors of both instinct and dogma, immediately
adopted the existing system; none was more convenient, better calculated
to meet their views, better adapted in advance to do their work.
Consequently, under the third Republic,[6385] as under anterior
governments, the school machinery continues to turn and grind in the
same rut. Through the same working of its mechanism, under the same
impulse of its unique and central motor, conforming to the same
Napoleonic and Jacobin idea of the teaching State, it is a formidable
concept which, more intrusive every year, more widely and more
rigorously applied, more and more excludes the opposite concept. This
would be the remission of education to those interested in it, to those
who possess rights, to parents, to free and private enterprises which
depend only on personal exertions and on families, to permanent,
special, local corporations, proprietary and organized under status,
governed, managed, and supported by themselves. On this model, a few
men of intelligence and sensibility, enlightened by what is accomplished
abroad, try to organize regional universities in our great academic
centers. The State might, perhaps, allow, if not the enterprise itself,
then at least something like it, but nothing more. Through its right
of public administration, through the powers of its Council of State,
through its fiscal legislation, through the immemorial prejudices of
its jurists, through the routine of its bureaus, it is hostile to
a corporate personality. Never can such a project be considered a
veritable civil personage; if the State consents to endow a group of
individuals with civil powers, it is always on condition that they be
subject to its narrow tutelage and be treated as minors and children.
--Besides, these universities