Higher Education in France, 1848-1940

Abstract

There is no higher education in France, said a work on The Ruling Classes in I875.1 This statement was almost true. There were no universities in the nineteenth century until I896. The twenty-two universities which had existed in 1789 were abolished by the Revolution. Decay and corruption had reduced them to a mere shadow of their original medieval selves.2 For a large part, it was no longer a university education that they dispensed. The superior faculties of theology, law, and medicine nominally provided professional training but their standards had fallen abysmally low, as had the number of students in them. Many professors had abandoned lecturing altogether, and confined themselves to the lucrative task of issuing degrees. On one occasion the students of Bordeaux even sued their professors to compel them to lecture, but this zeal was exceptional; in the faculty of law, less than 2 per cent of the students bothered to attend lectures. Examinations were more a financial than an academic matter, in fact the purchase of a privilege. General education in the humanities and the sciences was provided by the faculty of arts and the degree of master of arts was the normal preliminary for entry to the higher faculties. This M.A., however, was of secondary school standard; children entered the faculty of arts at the age of ten or even nine, stayed on till seventeen or eighteen, and confined themselves largely to the study of Latin. The universities had no connection, therefore, with the important scientific discoveries of the eighteenth