Western France poor and riven by animosities. What popular schooling existed was irregular and mediocre. In the countryside, the parish clergy taught catechism to peasant children on Sundays and feast days during the summer months; in the towns, some lessons were given by disbanded N.C.O.s of Napoleon's armies, married priests, college masters and the spinsters and widows who taught prayers and needlework to girls in the petites ecoles. The first ray of light came from outside Brittany, and also from outside France. Mutual education, based on the work of Lancaster's British and Foreign School Society, was imported during the Hundred Days by a group of French ideologues under the patronage of the Interior Minister, Carnot. It represented a new pedagogic method, strong in the faith of human perfectibility, to eliminate ignorance. It was democratic, relying on the emulation of eager pupils and the monitorial system and was universal, an education for all creeds and cultures. In Ille-et-Vilaine, the method was introduced by the prefect in 1817, and teachers trained in Paris were sent to Rennes and the sea-ports, presumed to be open to new ideas, where schools were set up with government money. To the Breton clergy, persecuted by the Revolution, however, the mutual system was not only foreign, but a plot hatched by atheists, Protestants and regicides to resurrect the evils of the Revolution and to undermine the Catholic Church which during the ancien regime had preserved a monopoly of popular education. In the rash of local conflicts which followed the clergy defeated mutual education and launched a counter-offensive. Jean-Marie de Lamennais (I780-1860), then vicar-general of Saint-Brieuc, founded a new religious