unfulfilled.  In 1799 there were only twenty-four elementary schools open in Paris, with a total attendance of less than 1,000 pupils; and in rural districts matters were equally bad.  Indeed, Lucien Bonaparte asserted that scarcely any education was to be found in France.  Exaggerated though this statement was, in relation to secondary and advanced education, it was proximately true of the elementary schools.  The revolutionists had merely traced the outlines of a scheme:  it remained for the First Consul to fill in the details, or to leave it blank.

The result can scarcely be cited as a proof of his educational zeal.  Elementary schools were left to the control and supervision of the communes and of the sous-prefets, and naturally made little advance amidst an apathetic population and under officials who cared not to press on an expensive enterprise.  The law of April 30th, 1802, however, aimed at improving the secondary education, which the Convention had attempted to give in its ecoles centrales.  These were now reconstituted either as ecoles secondaires or as lycees.  The former were local or even private institutions intended for the most promising pupils of the commune or group of communes; while the lycees, far fewer in number, were controlled directly by the Government.  In both of these schools great prominence was given to the exact and applied sciences.  The aim of the instruction was not to awaken thought and develop the faculties, but rather to fashion able breadwinners, obedient citizens, and enthusiastic soldiers.  The training was of an almost military type, the pupils being regularly drilled, while the lessons began and ended with the roll of drums.  The numbers of the lycees and of their pupils rapidly increased; but the progress of the secondary and primary schools, which could boast no such attractions, was very slow.  In 1806 only 25,000 children were attending the public primary schools.  But two years later elementary and advanced instruction received a notable impetus from the establishment of the University of France.

There is no institution which better reveals the character of the French Emperor, with its singular combination of greatness and littleness, of wide-sweeping aims with official pedantry.  The University, as it existed during the First Empire, offers a striking example of that mania for the control of the general will which philosophers had so attractively taught and Napoleon so profitably practised.  It is the first definite outcome of a desire to subject education and learning to wholesale regimental methods, and to break up the old-world bowers of culture by State-worked steam-ploughs.  His aims were thus set forth: