There will never be fixity in politics if there is not a teaching body with fixed principles.

As long as people do not from their infancy learn whether they ought to be republicans or monarchists, Catholics or sceptics, the State will never form a nation: it will rest on unsafe and shifting foundations, always exposed to changes and disorders." Such being Napoleon's designs, the new University of France was admirably suited to his purpose.

It was not a local university: it was the sum total of all the public teaching bodies of the French Empire, arranged and drilled in one vast instructional array.

Elementary schools, secondary schools, _lycees_, as well as the more advanced colleges, all were absorbed in and controlled by this great teaching corporation, which was to inculcate the precepts of the Catholic religion, fidelity to the Emperor and to his Government, as guarantees for the welfare of the people and the unity of France.

For educational purposes, France was now divided into seventeen Academies, which formed the local centres of the new institution.