What does M.Bonaparte do?
He persecutes and stifles instruction everywhere.
There is one pariah in our France of the present day, and that is the schoolmaster.
Have you ever reflected on what a schoolmaster really is--on that magistracy in which the tyrants of old took shelter, like criminals in the temple, a certain refuge?
Have you ever thought of what that man is who teaches children?
You enter the workshop of a wheelwright; he is making wheels and shafts; you say, "this is a useful man;" you enter a weaver's, who is making cloth; you say, "this is a valuable man;" you enter the blacksmith's shop; he is making pick-axes, hammers, and ploughshares; you say, "this is a necessary man;" you salute these men, these skilful labourers.

You enter the house of a schoolmaster,--salute him more profoundly; do you know what he is doing?
he is manufacturing minds.
He is the wheelwright, the weaver, and the blacksmith of the work, in which he is aiding God,--the future.
Well! to-day, thanks to the reigning clerical party, as the schoolmaster must not be allowed to work for this future, as this future is to consist of darkness and degradation, not of intelligence and light,--do you wish to know in what manner this humble and great magistrate, the schoolmaster, is made to do his work?
The schoolmaster serves mass, sings in the choir, rings the vesper bell, arranges the seats, renews the flowers before the sacred heart, furbishes the altar candlesticks, dusts the tabernacle, folds the copes and the chasubles, counts and keeps in order the linen of the sacristy, puts oil in the lamps, beats the cushion of the confessional, sweeps out the church, and sometimes the rectory; the remainder of his time, on condition that he does not pronounce either of those three words of the devil, Country, Republic, Liberty, he may employ, if he thinks proper, in teaching little children to say their A, B, C.
M.Bonaparte strikes at instruction at the same moment above and below: below, to please the priests, above, to please the bishops.

At the same time that he is trying to close the village school, he mutilates the College de France.

He overturns with one blow the professors' chairs of Quinet and of Michelet.

One fine morning, he declares, by decree, Greek and Latin to be under suspicion, and, so far as he can, forbids all intercourse with the ancient poets and historians of Athens and of Rome, scenting in AEschylus and in Tacitus a vague odour of demagogy.
With a stroke of the pen, for instance, he exempts all medical men from literary qualification, which causes Doctor Serres to say: "_We are dispensed, by decree, from knowing how to read and write._" New taxes, sumptuary taxes, vestiary taxes; _nemo audeat comedere praeter duo fercula cum potagio_; tax on the living, tax on the dead, tax on successions, tax on carriages, tax on paper.