Captured by our system, he is forced to surrender himself to the mechanical routine which fills his mind with fictitious tools, with useless and cumbersome acquisitions that impose on him in exchange an exorbitant expenditure of mental energy and which is very like to convert him into a mandarin.
V.Public instruction in 1890.
Public instruction since 1870 .-- Agreement between the Napoleonic and Jacobin conception .-- Extension and aggravation of the system .-- The deductive process of the Jacobin mind .-- Its consequences .-- In superior and in secondary instruction .-- In primary instruction .-- Gratuitous, obligatory and secular instruction.
Such is the singular and final result brought about by the institution of the year X (or 1801), due to the intervention of the grossly leveling Jacobin spirit.[6384] Indeed, since 1871, and especially since 1879, this spirit, through Napoleonic forms, has given breath, impulse and direction, and these forms suit it.

On the principle that education belongs to the State, Napoleon and the old Jacobins were in accord; what he in fact established they had proclaimed as a dogma; hence the structure of his university-organisation was not objectionable to them; on the contrary, it conformed to their instincts.

Hence, the reason why the new Jacobins, inheritors of both instinct and dogma, immediately adopted the existing system; none was more convenient, better calculated to meet their views, better adapted in advance to do their work.
Consequently, under the third Republic,[6385] as under anterior governments, the school machinery continues to turn and grind in the same rut.

Through the same working of its mechanism, under the same impulse of its unique and central motor, conforming to the same Napoleonic and Jacobin idea of the teaching State, it is a formidable concept which, more intrusive every year, more widely and more rigorously applied, more and more excludes the opposite concept.

This would be the remission of education to those interested in it, to those who possess rights, to parents, to free and private enterprises which depend only on personal exertions and on families, to permanent, special, local corporations, proprietary and organized under status, governed, managed, and supported by themselves.