To this end, we, the dominant party, use our legal rights. In the place of bad wheels we put good ones. We purify our staff. We do not appoint or leave in place any but safe men. At the end of six years, nearly all the rectors, proviseurs and professors of philosophy, many other professors and a number of the censors,[6309] are all priests. At the Sorbonne, M. Cousin has been silenced and M. Guizot replaced by M. Durosoir. At the Collège de France we have dismissed Tissot and we do not accept M. Magendie. We "suppress" in block the Faculty of Medicine in order that, on reorganizing it, our hands may be free and eleven professors with bad notes be got rid of, among others Pinel, Dubois, de Jussieu, Desgenettes, Pelletan and Vauquelin. We suppress another center of insalubrities, the upper École Normale, and, for the recruitment of our educational body, we institute[6310] at the principal seat of each academy a sort of university novitiate where the pupils, few in number, expressly selected, prepared from their infancy, will imbibe deeper and more firmly retain the sound doctrines suitable to their future condition.
We let the small seminaries multiply and fill up until they comprise 50,000 pupils. It is the bishop who founds them; no educator or inspector of education is so worthy of confidence. Therefore, we confer upon him "in all that concerns religion,"[6311] the duty "of visiting them himself, or delegating his vicars-general to visit them," the faculty "of suggesting to the royal council of public instruction the measures which he deems necessary." At the top of the hierarchy sits a Grand-Master with the powers and title of M. de Fontanes and with an additional title, member of the cabinet and minister of public instruction, M. de Freyssinous, bishop of Hermopolis,[6312] and, in difficult cases, this bishop, placed between his Catholic conscience and the positive articles of the legal statute, "sacrifices the law" to his conscience.[6313]--This is the advantage which can be taken from the tool of public education. After 1850, it is to be used in the same way and in the same sense; after 1796, and later after 1875, it was made to work as vigorously in the opposite direction. Whatever the rulers may be, whether monarchists, imperialists or republicans, they are the masters who use it for their own advantage; for this reason, even when resolved not to abuse the instrument, they keep it intact; they reserve the use of it for themselves,[6314] and pretty hard blows are necessary to sever or relax the firm hold which they have on the central lever.
