Paris as It Was and as It Is / A Sketch Of The French Capital, Illustrative Of The Effects Of The Revolution

by Francis William Blagdon

The formation of the Collège Royal gave great displeasure to the University. After having held so long without a rival the sceptre of the sciences and literature, it was grating to its members to relinquish it. They could ill bear to see set above it an establishment evidently intended to direct and guide it. Self-love offended seldom forgives, especially when it is animated by the esprit de corps. The University depreciated the new college, and endeavoured to fetter it in a thousand ways. At last, those dark intrigues being constantly smothered by the applause which the professors received, the University finished by bringing them before a court of justice. From, envy to persecution there is but one step, and that step was soon taken.

Religion served as a pretext and a cloak for this accusation. It was affirmed that the new professors could not, without danger to the faith, explain the Hebrew and Greek tongues, if they had not been presented to the University to be examined by it, and received from it their mission. To this it was answered, that if the theologians of the University understood Greek and Hebrew, it must be easy for them to denounce the passages in which the new professors had erred, and that if, on the contrary, they did not understand those languages, they ought not to pretend to judge those who taught them. After long debates, things were left in the state in which they were before the trial. Each party continued quietly its lessons, and, as it almost always happens in such cases, reason ended by having its due weight: true it is that it was then supported by royal authority.

The Collège de France has not since ceased to make an increasing progress. It even had the valuable advantage of reforming itself successively, and of following new ideas, the necessary result of its constitution and of the lustre that has always surrounded it; two causes which have occasioned its chairs to be sought by the most celebrated men of every description. It is this successive reform which constitutes the distinctive character of the Collège de France, and which has always enabled it to fulfil its real object.

Thus, to quote but one example. The chair of Greek philosophy was, in the beginning, intended to make known the writings of the ancient philosophers on the nature of things and the organization of the universe. These were, at that time, the only repositories of human knowledge for mathematics and physics; but, in proportion as the sciences, more advanced, substituted rational theories for hazardous conjectures, the modern discoveries of astronomy were taught, together with the writings of the ancients. The object of this chair, which at the present day bears the name of general physics and mathematics, is to disseminate the most elevated notions of mechanics and the theory of the system of the world. The works taught by its occupier are analytical mechanics and celestial mechanics, that is, those works which form the limits of our knowledge for mathematical analysis, and consequently those of which it is most important to increase the very small number of readers.

By a consequence of that spirit of amelioration which animates this College, some time before the revolution, a chair and a cabinet of experimental physics were added to it.

As for the natural sciences, which are taught here with much depth and detail in several establishments, they have, in the Collège de France, a sort of regulator which directs them, as it were, by their generalities. It is, in fact, to this only that an establishment which, by its nature, contains no collection, ought to attach itself, and the philosophy of the sciences, the result and completion of their study, here constitutes the object of all the lectures.

Thus the improvements which the sciences have successively experienced, have always been spread by the instruction of the Collège Royal; and among the professors who have occupied its chairs, none can be quoted who have been strangers to their progress.

The revolution, which overthrew in France the ancient universities, suspended for some time the exercises of this establishment; but, under the name of Collège de France, it has since resumed a new lustre. It then found itself compelled to new efforts, in order to maintain its place among the scientific institutions, which have emulously risen in every branch of human knowledge. Nevertheless, those different sciences, even natural history, and the curative art, taught with so much perfection in private establishments, have hence derived great advantages, and here it is that public instruction comes at once to be resumed, investigated, and extended.

The present government appears to be perfectly sensible of the importance of such an establishment. The enlightened men, the celebrated savans, who approach it, have pointed out in the Collège de France a normal school, completely formed, and which unites to the extent of its object the ever-powerful ascendant of seniority. The similarity between the circumstances in which this institution is at the present day and those when it was founded, affords the most certain hope of its progress being maintained and accelerated.

This is what appears to me the most interesting in the history of this ancient college. I say nothing of its present professors; their zeal is proved by their assiduous and uninterrupted lessons; their merit is before the judgment of the public; and as for their names, these are indifferent to the results of their labours. If any other motive than that of the interest of the sciences were blended with the information I now communicate, I should not think that, in this letter, I was fulfilling the object of your wishes.