[44.] The monitorial system (Enseignement mutuel) was introduced into France soon after the Bourbon Restoration; but it was not, like our monitorial system, designed with a view primarily to the maintenance of discipline, but rather to supplying the want of schools and masters and remedying the official indifference to popular education, which then existed in France. As such, it was warmly espoused by the liberals, and as warmly opposed by the reactionaries. The monitors, it was thought, could hand on to the younger pupils the knowledge they had already received; after the Revolution of 1830, when no longer the object of political controversy, the system gave way to more practical and efficient methods of public instruction.
[45.] Porlier (Don Juan Diaz), born in 1783, was publicly hanged in 1815 as the result of a conspiracy against Ferdinand VII of Spain. After having been one of the most active and bravest supporters of Ferdinand's cause in the effort to re-establish his throne and the national honour, he now sacrificed his life to an unsuccessful attempt to set up a constitutional government.
Antonio Quiroga (born 1784), also after having distinguished himself in the national struggle against Napoleon, was tried for complicity in the conspiracy, after the fall of Porlier. After a series of adventures, in which he was more lucky than Riego, his subaltern, to whom he owed so much, he again distinguished himself, after a temporary withdrawal from active service in 1822, by the stout opposition he offered to the French invasion of 1823. His efforts, however, were of no avail and he escaped to England, and thence made his way to South America. Some years later he returned to Spain, was nominated Captain General of Grenada, and died in 1841.
Rafael del Riego (born 1785), after serving against the French, first became prominent in connexion with the effort to restore the constitution which Ferdinand had abolished in 1812. He was elected by his troops second in command to Quiroga, whom he himself proposed as their leader. This rising was a failure and Riego was exiled to Oviedo, his birthplace. After being repeatedly recalled and re-exiled, he ended by being one of the first victims of Ferdinand's restoration in 1823, and was dragged to the place of execution at the back of a donkey, amid the outrages of the mob.
[46.] Father Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623), the famous historian of the Council of Trent, a Servite monk, and the ecclesiastical adviser of the Venetian Government, at a time when it seemed not impossible that Venice would break away, like Northern Europe, from the Roman Catholic Church.
[47.] Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) was, according to Stendhal, our only philosopher. It is on Tracy, one of the Ideologists, that Stendhal, one might say, modelled his philosophic attitude. Tracy's Idéologie (1801), he says, gave him "milles germes de pensées nouvelles"—gave him also his worship of logic. He was equally impressed by the Traité de la Volonté (1815). Cf. Picavet's Sorbonne Thesis (Paris, 1891) Les Idéologues, pp. 489–92, in which he speaks of Stendhal as "a successor and a defender, mutatis mutandis, of the eighteenth-century 'Idéologues.'"
[48.] Giovanni Luigi Fiescho (15 23–1547), a great Genoese noble, formed a conspiracy in 1547 against the all-powerful Admiral of the Republic, Andrea Doria. The state fleet in the harbour was to be seized, but in attempting this Fiescho was drowned, and the conspiracy collapsed.
[49.] Henri Grégoire (1750–1831), one of the most original fearless and sincere of the Revolutionary leaders, was the constitutional Bishop of Blois, who refused to lay down his episcopal office under the Terror, and when the Reign of Terror was over, took an active part in restoring Religion and the Church. He resigned his bishopric in 1801. Napoleon made him a count but he was always hostile to the Empire. He was a staunch Gallican, and never forgave Napoleon his concordat with the Papacy. He was naturally hated and feared by the Royalists at the Restoration, but he remained popular with the people, and was elected a member of the lower chamber in 1819, though he was prevented by the Government from sitting.
[50.] La Génie du Christianisme, by Chateaubriand (1802).