Higher agricultural education

A perusal of nineteenth-century scientific literature, especially the journals, soon reveals the large role that science was capable of playing in agriculture and the degree to which farmers and all sorts of politicians were coming to rely on scientists to tell them how to increase production. The patron saint of French agricultural education is Mathieu de Dombasle, who opened near Nancy the first serious agricultural school in 1824. This noble failure encouraged the engineers Polonceau and Auguste Bella to found in 1828, with royal support, the more scientifically oriented Institution royale agronomique de Grignon, near Paris. In 1848 the Second Republic created a national organization of agricultural education: seventy departmental farm-schools to produce good farm workers; regional schools of agriculture; and, capstone of the system, the Institut national agronomique de Versailles. In line with policies in most western countries, the Third Republic promoted scientific agriculture on a scale unprecedented in French history. An autonomous Ministry of Agriculture emerged in 1881 from the clutches of the ministries in which it had been held captive for most of the century. Nineteen different ministers of agriculture served the forty-two governments that ruled France from 1881 to 1914. Given the composition of the Chamber of Deputies, it is not surprising that the ministry fell victim to a near monopoly by lawyers and doctors.

One of the most striking areas of nineteenth-century scientific growth was in biology. Apart from anti-Darwinism, two of the most intriguing issues in French biology are the influence of Auguste Comte and of Claude Bernard, the odd couple who laid down nearly opposite royal roads to the great research empire that the French believed to be their birthright. The scientific community, backed by republican enthusiasm, worshiped Bernard as its great culture hero. Dumas put it so well that Pasteur quoted him: “Ce n'est pas seulement un grand physiologiste, c'est la physiologie elle-même.” On Bernard's death in 1878, the black-banded pages of grief in the Revenue scientifique morosely proclaimed his reputation even in Germany. “Claude Bernard était de tous les français celui que l'orgueilleuse science d'outre-Rhin osait le moins méconnaître.” The Chamber of Deputies paid 10,000 francs for his burial from Saint-Sulpice in the first public funeral for a scientist. Yet Comte's influence lurks in the inspirational ideology leading directly to biology. Some even believe that it has left its potent traces in the Bernardian gospel itself.

Did Auguste Comte and the divided band of positivists significantly influence the development of biology in nineteenth-century France? Many historians of biology, perhaps even most scholars, would not hesitate to answer yes.

The bourgeois context

In spite of the “rise of the bourgeoisie” – a universal constant in Western history whose explanatory power is exceeded only by the formula “It began with the Greeks” – France was a peasant country in 1870. In 1814 the population of France was 29,000,000 rising to 36,000,000 in 1871, more than Great Britain's but nearly 5,000,000 less than Germany's. Between 1846 and 1859, and again the period 1890–1946, the reproductive rate fell below 1.00. Although there was a rise in the rate between 1860 and 1889, the French population stood at only 39,500,000 in 1914, less than Britain's and way below Germany's 67,800,000. No comparison of economic or educational systems can ignore the direct implications of different population bases. According to the 1891 census, 46 percent of the population was living off agriculture, 25 percent off industry, 13.5 percent off commerce and transportation, and 6.6 percent off the liberal professions. The second half of the nineteenth century saw a decline in the percentage of the active population in agriculture and domestic service and a corresponding growth in other sectors, but the structure of the active population was not radically modified.

Yet enough profound change took place to justify the statement that a new France emerged between 1870 and 1914.

In his Histoire de la civilisation en Europe (Sorbonne lectures, 1828–30), François Guizot showed without difficulty that French civilization was the truest representative of European culture. That this judgment was a truism for cultured men of the day was evident in John Stuart Mill's ready assent that only a clod could not know that “the history of civilization in France is that of civilization in Europe.” What was the nature of this civilization that enthralled the European mind for at least two centuries? The superb German survey entitled The Civilization of France (1930) by Ernst Curtius makes it mainly a matter of literary culture: “Literature plays a far larger part in the cultural and national consciousness of France than it does in that of any other nation.” Victor Hugo summed it up: “Literature is civilization.” Curtius argued that “in France literature fulfills the function which among us [Germans] is divided between philosophy, science, poetry and music.” So even Cartesianism, “the most important factor in the intellectual history of France,” was distilled into the literary cliché of clarté française. France's intellectual hegemony in Europe was facilitated by the cultural universality of its language, characterized by “logic, lucidity, brilliance, naturalness, and taste.” This leaves little room for the cult of Isis, widely touted elsewhere as the goddess to whom we must pay tribute for our modernity.

At about mid-century, research and teaching in natural history and physiology in both the Muséum and the Collège de France were much stronger than in the faculties of science. In 1855–6 it was possible to classify the faculties into three categories according to the level of their teaching of natural history. In the first group, with a full faculty, including three professors in natural history, one for each “order” of the natural world, were Paris, Lyon, Montpellier, and Toulouse. The second group, with two professors of natural history, one of whom taught two different courses, included Caen, Dijon, Strasbourg, Besançon, Grenoble, Rennes, and Bordeaux. The third group, made up of new faculties having only one professor for all of natural history, included Lille, Nancy, Marseille, Clermont, and Poitiers. But less than a quarter century later the faculties had improved considerably in the whole range of biological science; in the last decades of the nineteenth century a great deal of new biological research was done in the faculties. In areas like marine biology, the faculties were the most productive institutions in research and in training researchers and teachers.

Monographs and books

Buffeted by conflicting ideologies, numerous intellectual movements, prolific authors, and cheap printing, the nineteenth century unleashed an unprecedented flood of the printed word. With the growth of education, professors took on a greater importance in publishing materials for the educational system and in writing works for the educated public. Among the most colossal scholarly works, although not the most perfect, were Migne's editions of the Patrologia latina in 221 volumes (1844–55) and the Patrologia graeca in 166 volumes (1857–66). The growth and popularization of science led to series like Reinwald's Bibliothèque des sciences contemporaines. The social sciences and philosophy had a famous outlet in the publisher Alcan's Bibliothèque contemporaine, many of whose volumes were written by his fellow normaliens. By 1904 Alcan's Bibliothèque scientifique internationale, under the editorship of Emile Alglave, included 103 volumes, many of which were adopted by the Ministry of Education for inclusion in the libraries of lycées and collèges, although only about fifty of the volumes (including translations) were in physics, chemistry, biology, and physiology. Much of Alcan's list was made up of excellent works in the haute vulgarisation of science; Alcan did not achieve the same distinction in scientific publication as it did in philosophy, history, and psychology.

The trouble with prizes

The history of the funding of science in France is pervaded by the theme of poverty, eloquently stated by a line of lamenters from Pasteur to Maurice Barrès and on to Jacques Monod. So convincing has been the brief for poverty that historians, ever victims of their sources, have generally been mesmerized into repeating this litany. Not that Pasteur was wrong in 1868: Dumas, Foucault, Fizeau, and Boussingault had private laboratories because there were no funds specifically earmarked for research in the educational budget. In 1884 Fremy echoed Dumas's plea of 1881 that those with money support science, but few followed Fremy's example of making a gift of 5,000 francs. Twenty-seven years later Georges Lemoine deplored the insufficiency of funds for the support of the scientific community, a vastly larger entity than it was in 1868, but seemingly in the same penury. Not really, of course; and it is to the steady, solid, increasing financial support for scientific research that the historian must also direct his attention. Recent scrutiny of the science support system in France has already produced some surprises, especially in the studies by Shinn, Crawford, and Weart.

The changing organization of French scientific research in the 1930s might easily be interpreted as a sign of confusion and vacillation, in tune with national politics. Nothing could be more mistaken. A strong sense of purpose animated the scientific community, whose devotion to the research imperative along with its persistent political lobbying had already produced by 1930 the foundations of state organization and funding of research. This basic fact is somewhat obscured by the birth of several different organizations with similar names during the 1930s; fortunately for the memory of posterity, they were all gobbled up by the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, the mega-organization created in 1939. Breton's Office des inventions, which had absorbed the Caisse des recherches scientifiques (1901–22), so adept at survival in the 1920s, was replaced in 1938 by the Centre national de la recherche scientifique appliquée, an ephemeral creature that expired in 1941. In 1930 parliament created two funds, one for letters and one for science. The Caisse nationale des sciences for the support of scientific research used a system of short, renewable contracts rather than create a permanent group of researchers. There was a novelty here. The state had set a new direction by granting research scholarships, for it now pushed the creation of a corps of researchers, rather than just pay for research materials.

In 1875, after nearly half a century of battle, French Catholics broke the tenacious monopoly of the state University in higher education. Although still hindered by onerous state regulations, the episcopacy founded five universities, strategically established in Paris, Lille, Angers, Lyon, and Toulouse. All served a certain group of dioceses. Except for Toulouse, they had at least the three faculties legally required for the establishment of a private university. The law also required that a faculty of science possess physics and chemistry laboratories as well as collections of instruments and material in physics and natural history. In spite of the jealous reassertion of some of the state University's old monopolistic prerogatives by the Ferry laws, involving, among other things, the elimination of professors of the Catholic faculties from examination juries and the denial of the title university to the new establishments, the Catholic institutions survived and still exist. Ferry was minister of education from February 4, 1879, to November 14, 1881, and from February 21 to November 20, 1883. Catholics interpreted the law of March 18, 1880, as a serious blow against the private faculties.