The things to which we give abstract names, liberty, justice, truth, actually are incapable of yielding up their essence, to be bottled, labeled, scrutinised. The qualities dwell in a thousand concrete things, in the accidents and transiencies of day-to-day living….

Educational historians have come to accept fully the importance of relating changes in formal schooling to changes in aspects of social structure. Perhaps the most successful recent studies have been those which have analysed the growth of elementary education in nineteenth-century Canada and the United States in terms of the total experience of growing up. Employing developmental theory and concepts of life-cycle, their work suggests that formal education was only one aspect of a series of psychological and behavioural stages through which children and youths passed on their way to adulthood. The nature and pattern of these stages are said to have been determined by family and household characteristics as well as demographic, economic and cultural factors.

The past decade has witnessed a marked revival of interest in the role of the Catholic Church in nineteenth-century French education. Several scholarly works have examined this subject from a variety of directions. This essay presents a detailed comparison of career-preferences of graduates of the two most prestigious Jesuit schools of the period. Studying the progress of alumni of the Collège de l'Immaculée-Conception (popularly referred to as “Vaugirard”), and of the Ecole Sainte-Geneviève de la rue des Postes, permits an examination of similarities and differences between the two schools. It also provides a statistical basis for conclusions regarding the impact of these institutions on French society.