between the Cartesian cogito and the anti-rationalism of Bergson and Sartre;
instead he is submerged by his affinities with the conservative spiritualism that
dominated the generations which followed him.
At midcentury none of the leading French intellectuals was an academic
philosopher. From the time of Napoleon until the reforms of the 1880s, uni-
versity professors were essentially examiners of secondary school leavers and
certifiers of teachers; classes for regular bodies of university students did not
exist until the 1880s. Even thereafter, the education system promoted scholastic
preservation of the classics rather than innovation. For decades educational
administrators struggled over the extent to which modern languages and
natural sciences were to be introduced in the secondary schools (Ringer, 1992:
40–46; Ringer, 1987: 26–29). The structure did not alter until well into the
Third Republic; Sartre was still struggling with it in the 1930s. An academic
philosopher holding the sole chair per university was expected to cover the
whole field in an eclectic manner. Philosophy was further conservatized by
being taught in the lycées, the elite secondary schools, where it consisted of a
survey of philosophical classics in the last year of instruction (Fabiani, 1988).
Philosophy’s rationale was to serve as the crown of the curriculum, the syn-
thesizer which overcame the fragmentation of the disciplines by bringing
together the wisdom of everything pupils had learned. Most philosophers were
trained at the elite school of education, the École Normale Supérieure (ENS)
in Paris, and passed through a number of years teaching in provincial lycées,
after which one might become a school inspector in the government bureauc-
racy, an administrator of centralized examinations, or a member of juries
granting higher degrees. Success in such careers meant adhering to a conser-
vative intellectual canon, concentrating one’s scholarly activity on producing
manuals or translations and editions of the classics; it was acceptable to publish
little or nothing.
What innovation there was took place in the interstices of the system or
outside the academic world entirely. Lacking an institutional position, Comte
turned increasingly to a popularistic cult of social and religious reform; his
followers were a non-academic sect. The biggest reputations came by default
of philosophies claiming general importance. Renan, professor of Hebrew at
the Collège de France and introducer of biblical higher criticism, and Taine, at
the École des Beaux Arts, became notable as militants for secularization, which
they supported by a doctrine of factuality modeled on natural science. Their
inspiration was the autonomous German universities; but their avenue of
publicity was popular writings on literature and religious history. On more
strictly philosophical turf, Renouvier, a former Polytechnique mathematics
student and attendee of Comte’s private lectures, banned to private life for his
Republican views, found an attention slot which reconciled liberalism and
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