Creation of the lycées

The Revolution had abolished the Ancien Régime colleges run by religious orders without managing to replace them: the central schools created in 1795, with free curricula and no boarding, had failed to find their public. The country lacked trained officers, engineers and administrators.

The law of 11 Floréal Year X, promulgated on 1 May 1802, created the lycées: state establishments with boarding, one per appeal court district. With the special schools — the Polytechnique, law, medicine — they formed a track leading straight into public service.

The organisation was military and openly so. Pupils wore uniform, were divided into companies commanded by sergeants drawn from among them, and the day was marked by the drum. The curriculum favoured Latin and mathematics, the two subjects held to form the mind.

The state funded six thousand four hundred scholarships, shared between the sons of deserving soldiers and officials and the best pupils of the secondary schools. It was a machine for manufacturing servants of the state as much as for teaching.

The system was completed in 1806-1808 by the Imperial University, a single teaching corps holding a monopoly on education, whose grand master appointed the professors. It was within this framework that the baccalauréat was created, in 1808.

The lycée has survived every regime, keeping its name, its boarding and its prestige. The university monopoly, by contrast, was contested from the Restoration onwards and gave way with the Falloux law in 1850.