FOURTH WORLD
23
an early nineteenth-century liberal like Stendhal, for instance,
La carriere
ouverte aux talents
symbolized all that the Revolution had liberated and
Napoleon had consolidated. Evidently, such a conception seems un–
democratic by the ideals of social democracy that were to develop later
in the nineteenth century, and it is certain that the kind of selection
worked by the series of examination hurdles throughout the educational
system has eliminated those not born to culture: even today, workers'
children constitute less than ten percent of the student body in the
University. But what really made the Napoleonic system outmoded, I
think, was the industrial revolution and the diversified complexity of
modern capitalist technology: these have increasingly put in evidence
the negativity of the Napoleonic selection, on the one hand its wasteful
creation of
rates,
on the other hand its production of an elite unequipped
by the nature of its selection and formation to meet the demands of
modem technology, and often doomed to a sort of "intellectual un–
employment."
Modem technology can have no use for the abstract ideal of an
elite - that is, an elite chosen for its all-around cultural beauty, its
capacity to handle philosophical abstractions with grace, to improvise
brilliantly on a given theme, its ability to cite the classic spokesmen for
each position, and to write a dissertation in three parts. And this is
what the university system essentially provided, at least in the pre-Faure
Reform era: one can't yet judge what real changes the reform may
effect. An
agrege
could always feel himself part of an elite, since the
agregation
commanded great abstract respect as a hurdle got over, but
he spent two or three or four years preparing an exam designed to
select schoolteachers for the Third Republic, which gradually ceased
to bear relevance to that original purpose - to become rather a neces–
sary, but not sufficient, condition for entry into university teaching–
and which, if he was a specialist in French literature, meant spending
most of his time preparing Greek and Latin texts, or if he was a
physicist, preparing material dating from pre-1930's physics. An archi–
tect from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts spent years carefully copying
Renaissance fa«ades, and when faced with designing a factory tended
to fall back on the most commonplace, and ugly, cost-per-square-foot
solutions. Students at the very top of the pyramid, at the Ecole Normale
Superieure of the Rue d'Ulm, have in recent years increasingly felt that
they must spend their three years at Normale in preparation for an–
other, less abstract institution like the Ecole Nationale d'Administration.
It is no wonder that diplomas should have lost much of their value
outside the university and civil service hierarchies, and that students
