Here, three achievements are to the credit of Ferry. First, he reformed the pi grammes of classical education, eliminating Latin discourse. We learned, he said, Latin to write it, now we learn it to read it. What the gramma would lose there, the “love of letters would recover.
Secondly, Ferry reorganized the special education, that is to say without Latin, created by Duruy:a living language replaced Latin. A well-balanced reformer, Ferry felt no need to belittle classical education, whose educational virtue he knew better than anyone, while making room for what would later be called modern education. In third place. Ferry, resuming on a large scale what Duruy, violently opposed by Bishop Dupanloup, had only been able to begin, created public secondary education for young girls (L. 21 Dec. 1880). These female souls. who remained the main asset of the Church in France, were they not to come, like the male souls, from the department of souls. Weren't the female spirits also entitled to the benefits of a positive formation? /P>
We don't want, said Ferry, to make learned women or incredulous women. No... but women who know how to reason. We want the habit of reasoning from scientific methods to penetrate the education of women a little more than they have hitherto.
Hence the creation of high schools and colleges for young girls, with day schools and possibly boarding schools. Religious instruction would be given by the priest at set times. Morals proper, considered independent of any denomination, would be taught by teachers:
Don't do University, cried, addressing the right, Ferry, this species of public insult which would consist in saying to him:you can teach everything, mathematics, natural history, the history of the country, but you are incapable of morality.
Finally, as he there was a École Normale Supérieure to train managers in secondary education for men, a École Normale Supérieure was needed to train managers in secondary education for women; it was Sèvres.
Ferry could only begin the great reform which, by the law of July 10, 1896, was to create the large regional universities by bringing together the faculties of the same city, universities endowed with budgetary autonomy. But he knew how to build. rebuild, enlarge, rehabilitate a considerable number of university buildings. He also knew how to increase the number of masterful chairs, reduced, he said, to the point of ridicule, from 625 to 1200.
Such was this school work by Ferry, completed and developed by his successors, which gave the 111th Republic its essential physiognomy among contemporary regimes.
It was she who provided world opinion, vis-à-vis republican France, with its main reasons for admiration or disapproval, according to the philosophical categories to which this opinion belonged and according to the greater or lesser influence that the Church held there.
In France, the anger of the Catholic right, its bitter hatred for the Antichrist, for the icy-shaped Diocletian of whom Bainville speaks, led him in large part to make common cause with the radicals against the colonial and imperial work of Ferry. . This right, on March 30, 1885 - a dramatic parliamentary day among all - helped Clemenceau the Furious to overthrow Ferry the Tonkinese ", following the alleged military disaster of Lang Son.