Ferry wants to destroy the privileges that this law granted to the Church. He wants above all that the teaching staff of the State receive their fair representation in the Councils of Public Instruction.
The law of February 27, 1880 relating to the Superior Council substitutes the principle of pedagogical competence for the principle of representation of "social influences" Bishops, pastors and rabbis, Councilor of State and advisers to the Court of Cassation make room for elected representatives of all branches of education (the same principle dominated the reform of the iniquitous Academic Councils in the provinces).
The discussion of the law had revealed the strength, the passions confronted, which Falloux and inspired by Bishop Dupanloup. Your bishops, said Ferry bitterly to the right.
The law, he added, that defends you here, the law of March 15, 1850 has made you masters of secondary education.
He still exclaimed:
What did you do with our studies? the one which, under the impulse of Mgr Dupanloup and Montalembert, put the University of France under the high police of its detractors and its enemies.
Ferry loudly proclaimed that it was necessary, by virtue of the principle of the separation of the spiritual and the temporal, to suppress "the bench of bishops" in the Superior Council of Public Instruction, just as it had been suppressed in the Upper Chambers.
This first reform heralded others. Ferry, in opening the first session of the new Superior Council, on March 31, 1880, said that the University, which had been nothing more than an administration since 1850, appeared from that memorable day as a living body, organized and free.
The Republic, he added, had paid its debt to the University; the University would pay its debt to the Republic by operating itself and on itself this reform of studies so often attempted, so long awaited, and which it is no longer permitted or possible to differ.
At the same time as the project relating to the Higher Council, Ferry had tabled a project concerning higher education, which directly attacked the law of July 1875, known as the Buffet law, inspired by Dupanloup, and of which Gambetta had said that it was a bone in the throat of every Republican:for it extended to higher education the spirit, both liberal and favorable to the Church, of the Falloux law. This second Ferry project was directed against free higher education establishments, Catholic institutes or faculties, created under the Buffet law. It abolished the mixed juries provided for
by this law, which included both representatives of free higher education establishments and state faculties, and which had the right to confer bachelor's and doctoral degrees.
This abolition was the subject of Articles I to 5 of the draft. The faculties of the State regained the monopoly of conferring university degrees; no free establishment could take the title of university. It is in this project, relating exclusively to higher education, that the three lines of article 7 appear in an unusual way, covering all kinds of education:No one is allowed to direct a public or private establishment. of any order whatsoever nor to teach there if he belongs to an unauthorized congregation.
Ferry did not hide the fact that Article 7 was above all directed against the Jesuits. In his Epinal speech of April 25, 1879, he declared very loudly that the government was targeting a congregation that was prohibited by our entire history:the Society of Jesus.
Yes, it's up to her , gentlemen, that we want to snatch the soul of French youth.
If the Jesuits asked for permission, it was certain, in advance, that it would be refused. Why ? Because they directed the greatest number of colleges where the nobility and the upper middle class were brought up:in other words, this “good society”, this world, quite simply, the citadel of resistance to the Republic.
Thus Ferry, the great lawyer and the great layman, killed two birds with one stone.
On the one hand, he defended the state with which. even under the very Christian monarchy, the great ultramontane order was often in difficulty. On the other side. Ferri dismantled the main fortress of the conservative and counter-revolutionary spirit:he completed the revenge of the Republic to the Republicans on the conservative Republic and on the clerical May 16