The Modern R��gime - II

<p>“To treat of the Church the School and the Family describe the modern milieu and note the facilities and obstacles which a society like our own encounters in this milieu” such was the programme of the last section of <em>The Origins of Contemporary France</em>. The present volume is a continuation of the first part of this programme; after the commune and the department after local societies the author was to study moral and intellectual bodies in France as organised by Napoleon. This study completed this last step taken he was about to reach the summit. He was about to view France as a whole to comprehend it no longer through a detail of its organs in a state of formation but its actual existence. Sadly of this last volume only the part relating to the Church and to public instruction was written for the intervention of death suddenly arrested the pen. Yet for those who have followed him thus far it is already clear that the great defect of the French community is the dissociation of individuals isolated dwindling and prostrate at the feet of the all-powerful State rendered incapable by remote historical causes and yet more so by modern legislation of “spontaneously grouping around a common interest”. If the conclusion is not written whoever knows the author’s thought may divine it. Thus the work such as it is is essentially finished; it already contains his ideas in full; the intelligent eye has only to follow them and to note their consequences and combination.</p>