Falloux Law (1850)

Since the Revolution the French state had taken an ever larger part in education, and the Université founded by Napoleon supervised the whole school system. Catholics believed these schools spread the ideas of the Enlightenment and of socialism and wanted the Church to lead education as under the Ancien Régime. The Guizot Law of 1833 had allowed private primary schools but kept secondary and higher education under the Université. After the February Revolution of 1848 the Minister of Public Instruction Hippolyte Carnot prepared a plan for compulsory schooling for children of both sexes and three years of state-funded teacher training, but it was shelved when he resigned on 5 July, after the June Days.

Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, elected president in December 1848, appointed the Legitimist Catholic Falloux Minister of Public Instruction in Odilon Barrot's cabinet. Falloux formally withdrew Carnot's plan on 4 January 1849 and entrusted a new bill to a commission chaired by Thiers; he summed up his programme as "God in education, the Pope at the head of the Church, the Church at the head of civilisation". The bill was laid before the Assembly on 18 June 1849, and after Falloux resigned in September his successor Parieu carried it on. The Assembly first passed, on 11 January 1850, the "Parieu law" making it easy to suspend and dismiss schoolteachers, and in the debate Victor Hugo attacked the excessive influence of the clergy with the words "the Church at home and the State at home". The law passed on 15 March by 399 votes to 237.

The law divided primary and secondary education between public and "free" schools. Members of religious orders could teach without the baccalauréat if they were ministers of a religion or held a certificate of training, and for nuns a letter of obedience from the bishop sufficed. Schools were supervised jointly by the mayor and the parish priest, bishops sat by right on the councils of the academies, now one per department, and seven representatives of the religions (four of them Catholic) sat on the Superior Council of Public Instruction. Moral and religious instruction became a compulsory primary subject beside reading, writing and arithmetic, and every commune of more than 800 inhabitants was to have a girls' school. Catholic schools grew by 75 per cent between 1854 and 1867.

After the coup a law of 1854 cut the academies to sixteen, but the framework of the law survived. In the 1880s the Jules Ferry laws of the Third Republic made primary schooling free and compulsory and removed religious instruction, and the Goblet law of 1886 repealed the first two titles of the Falloux Law. In The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx mocked the legislation of the period as summed up "in two laws: in the law reestablishing the wine tax and the education law abolishing unbelief", by which the Voltairean liberal bourgeois of the Orléanist party handed the care of the French mind over to their old enemies, the Jesuits.