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In France Cybèle has more worshippers than Christ. Higher agricultural education A perusal of nineteenth-century scientific literature, especially the journals, soon reveals the large role that science was capable of playing in agriculture and the degree to which farmers and all sorts of politicians were coming to rely on scientists to tell them how to increase production. The patron saint of French agricultural education is Mathieu de Dombasle, who opened near Nancy the first serious agricultural school in 1824. This noble failure encouraged the engineers Polonceau and Auguste Bella to found in 1828, with royal support, the more scientifically oriented Institution royale agronomique de Grignon, near Paris. In 1848 the Second Republic created a national organization of agricultural education: seventy departmental farm-schools to produce good farm workers; regional schools of agriculture; and, capstone of the system, the Institut national agronomique de Versailles. In line with policies in most western countries, the Third Republic promoted scientific agriculture on a scale unprecedented in French history. An autonomous Ministry of Agriculture emerged in 1881 from the clutches of the ministries in which it had been held captive for most of the century. Nineteen different ministers of agriculture served the forty-two governments that ruled France from 1881 to 1914. Given the composition of the Chamber of Deputies, it is not surprising that the ministry fell victim to a near monopoly by lawyers and doctors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technical progress is a function of bourgeois money. The functions of the faculties of science in the later nineteenth century were teaching, research, and service to agriculture, industry, and government at municipal, departmental, and national levels. An extra duty of faculties, resulting from the organization of a unified system of education and the historical connection between lycée and faculty, was their time-consuming responsibility for the baccalaureate examinations, a particularly heavy burden in large towns. The examination figures for the University of Paris in 1893–4 show the problem. Fortunately a light teaching load gave the French university scientist some time for research. Probably the most striking feature of the provincial faculties of science was the development of a system of institutes of applied science, each of which was usually headed by a leading scientist interested in regional industry and agriculture. The careers of Pasteur in Lille, Schützenberger in Mulhouse and in Paris, Haller in Nancy, Sabatier in Toulouse, and the Berthelots and Le Chatelier in Paris provide a paradigm of the activity of the academic scientist whose research was intimately connected with the economic life of the region and the nation. In developing institutes of applied science and technology the University saw itself as fulfilling a vital social function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]