PHILOSOPHY AND THE NEW UNIVERSITY

Writing just after the end of World War I, an acute observer of the French philosophical scene judged that “philosophical research had never been more abundant, more serious, and more intense among us than in the last thirty years”. This flowering was due to the place of philosophy in the new educational system set up by the Third Republic in the wake of the demoralizing defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. The French had been humiliated by the capture of Napoleon III at Sedan, devastated by the long siege of Paris, and terrified by what most of the bourgeoisie saw as seventy-three days of anarchy under the radical socialism of the Commune. Much of the new Republic's effort at spiritual restoration was driven by a rejection of the traditional values of institutional religion, which it aimed to replace with an enlightened secular worldview A principal vehicle of this enterprise was educational reform and specifically the building of a university system dedicated to the ideals of science, reason, and humanism.