ABSTRACT
The republicans made a particularly dramatic challenge to the church's traditional domination of women's education. The historical works of Ernest Lavisse, the regime's official historian, depicted France's kings as having begun the work of making the nation that was completed by the revolutionaries and their republican successors. The republicans who took office at the end of the 1870s had absorbed Thiers's conviction that the Republic would only survive if it demonstrated that its institutions were compatible with existing social hierarchies. While the Third Republic thus accommodated the interests of small property owners, it also managed to protect the standing of wealthy elites who had prospered during the July Monarchy and the Second Empire. The place of the urban workers in the new republican society was more problematic than that of peasants. Social critics complained that men of this sort lacked real taste and education, and that they were undermining the cultural hierarchy that had defined bourgeois society.
