ABSTRACT
As we have seen in the historical chapters, France since the eighteenth century has been culturally divided into the traditional Catholic part and the revolutionary secularist part. The cultural schism was reinforced by the industrialisation of the country in the nineteenth century and the growth of the urban proletarian population. On the whole the agricultural countryside remained faithful to the old Catholic tradition and in politics as well as in education is more conservative, whilst the mining and industrial centres accepted the radical anti-clerical tradition of the French Revolution and in the twentieth century en masse joined the ranks of the Socialist and more recently the Communist parties. However, throughout the whole period of their historical opposition both antagonists were essentially French and were proudly conscious of their common heritage and common nationality. Whether Jesuit or Jansenist, Huguenot or Jacobin of the past or Catholic and Communist of the present, all French intellectuals shared the traditions of Descartes and Bossuet, Voltaire and Condorcet and the glory of the Grand Monarchy, the Great Revolution and the Napoleonic era. The same grandeur of conception, the same logical method of application and the same passionate love of France make these two traditions, so often bitterly opposed, twin daughters of the same mother. Descartes was educated in the Jesuit College de la Fleche, Moliere and Voltaire, Camille Desmoulins and Robespierre were all graduates of the Jesuit College Louis-le-Grand, and by their example prove that the transfer from one tradition to another was possible because they were both French. In our own time we have examples of Socialist leaders educated in a Jesuit College and Archbishops educated in the secular Ecole Normale Superieure. When the principal of a Jesuit College was asked how he could be so friendly with his former pupil Paul Boncour, who became a Socialist and secularist, the Jesuit Father answered: “But he is one of the most distinguished anti-clericals who graduated from our institution."
