The greatest danger of all, of course, lies "in the fault of the French mothers, who do not give to the army soldiers enough," says another writer, M. Armand Latour, "and, alas! it is to be foreseen that they will be, in this respect, less and less generous in the future."
Of these military schools, the oldest is the _École superieure de guerre_ at the _École militaire_, founded by Louis XV in 1751, under the name of the _École royale militaire_. It was the king's intention to devote this institution to the education of five hundred young gentlemen, born without property, and, in preference, those who, having lost their fathers in battle, had become the children of the State. In addition to the five hundred young gentlemen, the hôtel was to be grand and spacious enough to receive the officers of the troops to whom the command was to be confided, the learned professors of every species who were to be proposed for the instruction and exercise of all those who would take any part in the spiritual and temporal administration of this household. The architect Gabriel commenced the construction of the buildings in the following year on what was then a portion of the plain of Grenelle, and in the meanwhile the school was opened provisorily in the Château de Vincennes. The architect was soon arrested by want of funds; but the king applied to these expenses the proceeds of a tax on playing-cards, those of a lottery,--the favorite method of raising funds at this period,--and the revenues of the Abbaie de Laon, which was then vacant. The first stone of the chapel, blessed by the Archbishop of Paris, was not laid by the king, till 1769. The pupils were admitted in 1756, divided into eight classes; at the age of eighteen or twenty years, they were graduated, and passed into the royal troops, receiving a pension of two hundred livres on the funds of the school.
In the month of August, 1760, the king issued a long statement setting forth the motives which had actuated him in drawing up the code of regulations; in the following February, the Archbishop of Paris published an equally long manifesto defining the functions and exercises spiritual which the pupils were to practise. All this did not prevent the king from modifying the organization of the school, in 1764; recognizing the truth that a strictly military education was not the best adapted to the wants of youth, and establishing the Collège de la Flèche for a preparatory educational institution; in 1776, Louis XVI suppressed the École, and distributed the pupils among various colleges whose graduates were gentlemen cadets for the various royal regiments. In 1778, the school was re-established, and the king granted it an endowment of fifteen millions; a decree of March 26, 1790, abolished the restriction of titles of nobility for all applicants, and threw the entrance open to all sons of officers of the land and sea forces. The Convention, by a decree of 13th of June, 1793, ordered the sale of all the property from which the revenues of the school were drawn, and converted the buildings into cavalry barracks and a depot for flour. Under the Empire, Napoleon installed his Guard in the École Militaire; in 1815, under the Restoration, the Garde Royale was lodged there; under Louis Napoleon, the Imperial Guard again,--very important demolitions and reconstructions having been found necessary between 1856 and 1865.