It was not enough for the reactionaries that they themselves had been brought up in the Jesuit schools; they were fain to have the whole youth of the nation sent there. De Maistre was all his life the patron and ardent champion of the Jesuits. At the court of St. Petersburg he exposed himself to much unpleasantness rather than throw them over.
The third part of Bonald's _Législation primitive_, which treats chiefly of education, is directed against Rousseau's _Émile_; he cannot forgive this book for teaching that religion ought not to form a part of children's education. In all seriousness he mentions, as an example of the fatal results of Rousseau's principles of education, that during the last five months seventy-five children have been sentenced to punishment for various crimes. He then proceeds to expound his own principles. Their aim, as was to be expected, is the suppression of all individuality. "We require a continuous, universal, uniform (_perpétuel, universel, uniforme_) course of instruction, and consequently continuity, universality, and uniformity in our teachers; therefore we must have a corps of teachers, for without a corps we can ensure neither continuity nor universality nor uniformity." He maintains that married teachers cannot be expected to sacrifice themselves to their calling, and unmarried ones are equally unserviceable unless they are under the restraint of religious vows; "for secular teachers, even though they be unmarried, are incapable of forming a real corps, because they enter it and leave it according to their own inclination and caprice; moreover, no father of a family would dare to entrust his children to an unmarried man whose morals were not certified by his religious vows and discipline." By force of these arguments he arrives at the conclusion that the whole education of the nation should be entrusted to the clergy, should be distinctly religious, and should early accustom children to reverence that authority to which they are to submit throughout their lives.
Obstinate insistence on the principle of authority is, then, the distinctive, the ruling feature of this literary group. The French rebuilders of society champion the principle with much more ardour than those of Germany, partly because of their racial peculiarities, partly because of their different religion. The reactionary movement in German literature has its origin, as we have seen, in the law-defying self-assertion and self-will of the individual.[8] In spite of its Catholic tendencies and its apery of Catholicism, German Romanticism never became so entirely Catholic, so deferential to authority, as the French reaction. Teutonic and Protestant self-will always militated against this. The French mind yielded easily. And it must be allowed that there is something attractive in the complete, unmitigated reaction which is lacking in the undecided, incomplete reaction.