Secondary Education and the Professions in France During the Second Empire

Abstract

In recent years historians and sociologists alike have given increasing attention to the relationship between education and social structure in France. Louis Althusser has argued that the French educational system was designed to preserve elites. Michel Crozier concluded that the system prevented a too rapid mobility that would upset the status-quo and that ‘graduates [of grandes é'coles] have a de facto monopoly on the top brackets of the Civil Service, the universities, and medicine, and decisive advantages in entering most professions and many industrial organizations’.