The doctoral seminar did not extend easily to France.
Napoleonic Europe, focusing on grand state institutions, was no friend of independent corporations with a royalist heritage. In the wake of the French Revolution, Napoleon created a score of pyramidal educational authorities, each one consisting of faculties, lycées, and elementary schools, all ultimately responsible to functionaries in Paris. This University of France continued through the nineteenth century, recruiting teenagers to become schoolteachers and, later in the century, becoming a motor of regional economic growth. Higher scientific learning was transmitted in special grandes écoles outside the university. The most important of these early in the century was the Ecole Polytechnique, governed then (as now) by the Ministry of War and designed to produce military engineers. There was also the Ecole Normal Supérieure, the national school that set norms for schoolteachers, which at mid century, under the inspired direction of Louis Pasteur, became a privileged conduit to a scientific career. By the twentieth century there were a score of these grandes écoles, which recruited by competition and which promised graduates a civil-service posting in diverse technical fields. The French universities have never received their place in science, but a comeback of sorts was made at the end of the nineteenth century in direct response to developments outre-Rhin.
Beyond the borders of France, Napoleon engineered the end of a number of universities in the Netherlands and German-speaking Europe. German rulers used the occasion of their new independence to open new universities in propitious administrative seats like Berlin, Breslau, Bonn, and eventually Munich. The notion of pure learning, or Wissenschaft (a neologism from the German Enlightenment intended to denote scholarship and science), lay at the centre of the reorganized and the new universities, especially in Prussia. The research spirit permeated the University of Berlin, created in 1810 with the guidance of historian Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), brother of the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Over the next generation research became a way of life for German university professors, as councillors of the various kings, princes, dukes, following a long tradition, competed for prominent men of science.
The German research university in context
The research ethos, already displayed at the larger eighteenth-century German universities, became rooted in nineteenth-century academic life. Germans believed, along with the poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), that the promotion of culture through education was the path to national regeneration. Eighteenth-century courtly life, lacking the means to indulge in the profligate dissipation that characterized Paris and London, was nothing if not intellectual. The courtly ideal of Bildung – an appreciation of the world combined with self-realization – was achieved by serious study.
Education became a German passion early in the nineteenth century, and the university reforms were connected with a new system of primary and secondary schools. The guiding light for educational curricula was a romantic invocation of classical antiquity which was known as neohumanism. The path to Bildung, then, required a large detour through Greek and Latin, the knowledge of which (attested by a diploma, the Abitur, issued by a classical secondary school, the Gymnasium) was held to be a prerequisite for study in any university faculty. This much was also true of French and English education, although to a lesser degree. The signal characteristic of the German educational synthesis lay in grafting research on Bildung.
Accomplishment in research, certified especially by having received a doctorate from a philosophy faculty, signalled that a man was the right sort for instructing German youth. By extension, the battery of examinations instituted to certify young men as customs agents, mine inspectors, and Gymnasium teachers went far beyond the practical knowledge necessary for the job. Gymnasium mathematics teachers, for example, had to acquit themselves in many subjects not taught in the secondary schools, such as celestial mechanics. The requirement is less bizarre when it is recalled that the examiners for civil-service ratings were university professors, whose material interests included persuading future civil servants to attend their rather arcane – not to say useless – lectures. In this way, professors circumvented the inconvenient tradition by which philosophy faculties awarded no diploma except the doctorate; the civil-service rating examinations defined a kind of undergraduate degree (comparable to the licence in France or the ordinary BA at a Scottish or English university).
Bildung, like Wissenschaft, was practically irrelevant. A cultivated person was unprepared for greasing the wheels of commerce and industry, just as a master of Wissenschaft had no sense of how to turn his knowledge to lucrative gain. University learning, at least in the philosophy faculties, was intentionally abstract. As the German states required engineers and manufacturers, notably for their armies, they looked to France and adapted her solution. They set up civilian copies of the Ecole Polytechnique. By mid century these schools evolved into institutes of technology, independent of universities, called technische Hochschulen. Although these institutes did not create the German industrial revolution of steel, chemicals, and electricity (sometimes called the Second Industrial Revolution), they provided thousands of unusually well-prepared engineers (among them Albert Einstein’s uncle, Jakob Einstein [1850–1912]) who stewarded the revolution into the twentieth-century age of gigantic industrial firms.
Institute professors, like those who taught Albert Einstein in Zurich, were infected with the research ethos of their university counterparts. Publishing brilliant work was one way to move up from institute to university, a common career move for many scientists (Einstein bucked the trend, resigning a professorship at the German University of Prague for one at the Zurich Institute of Technology). An institute diploma, however, had nothing of the cachet of a university doctorate. The Zurich Institute of Technology in fact had a special arrangement with the local university, whereby institute alumni could become university doctoral candidates (Einstein twice failed to obtain a doctorate in this way). The engineers clamoured for parity with university graduates to achieve respect at dinner parties and to obtain state privileges bestowed on cultured university alumni. This they progressively (and slowly) achieved. The right to award a doctorate of engineering came in 1900, and more than fifty years later came the honour of calling themselves technische Universitäten.
In the nineteenth century, German education was generally a battleground between practical studies, or Realen, and impractical Wissenschaft. Chemistry provided the first demonstration that pure learning, left to its own devices, could turn a profit. The demonstrator was Justus von Liebig (1803–1873), who mass-produced chemists from his laboratory at Giessen. He revived the felicitous notion that certain kinds of science, especially chemistry, were teachable less by magisterial lectures than by hands-on experience. He expanded on the lecture-demonstrations of the Enlightenment by extending to natural sciences what had been common for Sanskritists or Provençalists – the seminar. Liebig’s students, at first instructed in his home, were largely apothecaries. He taught a technique, synthesizing chemical compounds, that could apply to all nature. He retailed the technique with a goal that no government could dispute, increasing agricultural production. State authorities showered riches on him: a title of nobility and a well-appointed laboratory for teaching and research. The disciples of organic chemistry established themselves across Germany when the great boom of synthetic dyes began, guaranteeing the discipline an independent home in the philosophy faculties. We shall see later that a similar evolution characterized nineteenth-century physics.
The idealism of the Gymnasium movement did not completely extinguish an eighteenth-century emphasis on secondary instruction in Realen – notably modern languages and mathematics. Municipalities and occasionally states also sponsored a variety of trade and commercial schools designed for people who could not afford the luxury of higher learning. Following a natural tendency among academic institutions to seek greater privileges for their graduates,