It was founded in the year 1766, for the instruction of fifteen
hundred children intended for mechanical professions, and was the
first beneficent establishment opened in favour of the common people.
Literature, sciences, and liberal arts had every where public
schools; mechanical arts alone were neglected. The lower orders, by
whom they were exercised, had no other means of learning them, and of
developing the faculties of their mind, than the blind routine of
apprenticeship.
The success of this school had progressively caused similar ones to
be instituted in a great number of towns of France, but most of them
are buried under the ruins of the revolution; that of Paris has
escaped the general overthrow; and, though it has lost a considerable
portion of its revenue, it still admits about six hundred pupils.
They are taught every thing relative to the mechanical arts, such as
drawing in all its various branches, military, civil, and naval
architecture, hydraulics, arithmetic, land-surveying, mensuration,
perspective, stone-cutting, and in short such parts of mathematics
and practical geometry as relate to those different objects.
The Gratuitous School for Drawing must not be assimilated to
establishments intended for improving the taste of those who follow
the career of the liberal arts. It presents immediately to the
children of the lower orders of the people the instruction that suits
them best. Here, every thing is useful. Not only are the pupils
instructed _gratis_, but the school furnishes to the indigent,
recommended by one of the founders, the paper, pencils, and
instruments necessary for their studies in the classes, and also
models for exercising their talents at home.
* * * * *
I shall speak elsewhere of the _Special School of Medicine_ of Paris;
there are two others, one at Montpellier, and one at Strasburg. At
Alfort, near Paris, is established, on a grand scale, a