Virtually all the changes and adjustments in educational thought and practice during the period of the revolutions sprang from the intellectual foundations of the Age of Reason which was just drawing to a close. Notions about the practice and content of teaching were highly articulate, even if they sometimes smelt more of the salon than the schoolroom. It was during these years that the discussion of education became conscious of its central place in all thinking about what d'Alembert referred to as ‘our minds, our customs and our achievements’. But to hold that the developments in educational thought were linked to one or two of the major themes of the Enlightenment would be to oversimplify the issues. Perhaps no one was in a better position to appreciate the range covered by the intellectual stimuli than Victor Cousin, who made contact with the thought of the Idéologues in the newly opened École Normale in Paris under the Empire, then made contact with transcendentalism in the German universities, and lived on to promote the reconstruction of French elementary education in the quite different philosophical atmosphere in which planning was accomplished under the Orleans monarchy. The eighteenth century, he remarked, had submitted everything to critical examination. This was the period that ‘made of education at first a problem, then a science, finally an art; hence pedagogy’. Pedagogy, he was prepared to concede, was a ridiculous word, but the thing itself was sacred, and its full flowering as a subject of scientific import had been accomplished in the age of revolution.