By the 1850s, however, the relationship between the
communes, educational civil society (especially Catholic organizations), and an
increasingly powerful state education bureaucracy had resulted in open competition
between the providers of primary education. This competition forced new debates on the
roles and responsibilities of communes, local civil society, and the state. The culmination
was a political culture that privileged a direct relationship between the local community
and a national body--either the state or the Catholic Church--that provided vital
resources and direction. The institutional result was the emergence of a preference for
centralized national systems by the mid-1870s. The trade-off was that local civil society
became merely a pressure group to support education policy determined elsewhereâ€"a
retreat from local praxis in favor of national politics.