While tracking down an exact reference for the French professor Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, I came across a collection of examination questions for 1873-1884 from the École libre des sciences politiques at archive.com. [Trick: sometimes you need to click the + sign in the archive.com viewer to see an image in that collection]
I offer this post for the 1878 examination as a bookmark for myself and others. Maybe later a few more of the economics questions will get fished out and posted in translation.
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Question de Finances
Cours de M. Leroy Beaulieu
Exposer brièvement les avantages et les inconvénients respectifs des impôts directs et des impôts indirects. Le placer, pour l’étude de cette question, au point de vue d’un pays qui a de très grandes charges, c’est a dire qui est grevé d’une lourde dette et qui entretient un grand état militaire.
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Question: [Public] Finance
for the course
taught by Mr Leroy Beaulieu
Briefly describe the respective advantages and disadvantages of direct and indirect taxes. Take, in your answer to this question, the point of view of a country which is very heavily burdened, that is to say, having both a heavy [national] debt and a very large military budget.
Source: Ecole libre des sciences politiques (Paris). Examens de 1878: questions envoyées par les professeurs pour les épreuves écrites, questions tirées et questions non tirées…
Image Source: Paris. Collège de France, M. le Professeur Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, Membre de l’Institut. Wikicommons, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Colorized by Economics in the Rear-view Mirror.,