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Literacy and Demographic Behavior: Evidence from Family Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

James R. Lehning
James R. Lehning*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Utah
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Extract

An important part of historians' view of the process of social change is the role assigned to the spread of literacy and education. The contrast between tranditional societies, one of whose characteristics is limited literacy and educational opportunities, and modern society with high levels of literacy and widespread education, has shaped both social history and development policy. For some, the acquisition of literacy exposes people to new ideas, makes them more rational, and, ultimately, changes their behavior. People “become modern” at least partially through education and learning to read and write. In this vein Francois Furet and Jacques Ozouf have emphasized the introspection and access to written culture that came with literacy in France, and Michel Vovelle has spoken of a possible “cultural revolution” accompanying spreading literacy in eighteenth-century Provence. Thus, the democratization of literacy meant far more than just more people knowing how to read and write; it made people more logical and philosophical.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , Winter 1984 , pp. 545 - 559
Copyright
Copyright © 1984 by History of Education Society 

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References

Notes

1. Inkeles, Alex and Smith, David, Becoming Modern (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 15–24 lists characteristics of “modern” societies. Furet, Francois and Ozouf, Jacques, Lire et écrire: l'alphabétisation des francais de Calvin a Jules Ferry (Paris, 1977), Vol. 1, pp, 358–359; Vovelle, Michel, “Y a-t-il une révolution culturelle au XVIIIe siècle? A propos de l'education populaire en Provence,” Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 32 (1975):89–141.Google Scholar

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5. Scott, James, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven and London, 1976); Popkin, Samuel L., The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979); Levine, David, “Illiteracy and Family Life during the First Industrial Revolution,” Journal of Social History, 14, 1 (1979):40.Google Scholar

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9. For a fuller discussion of Marlhes and its setting, see my The Peasants of Marlhes (Chapel Hill, 1980), especially Chapters 1 and 2.Google Scholar

10. The liste nominative of the census of 1901 has been used to supplement death records as an end of observation, and birth certificates for women born outside of Marlhes but in the department of the Loire have been searched for in Series 3E of the Archives départementales de la Loire (A.D.L.).Google Scholar

11. The use of signatures as a measure of at least basic literacy can be justified on several grounds. Frist, until at least the middle of the nineteenth century reading was taught before writing in French primary schools. Someone who was able to write, therefore, had already learned to read. Even after reading and writing were taught at the same time, this should still be the case. Signatures at marriage, some fifteen years after school-leaving, would of course underestimate literacy. Secondly, strong correlations have been found (.90) at the departmental level in 1866 between signing and ability to read and write. See Furet, and Ozouf, , Lire et écrire, vol. 1, pp. 20, 26. This does not resolve the problem of what basic literacy meant; see below, Part IV. The ancien cadastre of Marlhes is in A.D.L. Series P non-coté.Google Scholar

12. In this study a family had been classified as landholding if it fulfilled either of the two following conditions: (1) it was indicated in the matrice cadastrale as owning at least one hectare of land; or (2) the occupation listed on the marriage act indicated that the individual was a landowner (e.g., propriétaire, fermierpropriétaire).Google Scholar

13. Ministere de 1' Instruction Publique de France, Statistique Retrospective. Etat récapitulatif et comparatif indiquant, par département, le nombre des conjoints qui ont signé l'acte de leur mariage, au XVIIe, XVIIIe, et XIXe siècles (n.p., n.d.).Google Scholar

14. This is based on tabulations of the signatures on acts of marriage in the parish registers (before 1792) and état civil of Marlhes, kept in the A.D.L. Series 3E 140–145 and in the Mairie of Marlhes.Google Scholar

15. Lehning, , The Peasants of Marlhes, Chapter 3.Google Scholar

16. Two examples show this. In Meulan, the mean age of the mother at birth of last child declined from 40.7 in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to 34.3 between 1790 and 1839, as contraception became a part of the population's behavior. Lachiver, Marcel, La Population de Meulan du XVIIe au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1969), p. 174. In Shepshed in Leicestershire, this figure fell from 40.55 for marriages of 1600–1699 to 36.56 for marriages 1800–1849, indicating the adoption of family limitation there after 1800. Levine, David, Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capitalism (New York, 1977), p. 68.Google Scholar

17. For a fuller discussion of wetnursing in Marlhes, see Lehning, James R., “Family Life and Wetnursing in a French Village,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 12 (1982):645–656. For evidence that lengthy nursing increased the interval between births, see Salber, Eva J., Feinleib, Manning and MacMahon, Brian, “The Duration of Post-Partum Amenorrhea,” American Journal of Epidemiology, 82(3), (1966):348–349; Potter, Robert G., New, Mary L., Wyon, John B. and Gordon, John E., “Applications of Field Studies to Research on the Physiology of Human Reproduction: Lactation and Its Effects Upon Birth Intervals in Eleven Punjab Villages, India,” in Sheps, Mindel C., and Ridley, Jeanne Clare (eds.), Public Health and Population Change: Current Research Issues (Pittsburgh, 1965), p. 394. The basis for thinking that lower nutritional levels affect fecundity can be found in Frisch, Rose W., Revelle, R., and Cook, S., “Height, Weight and Age at Menarche and the Critical Weight Hypothesis,” Science 174 (1971):1148–1149. Leroy Ladurie, E., “L'Amenorrhée de famine (XVIIe–XXe siecle), pp. 331–348 in Le Territoire de l'historien (Paris, 1974) summarizes some historical examples of this phenomenon, and Frisch, Rose E., “Population, Food Intake, and Fertility,” Science 199 (1978):22–30 uses the theory to explain fertility levels in mid-nineteenth-century England and Scotland. The sharpest criticism of Frisch's work has come from Trussell, James, “Menarche and Fatness: A Reexamination of the Critical Body Composition Hypothesis,” Science, 200 (1978): 1506–1509. Frisch has responded in the same issue, pp. 1509–1513. A field study that indicates an effect of nursing but no effect of nutritional status on fertility is Huffman, Sandra L., Alauddin Chowdhury, A.K.M., Chakraborty, J. and Henry Mosley, W., “Nutrition and Post-Partum Amenorrhea in Rural Bangladesh,” Population Studies, 32 (1978):251–260.Google Scholar

18. Several of these issues have been considered recently. See Resnick, Daniel P. and Resnick, Lauren B., “The Nature of Literacy: An Historical Exploration,” Harvard Educational Review, 47, 3 (1977):370–385; and Hebrard, Jean, “Ecole et alphabétisation au XIXe siècle (approche psycho-pedagogique de documents historiques), Annales. Economies. Sociétés. Civilisations, 35e Année (1980):66–80.Google Scholar

19. For France see Gontard, M., L'Enseignement primaire en France de la Révolution à la Loi Guizot (1789–1833) (Paris, 1959), pp. 227, 310, 542; and Les Ecoles primaires de la France bourgeoise (1833–1875) (Toulouse, n.d.), pp. 28, 120; Anderson, R. D., Education in France 1848–1870 (Oxford, 1975), pp. 163–164; Ozouf, Mona, L'Ecole, L'Eglise et la République (Paris, 1963); Resnick, Daniel P. and Resnick, Lauren B., “The Nature of Literacy,” 375–379. For Marlhes, see Archives Nationales de France (A.N.), F 17 9308, Rapport General sur l'état de l'instruction primaire dans le département de la Loire en 1841, p. 15; A.N. F 17 9311, Rapport sur la situation des écoles de filles et des salles d'asile en 1855, arrondissement de Saint-Etienne; A.N. F 17 10413, Etat de situation des écoles primaires publiques et libres et des écoles maternelles, 1860; A.D.L. T 1545, Rapport de I'lnspecteur Primaire, commune de Marlhes, 7 decembre 1880.Google Scholar

20. Schofield, Roger, “The Measurement of Literacy in Pre-Industrial England,” in Goody, Jack (ed.), Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 312–313.Google Scholar

21. Fortier-Beaulieu, Paul, Mariages et noces campagnards (Paris, 1937), map 1, between pp. 16 and 17.Google Scholar

22. On Church views, see Aries, Philippe, “Interpretation pour une histoire des mentalites,” pp. 311–328 in Bergues, Helene (ed.), La Prevention des naissances dans la famille (Paris, 1960); Noonan, John, Contraception (Cambridge, 1965); and Flandrin, Jean-Louis, Families: parenté, maison, sexualité dans l'ancienne société (Paris, 1976), especially Chapter 4. For the views of the Third Republic, see Ozouf, , L'Ecole, l'Eglise et la République. Google Scholar

23. Darmon, Jean-Jacques, Le Colportage de librairie en France sous le Second Empire: grands colporteurs et culture populaire (Paris, 1972), pp. 47, 171.Google Scholar

24. Davis, Natalie Zemon, “The Historian and Popular Culture,” in Beauroy, Jacques, Bertrand, Marc, Gargan, Edward (eds.), The Wolf and the Lamb: Popular Culture in France from the Old Regime to the Twentieth Century (Saratoga, California, 1977), p. 9; Geertz, Clifford, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1972), especially p. 5.Google Scholar

25. See Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971), p. 650 for such an argument about one aspect of traditional European culture, witchcraft; Marrus, Michael R., “Folklore as an Ethnographic Source: A'Mise au Point' in Beauroy, , Bertrand, and Gargan, (eds.), The Wolf and the Lamb, pp. 120–124 makes a similar suggestion about 19th century French folk culture.Google Scholar