Educating the people: Cours d’adultes and social stratification in France, 1830–1870

Abstract

This essay examines the formation, operation, and social effects of adult education classes in France during the nineteenth century. These classes were created and operated prior to the formation of France’s national education system and were part of the expansion of primary schooling for the working class, or more generally for “the people”. The more formally organised classes were typically held at local Catholic and non‐sectarian primary schools throughout France, but this essay argues that classes held in a variety of other settings contributed to the diversity of adult education courses offered in the 1830s and 1840s. During this early period, the diversity of adult education courses led to wide‐ranging social effects, including a challenge to the existing political and social order. Ultimately, however, adult education courses were incorporated into the developing national primary education system and became part of the formation of a generalised system of social distinction that defined and reproduced hierarchies of class and gender in modern French society.

Keywords:

• adult education
• Cours d’adultes
• France
• nineteenth century

Acknowledgements

Much of the research in this essay was possible thanks to a Bernadotte E. Schmitt grant from the American Historical Association in 2004. Some of the preliminary findings from this research were presented as one part of a paper given at the Canadian Historical Association annual meeting in June 2005, and an early draft of the current paper was presented at the meeting of the International Standing Conference on the History of Education in 2008. The author would like to thank the participants at those meetings for their helpful comments. Thanks also to the College of Arts and Sciences at Chicago State University for their research support.

Notes

¹Martin Nadaud, Mémoires de Leonard, ancien garçon maçon (Bourganeuf: A. Duboueix, 1895), 11–23.

²Nadaud, Mémoires de Leonard, 100. Nadaud’s discussion of these adult education courses in his memoirs is one of the few examples from French workers’ autobiographies from the nineteenth century that address these courses, but his experiences provide us with a starting point to examine the extensive archival records on these courses.

³Nadaud, Mémoires de Leonard, 101–2.

⁴Nadaud, Mémoires de Leonard, 99–100. Monitorial schools were not the only ones where adult education classes were held, as discussed below. Furthermore, Nadaud’s experience as a monitor in his first class appears to be somewhat unusual, at least according to the 1844 report cited in note 23 below.

⁵Nadaud, Mémoires de Leonard, 99.

⁶More recent historiography has been critical of focusing too much on educational reform laws for analysing the development of primary schooling in France. For example, see Raymond Grew and Patrick J. Harrigan, School, State, and Society: The Growth of Elementary Schooling in XIXth‐Century France. A Quantitative Analysis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991) and François Jacquet‐Francillon, Naissances de L’Ecole du Peuple, 1815–1870 (Paris: Les Editions de l’Atelier, 1995).

⁷Loi sur l’Instruction primaire du 28 Juin 1833, in Bulletin Universitaire contenant les ordonnances, réglements, et arrêtés concernant l’instruction publique. Vol. 3 (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1847), 231–43.

⁸ Loi sur l’Instruction primaire du 28 Juin 1833, Titre III, Art. 9, in Bulletin Universitaire, 234.

⁹ Circulaire adressée à MM. les Préfets et à MM. les Recteurs concernant la loi du 28 juin 1833 sur l’instruction primaire, in Bulletin Universitaire, 263–65. This circular is also cited in Noël Terrot, Histoire de l’éducation des adultes en France (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), 63–64. Terrot’s book provides a good overview of adult education in France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but focuses mostly on the late nineteenth to twentieth centuries and just touches on the period I am addressing in this essay.

¹⁰Archives de Paris, VD 6 /154, No. 1, l’Administrateur du Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers à Monsieur le Maire du Premier arrondissement, Paris le 3 Septembre 1816.

¹¹Archives de Paris, VD 6/647, Liasse I; VD 6/154, No. 2, Liasse 2 & 4; VD 6/366, Liasse 1.

¹²Archives de Paris, VD 6/647, Liasse I, lettre du Préfet au Maire du 11e arrondissement, 15 février 1828.

¹³Archives Nationales, France (AN) F¹⁷ 6674. The specific programme of courses, their locations and instructors, and the members of the local committees for each of the 12 districts (arrondissements) of Paris are detailed in the pamphlet, l’Association Libre pour l’Education Gratuite du Peuple, Paris, les 1er novembre 1832.

¹⁴“Exposé du but de l’association et de ses travaux depuis le 1er juin 1831 jusqu’au 1er juin 1832,” Le Fondateur. Journal de l’Association libre pour l’éducation du peuple Novembre (1832): 3.

¹⁵This process for adult education classes parallels what Raymond Grew and Patrick Harrigan have argued also took place for primary schooling in France at the same time, where “the famous national laws that defined and did much to shape the French system of primary education recognized and codified developments already well under way”. Grew and Harrigan, School, State, and Society, 207.

¹⁶Nadaud, 101.

¹⁷Archives de Paris, VD 6 /647, lettre du directeur LePage au Maire du 11e arrondissement.

¹⁸Archives de Paris, VD 6 /647, Tableau des Ecoles Gratuites pour les adultes établies dans le XIe arrondissement, 8 février 1833.

¹⁹Archives de Paris, VD 6 /647.

²⁰Archives de Paris, VD 6 /154, Rapport de la commission composée de MM. Raymond, Defauris et Lairtullier sur les classes d’adultes, lu à la séance du comité local du 11. Xbre 1844. This number of 130 was an average number of students given in this report for adult education classes held in secular primary schools, so it serves only as an estimate for the particular school on the rue de l’Ecole de médicine.

²¹Archives de Paris VD 6 /647. An additional 120 students attended singing classes and another 45 attended advanced drafting and design classes. These are the last dates for the archival records of the classes at this location.

²²In her analysis of education reform, Kathleen Alaimo has pointed out that the idea of adolescence as a distinct life stage in between childhood and adulthood was not conceptualised and integrated into the organisation of schooling until the late nineteenth century in France. Alaimo, “Adolescence, Gender, and Class in Education Reform in France: The Development of Enseignement Primaire Supérieur, 1880–1910,” French Historical Studies 18 (1994): 1025–55.

²³Archives de Paris, VD 6 /154, Rapport de la commission composée de MM. Raymond, Defauris et Lairtullier sur les classes d’adultes, lu à la séance du comité local du 11. Xbre 1844. This report noted that the students in these schools broke down as follows: there were seven schools run by the Catholic clergy in Paris that provided adult education courses to approximately 2000 men; there were eight “non‐sectarian” schools in Paris that provided adult education courses to approximately 1360 men; there were 11 schools in Paris that provided adult education courses to approximately 570 women; since 1841 approximately 1200 male workers had taken adult education courses run by the Association Polytechnique; and 400 to 500 adult male workers took courses through the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers.

²⁴Archives de Paris, VD 6 /154, Rapport de la commission composée de MM. Raymond, Defauris et Lairtullier sur les classes d’adultes, lu à la séance du comité local du 11. Xbre 1844. As part of an attempt to explain these low numbers of students in adult education courses, this report notes that it was “almost impossible to apply the monitorial method of teaching to the teaching of adults”, but offers no explanation as to why that was the case. This comment seems to be somewhat supported by a report on one secular school where adult education courses were held, noting that the “semi‐monitorial simultaneous method” (la méthode simultanée du semi‐mutuelle) was used in these courses, suggesting that even instructors at monitorial schools had to modify their methods when teaching adult education courses. See Archives de Paris, VD 6 /647, Rapport sur l’Ecole d’Adultes de la rue Racine, 22 mai 1838.

²⁵“Circulaire concernant les écoles d’adultes,” L’Instituteur de la Charente, July 1836, 78.

²⁶Louis‐Arsène Meunier, Le Cours d’Adultes de 1837 à 1842 (Évreux: Impr. de Charles Hérissey, 1883), 12.

²⁷Meunier, Le Cours d’Adultes, 3.

²⁸Nadaud, Mémoires de Léonard, 105.

²⁹Nadaud, Mémoires de Léonard, 107.

³⁰J. Manier, L’Instruction Populaire en 1867 dans l’Académie de Toulouse (Ariège, Aveyron, haute‐Garonne, Gers, Lot, Haute‐Pyrénées, Tarn, Tarn‐et‐Garonne) (Paris: J. Manier, 1868).

³¹Arrondissement de Nantua, Bulletin de la Société d’Encouragement des Cours d’Adultes, Année 1867, no. 7 (Septembre 1867): 67.

³²Manier, L’Instruction Populaire. In addition L’École, Revue de l’Instruction Populaire, No. 3 (27 Janvier 1867): 24 reported that there were 22,765 courses for men and only 1300 courses for women in France in 1866.

³³Sandra Horvath‐Peterson, Victor Duruy and French Education: Liberal Reform in the Second Empire (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 110.

³⁴Horvath‐Peterson, Victor Duruy and French Education, 111.

³⁵“Le Centenaire de Victor Duruy, 1811–1911,” in Horvath‐Peterson, Victor Duruy and French Education, 109.

³⁶Robert Gildea, Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 56.

³⁷François Guizot, “Exposé des motifs du Projet de loi sur l’Instruction primaire, présenté à la Chambre des Députés par M. le Ministre secrétaire d’état de l’Instruction publique,” January 2, 1833, in Bulletin Universitaire, 247–48.

³⁸ L’Instituteur de la Charente, March 1836, no. 1, 1. For an analysis of the impact of literacy on the formation of the self that moves beyond this simple discussion of “individualism”, see Steven E. Rowe, “Writing Modern Selves: Literacy and the French Working Class in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Social History 40 (2006): 55–83.

³⁹This analysis is an attempt to historicise Pierre Bourdieu’s examination of education and cultural capital as sources of social distinction that he applies to evidence from late twentieth‐century France. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).

⁴⁰Archives de Paris, VD 6 /647.

⁴¹Archives de Paris, VD 6 /154, No. 2, Liasse 1, Rapport de la commission composée de MM. Raymond, Daufauris, et Lairtullier sur les classes d’adultes, lu à la séance du comité local du 11. Xbre. 1844.

⁴²Archives de Paris, VD 6 /702, No. 4, Écoles d’Adultes (Hommes) de la Maison‐Cochin, 1834–1836 and Maison‐Cochin, Écoles d’Adultes (Femmes), 1834–1836.

⁴³Archives de Paris VD 4 /21 /5551.

⁴⁴Archives de Paris VD 4 /21 /5552.

⁴⁵ Clôture du Cours d’Adultes de l’École Normale de Mâcon (Mâcon: Impr. de Dejussieu, March 21, 1851).

⁴⁶For discussion of the politics of song writing and singing, see Steven E. Rowe, “The Politics of Literature and Literacy: Popular Song Writing and Proletarian Poetry in Post‐Revolutionary France,” Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 19, no. 2 (2007): 13–36. For an interesting discussion of a particular example of police surveillance of workers, see Casey Harison, The Stonemasons of Creuse in Nineteenth‐Century Paris (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008).

⁴⁷AN F¹⁷ 6674.

⁴⁸Horvath‐Peterson, Victor Duruy and French Education, 113–14.

⁴⁹These gendered distinctions based on work have been analysed by several historians since the late 1980s. For example, see Joan Wallach Scott, “‘L’ouvrière! Mot impie, sordide…’: Women Workers in the Discourse of French Political Economy, 1840–1860,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 139–63; Victoria E. Thompson, The Virtuous Marketplace: Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris, 1830–1870 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), especially 62–72; and Rowe, “The Politics of Literature and Literacy.”