Schools without a law: Primary education in France from the Revolution to the Guizot Law

Landholding Inequality and the Consolidation of Democracy: Evidence from Nineteenth-Century France

“…Literacy rates are proxied by the percentage of men and women who were able to sign their marriage certificates. This proxy correlated very well with other literacy indicators such as the number of schools or the enrollment rate in primary education (Montalbo 2021). Demographic controls are the area of departments and the share of the urban population in 1846 or 1876.…”

Whither Education? The Long Shadow of Pre-Unification School Systems into Italy’s Liberal Age (1861–1911)

“…H uman capital has been a crucial determinant of economic performance, at least since the mid-nineteenth century (Allen 2011;Galor 2011;Goldin 2016). 1 The long-term growth of human skills has gone hand in hand with the rise of public schooling and mass education since the 1850s; yet, whether human capital improved throughout the nineteenth century as a result of milestone school acts fostering public education (Gomes and Machado 2020;Milner 2020;Montalbo 2021) or as a result of favorable economic and demographic trends (Cvrcek 2020) is still contended. Similarly, whether national school acts in the nineteenth century brought about more equity in access to education or simply reinforced existing social and spatial inequality in literacy and schooling continues to be a debated issue (Beltrán Tapia and Martinez-Galarraga 2018;Cappelli andVasta 2020, 2021).…”

Primary education and economic growth in nineteenth-century France

“…Before the Guizot law, primary schools were divided in two types: those financially assisted by the municipalities were called public schools, while schools relying only on fees paid monthly by the families were called private. One may therefore fear that municipalities investing in primary schooling, which were also the ones with the highest schooling achievements [Montalbo, 2019], would do so by levying more taxes. This would most likely lead to a higher level of taxes per capita in 1881 and 1911, in link with the long-lasting public intervention of municipalities.…”

“…I find a strong association between this number and the level of schooling achievement I consider, namely enrolment rates (defined as the number of pupils per 100 inhabitants) and the average schooling years within schools. These last two measures can be taken as fairly good proxies for human capital accumulation in the early nineteenth-century France [Montalbo, 2019]. There is no significant relation between the printing press and the previous population growth of municipalities, taken as a proxy for economic development, or their industrial characteristics around 1840.…”