The School Textbook and the People's Library

1 The School Textbook and the People’s Library Originally published as “Le manuel scolaire et la bibliothèque du peuple” in Romantisme, 1993, volume 23, number 80. L'édition populaire. pp. 79–93. “He who controls books controls education,” exclaimed Education Minister Jules Ferry on May 5th 1879 to the Classical Texts Examination Commission.1 Ten years later, a decree dated January 29th 1890 made the use of school textbooks mandatory in primary schools, even stipulating their number. Henceforth, no schoolchild in France would escape learning and acculturation by the book. Research by Alain Choppin has shown that schoolbook publishers gladly supported this unprecedented initiative; the annual total of 200 titles published in 1865–67 rose to 500 publications in 1872–75, increasing to a peak of 933 titles in 1883.2 Precise figures for print runs are scarce; however, the late nineteenth century clearly saw a deluge of print destined to cram the basics of education into the offspring of the masses. Armand Colin's bookshop alone reportedly sold 50 million volumes between 1872 and 1889, when schools numbered some 4.3 million pupils.3 In the light of the 5.8 million copies disseminated by Colin in 1882–83, it is clear that the whole of France was inundated by his works and that those who managed to avoid reading them were rare indeed. 1 National Archives, F 13 955, cited by Alain Choppin, Les Manuels scolaires. Histoire et actualité (Paris: Hachette, coll. “Education,” 1992), 22. 2 Ibid., 85. 3 See Antoine Prost, Histoire de l'enseignement en France 1800-1967 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1977). 2 Beyond the statistics, this amounted to a cultural revolution. If we are to believe the surveys conducted by Frédéric Le Play between 1857 and 1908,4 by the end of the century, two thirds of working-class families had books available at home. School collections represented 40 per cent of the total, twice that of devotional works. However, we cannot extrapolate too much from Le Play’s work as the small sample size of 55 family budgets does not allow for any definitive conclusions. The data can, however, serve as a rough and ready guide to the extent to which printed textbooks reached the most underprivileged members of society. This picture should be compared with further research into the rural populace, peasants in particular; however, here, the statistics remain silent. What is known is that on average, 700 manuals were published in France in the years 1875–95, and the millions of books that brought wealth to booksellers such as Armand Colin, Fernand Nathan, and Louis Hachette were distributed to some of the country’s most remote districts. It became mandatory to possess them from 1880 onward, ten years prior to Jules Ferry's decree. Ferry had perfectly grasped the significance of the battle for the book, which was to rage between 1870 and 1900. It is not enough to speak of gradually changing practices and habits; rather, we propose to study the years which preceded the Belle Époque in terms of a break with the past. This quiet revolution took place during the great economic crisis which shook the world between 1873 and 1895, as if its aim were to underscore the futility of quantitative approximations, deterministic causality, and economists’ models. As food started to become scarce, as work dried up in the industrial cities and the rural exodus was forcing the surplus farming population into urban areas, this spiritual manna fell from the heavens and the state began to socialize the mass of citizens hitherto unfamiliar with books as private property. The 4 Frédéric Le Play, Les Ouvriers des deux mondes, 1857–1908, 12 vol. 3 grandchildren of Stendhal’s M. Sorel, father of the bookish hero of Le Rouge et le Noir, had to accept an idea which sixty years earlier would have been deemed eccentric: the son of a carpenter such as himself might devote several hours each day to books on history, geography, mathematics, grammar, or civics. Julien Sorel would no longer climb a tree with cries of “filthy bookreading dog!” ringing in his ears.5 Henceforth, use of the whip or a clout round the ear would be used to enforce familiarity with the printed word, no longer seen as devilish or scandalous. While civilization undeniably took a great leap forward in this era, the small volumes in circulation during the pre-war period offer a taste of what little cultural baggage was available to those who were to fight in the trenches in 1914. Schoolbooks were the true classics of nineteenth-century publishing.6 Like Roger Chartier, we would do well to remember that, beyond statistics and surveys, we need to address the tricky issue of “the point at which text and reader meet,”7 which also involves tackling the thorny issue of how people read. Research is lacking on this issue, despite the invaluable collections of schoolteachers’ accounts gathered by Jacques and Mona Ozouf.8 Can we treat France as one homogeneous entity, or should we acknowledge the regional diversity highlighted by Eugen Weber?9 Did young people from the Auvergne learn the same geography lesson inspired by Pierre Foncin as their counterparts in Normandy or the Jura? Did Larive and Fleury’s grammar exercises, distributed as promotional material to every schoolteacher by Armand 5 Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, Part I, ch. V. 6 On the question of methodology, see Mesure(s) du livre, ed. A. Vaillant (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1992), 191–204. 7 Ibid., 295–97. 8 Jacques and Mona Ozouf, La République des instituteurs (Paris: Hautes Etudes-Gallimard-Le Seuil, 1992). The survey sent out in the 1960s to the 20,000 surviving primary school teachers whose careers began prior to 1914 yielded some 4,000 responses and is an invaluable resource. 9 Eugen Weber, La Fin des terroirs (Paris: Fayard, 1983). 4 Colin, who also sold a further million copies of the title between 1882–83, elicit the same reaction in southern France as on the German border? A dip into the ideological waters conveyed by these texts is a risky exercise, if Roger Chartier is to be believed, since this investigation does not put the reader in the picture at all, supposing him or her to simply be uniformly receptive to ideas; we ignore this issue at our peril, however, as it triggered the two textbook wars of the period. When we take account of the national scale of the cultural revolution which brought books into homes at every level of society after 1870, a chronological rift is apparent. The efforts by former Education Ministers François Guizot and Victor Duruy earlier in the century to eliminate illiteracy among the French populace, teaching them to read, write, and count, had proved effective. Thanks to Guizot, Hachette became France's leading educational publisher, as evidenced by its title of University Bookseller.10 Yet his influence appears nugatory when comparing sales for 1831–35 with those for 1875–85. With the advent of the Third Republic in 1870, book ownership became a mass phenomenon affecting every citizen. Municipalities took the place of individuals as book purchasers, and even the most financially disadvantaged were involved in the process of acculturation by textbook. Popular forms of publishing such as serial novels, manuals, and cheap volumes, were all outstripped by schoolbooks in terms of print runs. To understand quite how ground-breaking this was, it is important to grasp the vital significance of individual ownership of those five or six books whose possession was mandatory for pupils aged between six and thirteen. 10 Alain Choppin, Le Pouvoir et les livres scolaires au XIXe siècle. Les commissions d'examen des livres élémentaires et classiques. 1802-1875, PhD thesis, dir. A. Prost, Paris I, 1989. 5 The nation’s schoolteachers: Lavisse, Larousse et al Impressed by the size of the print runs recorded for the various volumes of Ernest Lavisse’s Histoire de France, historian Pierre Nora declared him “the nation’s schoolteacher” in his 1984 work Les Lieux de mémoire.11 Lavisse, tutor to Napoleon III’s son, was the spiritual son of Victor Duruy. Ferdinand Buisson, France's director of primary school education, was an enthusiastic advocate of Lavisse's History: “here we have it, the truly national and truly liberal little volume of history that we were asking for to serve as an educational tool.”12 This little tool fitted the new regime's needs so perfectly it might almost have been commissioned specially; it enabled the government to set out a united vision of France for the nation's youth without having to legislate for the use of a particular title, as had been proposed by both the French Revolution and the Restoration.13 The Armand Colin publishing archives studied by Caroline Duroselle confirm Lavisse’s runaway success.14 Joining the business in 1876 with Leçons préparatoires d'histoire de France à l'usage des commençants (Preparatory lessons in French history for beginners), Lavisse sold 5 million copies of his series by 1889. In 1882–83 alone, he sold 540,000 history books and 244,000 civic instruction manuals through Armand Colin under the pseudonym Pierre Laloi.15 These figures must have made Hachette green with envy: its Bled collection only sold 610,000 copies by 1967, fewer than Lavisse’s 1882– 83 tally of 784,000. 11 Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), Vol. I, La République. 12 Ibid., 265. 13 See Manuels scolaires et Révolution française, ed. J.-Y. Mollier (Paris: Editions Messidor, 1989), 11–35. 14 Caroline Duroselle, La Librairie Armand Colin (1870-1939), DEA (first-year PhD) dissertation in history, dir.

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