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The Affair of the Pigeon Droppings: Rural Schoolmasters in Eighteenth-Century France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2016

KAREN E. CARTER
KAREN E. CARTER*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Brigham Young University, 2130 Joseph F. Smith Building, Provo, UT 84602, USA karen_carter@byu.edu
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Abstract

This article examines the role played by village schoolmasters in eighteenth-century rural France. Although schoolmasters were not supported or regulated by the state, as they would be a century later, they were able to navigate successfully the complex network of social relationships that existed within early modern rural society. Using the journal of one schoolmaster, Pierre Delahaye, the article demonstrates that in addition to teaching, schoolmasters also worked as record keepers for village notables, as clerks for the parish, and even cleaned the churches and belfries. The schoolmaster's position afforded him a much greater social position than might be assumed from knowledge of only his income and background, and even allowed him to serve as a mediator between the village and the curé. Thus it can be argued that schoolmasters of the eighteenth century were as important to rural society as their state supported counterparts of the nineteenth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , April 2016 , pp. 21 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

Notes

1. For general works on nineteenth-century education see especially Anderson, R. D., Education in France, 1848–1870 (Oxford, 1975)Google Scholar; Curtis, Sarah A., Educating the Faithful: Religion, Schooling, and Society in Nineteenth-Century France (DeKalb, 2000)Google Scholar; Gildea, Robert, Education in Provincial France, 1800–1914: A Study of Three Departments (Oxford, 1983)Google Scholar; Gontard, Maurice, L'enseignement primaire en France de la Révolution de 1789 à la loi Guizot, 1789–1833: Des petites écoles de la monarchie d'ancien régime aux écoles primaires de la monarchie bourgeoise (Paris, 1959)Google Scholar; Moody, Joseph N., French Education Since Napoleon (Syracuse, 1978)Google Scholar; Ozouf, Mona, L'École, I'Église et la Republique 1871–1914 (Paris, 1982)Google Scholar; Prost, Antoine, Histoire de l'enseignement en France, 1800–1967 (Paris, 1968)Google Scholar.

2. Weber, Eugen, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford, 1976), 303–38Google Scholar; Day, C. R., ‘The Rustic Man: The Rural Schoolmaster in Nineteenth-Century France’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 25 (January 1983), 26–49 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meyers, Peter V., ‘Professionalization and Societal Change: Rural Teachers in Nineteenth-Century France’, Journal of Social History (Summer 1976), 542–58Google Scholar.

3. For general works on early modern primary education see Carter, Karen E., Creating Catholics: Catechism and Primary Education in Early Modern France (Notre Dame, 2011)Google Scholar; Chartier, Roger, Julia, Dominique, and Compère, Marie-Madeleine, L’Éducation en France du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1976)Google Scholar; Frijhoff, Willem and Julia, Dominique, École et société dans la France d'ancien régime: Quatre examples Auch, Avallon, Condom et Gisors (Paris, 1975)Google Scholar; Grosperrin, Bernard, Les petites écoles sous l'Ancien Régime (Rennes, 1984)Google Scholar; Sonnet, Martine, L’éducation des filles au temps des Lumières (Paris, 1987);Google Scholar de Viguerie, Jean, L'institution des enfants: l’éducation en France, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1978)Google Scholar.

4. Delahaye, Pierre Louis Nicolas, Journal d'un maître d'école d'Ile-de-France (1771–1792): Silly-en-Multien, de l'Ancien Régime à la Révolution, ed. Bernet, Jacques (Villeneuve d'Ascq, 2000)Google Scholar. The original manuscript is found in the Archives départementales (AD) de l'Oise, but all citations here refer to Bernet's edition. All translations are my own.

5. For more on the flour wars see Bouton, Cynthia A., The Flour War: Gender, Class, and Community in Late Ancien Régime French Society (University Park, 1993)Google Scholar, especially chapter 3, and Rudé, George, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848, new edition (London, 2005), pp. 22–31 Google Scholar.

6. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, p. 76.

7. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, p. 72 (May 1779). A vicaire in France was an assistant priest, and should not be confused with the English vicar. The parish priest in France was known as the curé.

8. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, pp. 79–80 (January 1781).

9. Silly-en-Multien is now Silly-le-Long, a commune in the department of the Oise.

10. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, p. 153.

11. AD Marne, 2 G 262, folder 4.

12. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, pp. 70–1, 120.

13. AD Marne, 2 G 256, folder 11; 2 G 267, folder 4. Chartier, Julia, and Compère, L’Éducation en France, p. 52, also note that the number of students varied according to the season.

14. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, p. 70.

15. A 1698 edict specified that schoolmasters should be paid 150 livres a year, and schoolmistresses 100 livres. See Isambert, François, ed., Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises depuis l'an 420 jusqu’à la Révolution de 1789, 29 volumes (Paris, 1821–33)Google Scholar, volume 20, p. 317. This edict was repeated, citing the same salaries, in 1724; see Isambert, Recueil général, volume 21, pp. 263–4.

16. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, pp. 58, 134.

17. Moriceau, Jean-Marc, Les fermiers de l’Île-de-France: L'ascension d'un patronat agricole (XVe–XVIIIe siècle) (Paris, 1994)Google Scholar, pp. 260–2, 402.

18. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, pp. 120, 130. A year later the court in Oissery was still dealing with complaints about this regulation.

19. Delahaye was part of a group of twenty-eight individuals who pooled their resources in order to bid for 65 arpents (54.6 acres) of land; together they paid 53,100 livres for the lot. He does not say how much he paid for his portion. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, pp. 234–37.

20. Jules-Ernest Puiseux, ‘La condition des maîtres d’école au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècle’, Mémoires de la société d'agriculture, commerce, sciences et arts du département de la Marne (1881–1882), pp. 141–60.

21. Moriceau describes this process in astonishing detail in part one of his Les fermiers de l’Île-de-France.

22. Bernet gives a brief description of the village in his introduction, ‘Le journal de Pierre Louis Nicolas Delahaye, clerc paroissial et maître d’école de Silly-en-Multien (1771–1792)’, pp. 16-17.

23. Among the extensive literature on this topic see especially Moriceau, Les fermiers de l’Île-de-France; Gutton, Jean-Pierre, La sociabilité villageoise dans la France d'ancien régime, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1998)Google Scholar; Jessenne, Jean-Pierre, Pouvoir au village et Revolution, Artois 1740–1848 (Lille, 1987)Google Scholar; Lefebvre, Georges, Les paysans du Nord pendant la Révolution Française, rev. ed. (Paris, 1972)Google Scholar; Goubert, Pierre, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730: Contribution à l'histoire sociale de la France du XVIIe siècle, 2 volumes (Paris, 1960)Google Scholar; Follain, Antoine, Le village sous l'Ancien Régime (Paris, 2008)Google Scholar; Jacquart, Jean, La Crise rurale en Île-de-France, 1550–1670 (Paris, 1974)Google Scholar.

24. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, pp. 208–10, 227.

25. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, pp. 53–4. Isidore's full name was Marie Elisabeth Isidore, and she was the only one of Delahaye's five children to survive to adulthood. Four boys, born in 1767, 1770, 1774, and 1775, all died before reaching their first birthday.

26. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, p. 95.

27. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, p. 136.

28. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, p. 165.

29. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, p. 103.

30. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, pp. 124, 127, 173.

31. For more on the pilgrimage of Notre Dame de Liesse, see Maes, Bruno, Notre-Dame de Liesse: Huit siècles de libération et de joie (Paris, 1991)Google Scholar.

32. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, p. 89.

33. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, p. 66.

34. According to parish records, Madame Dubois, née Marie Magdelaine Dargent, married Vincent Dubois in 1755. They had five children, three of whom survived to adulthood; their only son died in 1766. Vincent Dubois died in 1776. AD Oise, 1 MI/ECA 619 R2, p. 410.

35. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, p. 142.

36. For more on inheritance patterns and property transfers among farmers in the region, see Moriceau, Les fermiers de l’Île-de-France, pp. 475–502.

37. The incident described here and below is found on pages 151–3 of Delahaye's record.

38. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, p. 112 (September 1783).

39. This was not an empty threat. Early modern villagers often used the courts in all kinds of property disputes. Delahaye himself used the court system to recover some money that his brother-in-law owed him, by calling upon the bailiff of the court in Nanteuil to send him a formal warning. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, p. 145 (1786).

40. Carter, Creating Catholics, pp. 198–226.

41. Sabean, David Warren, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1984), p. 28 Google Scholar.

42. See especially McManners, John, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, 2 volumes (Oxford, 1998)Google Scholar, volume 1, pp. 321–83; Tackett, Timothy, Priest and Parish in Eighteenth-Century France: A Social and Political Study of the Curés in a Diocese of Dauphiné 1750–1791 (Princeton, 1977)Google Scholar; Hoffman, Philip T., Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500–1789 (New Haven, 1984)Google Scholar; Bergin, Joseph, Church, Society and Religious Change in France 1580–1730 (New Haven, 2009); 183–207, 216–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Julia, Dominique, ‘Le prêtre au XVIIIe siècle: La théologie et les institutions’, Recherches de science religieuse, 58 (1970), 521 Google Scholar–34.

43. This relationship has not received a great deal of attention from historians who study either the parish clergy or education. For example, John McManners includes a chapter on ‘Collaborators of the Curé’ in his comprehensive, two volume study of the eighteenth-century church, but the collaborators that he examines include only the housekeeper, the vicaire, and other resident priests. McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, pp. 384–98.

44. Julia, Dominique, ‘The Priest’, in Vovelle, Michel, ed., Enlightenment Portraits, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago, 1997), p. 361.Google Scholar

45. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, p. 62.

46. The following events can be found in Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, pp. 84–6.

47. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, p. 109 (June 1783). The record provides no clues as to the identity of the slanderer.

48. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, p. 58.

49. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, pp. 71–2, 80. La Reine was to receive 5,000 livres and the remainder went to Georges, including 8,000 livres that the curé owed him, and 3,000 livres of interest.

50. Delahaye, Journal d'un maître d'école, pp. 80–1.