The rise in literacy was one of the most significant developments of the Age of Enlightenment. Literacy can be measured through the study of signatures, usually those of spouses or conscripts. The real value of the signature test, however, cannot be appreciated except in the broad context of contemporary pedagogic methods and of the ways students learned to read and write. Up to and including the 19th c., reading and writing were usually taught as quite separate, consecutive processes. French school inspectors of the 1830s complained of a great gap between learning to read, which came first, and learning to write, which came second. The signature was the first thing anybody learned to write; therefore, it was a sign that some reading ability had already been acquired, even though it reveals little about writing competence. This justifies the interpretation of the signature as an intermediate point in the student's cultural apprenticeship.
Signatures to marriage contracts tend to test the literacy of a certain age-group, ranging from about 20 to the early thirties, and there may also be a social selection here, for those who married at a later age may well have been from a higher social stratum, in which case they may be expected to be more literate.
In addition, there were those who could read, but not sign their name competently. This was largely a female group. The Church had tried as far as possible to encourage people to read their bibles and catechisms, but not to write. Perhaps for this reason, many women in ancien régime France could read but not sign. In some families there was a rigid sexual division of literary labour, in which the women would read to the family while the men would do the writing and account-keeping. The signature test of literacy must, therefore, be used with caution, and with the knowledge that it almost certainly underestimates the real reading ability of the signers, and particularly that of female signatories.
On the eve of the Revolution almost half of the male population of France was able to read, but male literacy appears from the signatures to have been almost double that of women. Literacy was generally higher in the north and east, France's most prosperous and urban-industrial areas. Literacy was higher in towns than in the countryside, and higher in large towns than in small towns. Even in the north, older administrative centres like Douai, with lawcourts, religious establishments, or universities, had higher literacy rates than newly industrialized areas like Roubaix. Rich faubourgs everywhere were more literate than poor ones, and the gap between male and female literacy was much narrower in urban centres than in the countryside.
Literacy varied everywhere according to social status. In the west of France only about II per cent of domestic servants could read and write, but by 1789 the literacy of urban artisans, the future
In the capital, however, the popular reading public was distinguished by a much higher rate of literacy. By 1789 90 per cent of Parisian men and 80 per cent of the women could sign their wills. Two Parisian wage-earners out of three could sign the inventories of their deceased spouses. Two-thirds of the inhabitants of the Faubourg Saint-Marcel could read and write in 1792. These statistics alone suggest a huge potential audience for Revolutionary printed propaganda amongst the popular urban classes.
Illiteracy here means illiteracy in French; it is a concept which does not recognize the widespread usage of non-French languages. According to the abbé Grégoire, in l'An II (1794) at least 6 million Frenchmen were ignorant of the French language, and as many again could not sustain a conversation in it. They included almost a million Breton-speakers, France's German, Italian, Flemish, and Basque speakers, not to mention the exclusively patois-speaking populations of the centre, south, and south-west. Only a minority of French men and women were exclusively francophone at the end of the 18th c., and for millions of citizens the French Revolution, like the affairs of the ancien régime monarchy, was conducted in a foreign language. The historian Fernand Braudel stressed the diversity of France, which he described as a country of ‘micro-regions’ and ‘micro-dialects’. Linguistic uniformity and widespread literacy in French was an achievement of the late 19th and early 20th c.
The ability to use French in speech or writing was a trait which distinguished the bourgeois from the artisan or the labourer, in town or countryside. In the Aveyron, Grégoire was informed, the French-speakers were retired soldiers, doctors, clergymen, nobles, and négociants. In Bordeaux, aspiring artisans would use French as a sign of status, to distinguish themselves from the Gascon populace. The phenomenon of bourgeois bilingualism should not disguise the fact that it was the educated bourgeoisie and local notables who were the chief agents of the spread of the French language, and therefore of the nationalist ideology of the Revolution and of republicanism.
The transition from patois to French usage was a transition from a predominantly oral to a written language and culture. The illiterate, of necessity, recognized the increasing power of the written word over their lives. The burning of the terriers (feudal title deeds) by the peasantry in revolt in 1789 may be seen as the vengeance of rural illiterates against the power of written culture. The written word took some time to penetrate the oral universe of the French peasantry. In 1848 peasants in the Périgord were under the impression that Lamartine (or ‘La Martine’) was the mistress of the politician Ledru-Rollin: a mistake they probably would not have made if they had been accustomed to reading Lamartine's name in print.
The statistics of illiteracy hide the wide possibilities of oral reading. It took only one reader to read aloud a poster to a crowd gathered in the street, only one orator to read Marat's L'Ami du peuple in a political club, a café, or local wineshop. In the ancien régime official notices were usually publicly proclaimed before being posted, to the sound of the drum and trumpet. In 1790 Cerutti's La Feuille villageoise appealed directly to local notables, landowners, professional people, and clergy to read the paper aloud on Sunday after Mass, and the editor received several letters from subscribers who reported that they actually had read it publicly in this way.
Examples like that of Jamerey-Duval, the Lorraine farm-boy and shepherd, demonstrate the role of the oral and visual in the act of learning to read. The illiterate Duval dated his literary apprenticeship from a chance encounter with Aesop's Fables, which he made other shepherds read aloud and explain to him. He repaid his friends and fellow workers later by reciting stories in public to his companions.
Jamerey-Duval learned through memory, recitation, and oral reading. His case is a reminder that the literacy figures are not the whole story. There was a vast ‘reading public’ which was a listening public, among the illiterate.
[Martyn Lyons]
Bibliography
- F. Furet and J. Ozouf, Lire et écrire: l'alphabétisation des Français de Calvin à Jules Ferry, 2 vols. (1977)
