II
During the revolutionary period, books were considered to be ‘an instrument of integration and conditioning to Christian and civic morality, as well as to economic activity’.
1 N. Richter, Du conditionnement à la culture: L’offre de lecture des Lumières à la Troisième République (2003), p. 20. Beginning in the 1830s, the availability of books adapted to working farmers’ reading skills and knowledge requirements became a key issue in conjunction with a political consensus that sought to balance the needs of large and small farms,
2 C. Gaboriaux, ‘Entre innovations agronomiques et pratiques paysannes: La figure de “l’agriculteur pratique” au 19e siècle’, in C. Bonneuil, G. Denis, and J-. L. Mayaud (eds), Sciences, chercheurs et agriculture: Pour une histoire de la recherche agronomique (2008), pp. 45–60. whilst putting the instruction of the rural masses on the agenda.
3 Municipalities with over 500 inhabitants were obliged by the Guizot Law of 28 June 1833 to maintain a primary school at their own cost. A circular of 30 July 1836 required that ‘the basic principles of agriculture [be] taught in rural primary schools’. T. Charmasson, A.-M. Lelorrain, and Y. Ripa, L’enseignement agricole et vétérinaire de la Révolution à la Libération (1992), p. 28. From this point on, all rural accounting or agronomic treatises devote at least some space to questions of small-farm economics and agricultural accounting. Likewise all of them present calculation as the best means of reforming and improving peasant routines. Double-entry book-keeping was deemed too complex for small farms. Instead, more simplified book-keeping, or at the very least the use of an
agenda or pocket-sized notebook, was recommended as a way of recording daily operations.
4 N. Joly, ‘Shaping Records on the Farm: Agricultural Record-keeping in France from the Nineteenth Century to the Liberation’, Agricultural History Review 59 (2011), pp. 61–80.At first glance, one could believe that the woman farmer was not touched by this didactic literature. A competition run by the Council of Agriculture between 1837 and 1840 for the design of ‘small manuals, clear, simple and accurate, in which one can find, next to the description of excellent agricultural practices, moral precepts of order and economy’
5 Charmasson, Lelorrain, and Ripa, L’enseignement agricole, p. xxviii. targeted only the working class of ‘
cultivateurs’. In an earlier study of the content of these textbooks I found that the award-winning authors wrote only for men.
6 N. Joly, ‘Educating in Economic Calculus: The Invention of the Enlightened Peasant via Manuals of Agriculture, 1830–1870’, Accounting History Review 26 (2016), pp. 131–60. The woman farmer seems to have been relatively invisible within the burgeoning popular farm management literature perhaps because of the large number of home economics manuals aimed at them.
7 This editorial strategy complicates the identification of works that may have contributed to farm women’s economic and accounting education. Thus, the corpus for the present study includes a set of generalist home economics books: in total, 97 home economics and agricultural textbooks addressed to farm women and published from 1804 to 1899. By way of comparison, a previous analysis I made of the content of agronomy manuals and agricultural catechisms targeting a male audience was based on 130 original titles published between 1830 and 1870. Joly, ‘Educating in Economic Calculus’.The purpose of this section is thus to counter the idea that women were left behind in the effort to control on-farm economic practices. While there is undoubtedly an institutionalized discourse that posits the enlightened farmer as the hero of rational management, parallel discourses strove to define the conduct of the ‘Bonne Fermière’. This is the case with authors who wrote for a mixed public, framing their moral and practical instructions in terms of a collaboration between husband and wife. This is also the case with authors (generally female authors) dealing with domestic economy and providing specific managerial instructions for rural women. Indeed, one can see a similar desire for rationalization in French,
8 Scholarly analysis of textbooks published in France has focused primarily on the period 1880–1914, ignoring works from the first half of the nineteenth century – i.e., the non-school form of this teaching. It was only in 1882 that home economics courses were officially introduced into primary education and this new obligation was accompanied by the publication of dedicated school textbooks. Agricultural home economics education also dates from the end of the nineteenth century, see L. L. Clarke, Schooling the Daughters of Marianne: Textbooks and the Socialization of Girls in Modern French Primary Schools (1984); S. Roll, ‘De la ménagère parfaite à la consommatrice engagée: Histoire culturelle de la ménagère nouvelle en France au tournant des XIXe–XXe siècles’ (PhD dissertation, Université de Marc Bloch Strasbourg II, 2008); T. Depecker, ‘La loi des tables: Quantification du besoin alimentaire et réforme des conduites de vie (XIXe–XXe siècles)’ (PhD dissertation, EHESS Paris, 2014). English,
9 S. Walker, ´How to Secure Your Husband’s Esteem: Accounting and Private Patriarchy in the British Middle Class Household during the Nineteenth Century´, Accounting, Organizations and Society 23 (1998), pp. 485–514. and American
10 T. Le Texier, ‘Homemade Economics: The Managerial Rationalization of Women’s Everyday Life in America, 1820–1920’ (2012). http://www.letexier.org/article.php3?id_article=107 domestic manuals from the 1820s onwards, including a consistent rhetoric aimed at shaping women’s economic imagination and their ability to act as accountants, all while providing ‘easy-to-handle techniques and tools to help the housekeeper in her management’.
11 Ibid.Writing for the peasant family could even seem exciting. In the introduction to his agricultural booklet,
Le petit producteur français, the polytechnician Charles Dupin already foresaw the multiplier effects of a book useful to ‘four million families’ while at the same time committing ‘their twelve million children […] to push further the improvements begun by their fathers’.
12 This text is part of a series of cheap publications (75 cents a copy) devoted to the economic and technical education of the small manufacturer and the female worker as well as to farm women. Showing that he was aware of C. J. A. Mathieu de Dombasle’s accounting formulae, model farm, and pioneering agricultural training institute,
13 N. Joly, R. Bourrigaud, and F. Knittel, ‘Administrer une ferme-modèle au XIXe siècle: Deux expériences d’agronomes entrepreneurs ruraux, Mathieu de Dombasle et Rieffel’, Entreprises et histoire 88 (2017), pp. 21–36. Dupin suggested proceeding step by step in the teaching of double-entry accounting, beginning with the farmers, who then ‘will give this knowledge to their children, their wives and their daughters’. In commercial and industrial establishments, Dupin notes, the wife or daughter of the house keeps the accounts; thus he hopes that once she is educated, the farm woman could do the same ‘with the greatest success’.
14 Dupin, Le petit producteur français, II, p. 20.This familialist strategy is strongly reflected in the work of Jacques Bujault, a printer, bookseller, and lawyer who also became a farmer of his family property. This popular moralist used fiction to bring ‘instruction to the most remote farm, and to the most obscure roof’,
15 J. Bujault, L’agriculture populaire ou méthode générale et nouvelle pour l’enseignement et l’amélioration de l’agriculture (1831), p. 11. in the manner of the English women economists Jane Marcet and Harriet Martineau in the 1820s and 1830s.
16 P. Bouche, ‘Vulgariser, convaincre: Les “femmes économistes” en Angleterre dans les années 1830’, in F. Vaton and N. Edelman (eds), Économie et literature: France et Grande-Bretagne 1815–1848 (2007), pp. 141–59. With humour and originality, Bujault portrays a wise old man aged 106 speaking to an audience of villagers on a variety of subjects relating to agriculture, rural life, family, and religion.
17 These fictions complement the content of the Maître Jacques, a popular almanac in the West of France established in 1834 by Jacques Bujault, who claimed that 500,000 copies were printed each year. Bujault bequeathed significant funds to perpetuate its publication. The renowned agronomist Jules Rieffel made a compilation of Bujault’s works, Œuvres de Jacques Bujault (1845). Among the topics discussed in these village meetings is that of young rural girls’ education. Bujault composes a fanciful story ‘on the nice way to make little girls into housewives, and the older ones too, ha-ha!’ in which we learn that the chatelaine of the village decided to teach her two young daughters how to do the housework. The edifying result is not long in coming.
The girls paid, received, sold, bought the small household goods, and never spared themselves. They kept a register and wrote everything down. They raised three times as many chickens, sold four times as many eggs, not to mention 30 small pigs.
18 Ibid., p. 116. The author concludes his story, as usual, with a proverb: ‘in the long run, a small amount of money makes a big profit’. In the more academic part of his work, composed of memoirs, letters, and petitions that intertwine rural economics and politics, Bujault pleads for a gradual elevation of the peasantry’s knowledge level, with a central role for women and children. This view is consistent with the observation that rural France at this point is still largely illiterate.
19 Literacy levels in France rose steadily between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, under the impetus of the State and the ruling classes. The Guizot law (1833) was the first step towards mass schooling for young French people, but it did not make schooling compulsory and did not apply to girls. Based on Inspector Maggiolo’s retrospective survey in 1879–80, Furet and Ozouf point to significant regional variations in literacy rates, the legacy of long-standing social and economic inequalities: ‘From the end of the 17th century to the second third of the 19th century, the Saint Malo–Geneva line separated two Frances in terms of literacy. A France of the North-Northeast, with relatively high rates of spouses knowing how to sign their marriage certificate, and a France that includes the western Armorican region, the Massif Central and the entire Aquitaine and Mediterranean Midi, with very high illiteracy rates.’ F. Furet and J. Ozouf, Lire et écrire: L’alphabétisation des Français de Calvin à Jules Ferry (1977), p. 37. Despite these findings, it is important to emphasize the existence of a practical mastery of basic writing and arithmetic skills linked to the professional life and a non-school form of socialization, see N. Coquery, F. Menant, and F. Weber (eds), Ecrire, compter, mesurer: Vers une histoire des rationalités pratiques (2006). Children who have been to school thus begin to take on the tasks of keeping up correspondence between family members or reading the newspaper. This figure of ‘the child delegated to writing’
20 J. Hébrard, ‘La lettre représentée: Les pratiques épistolaires dans les récits de vie ouvriers et paysans’, in R. Chartier (ed.), La correspondance: Les usages de la lettre au XIXème siècle (1991), pp. 279–365 at p. 290. is extended in Bujault’s work to include the ‘child accountant for the family’. To fulfil this role, girls and boys must be introduced to the principles of political economy, learn them by heart at school and become the educators of the whole household: ‘these little babblers will be able to shout their principles into everyone’s ears, even the grandfathers’.
21 Bujault, L’agriculture populaire, p. 36. Recommending that husbands should hold their wives in high esteem (‘Everything prospers under the hand of an active and careful wife’), Bujault likewise gives them instructions for mobilizing young hands: ‘Have your children write down the proceeds of your harvests, your purchases, your sales, and your expenses’.
22 Ibid., pp. 38–9.In the introduction to a manual for the Young Farm Woman, the demand for education is put into the mouth of the interested parties: ‘Why do we only take care of these
damned men? as if they were the only ones in the countryside to make the land worthwhile! and what about us? We are nevertheless
something on the farm.’
23 Manuel de la Jeune Fermière ou dialogue campagnard entre le curé-laboureur et la mère Matinotte sur l’économie domestique agricole (1850), p. 2. In a mirror to these aspirations in another classic textbook, Jeanne explains to her cousin in the city, Henriette, how to keep the farm accounts because ‘Daddy wants us to know as exactly as possible what each thing costs and brings in’.
24 M. Piètrement, Le bonheur au foyer domestique: Livre de lecture courante pour les jeunes filles (1887), p. 218. Fields, livestock, barnyard, orchard, garden, household items – the diligent girl describes the books to be kept and their organization, a writing job that takes her no more than a quarter of an hour each day. If it is an expense to properly fertilize a field, to apply the necessary improvements, to drain it, ‘my book will tell me at the end of the year if the harvest compensates for all these expenses’.
25 Ibid., p. 218. The author of this manual, a teacher, describes in various ways the economic awakening of the apprentice farm woman; for example, as she looks ahead to the results of her poultry breeding: ‘when the broods are made, it does not take more time to look after a hundred fowl than fifty, and it is on the quantity that one has the profit’. Nor does she fail to observe at the markets her customers’ preferences and ‘the goods which sell well’.
26 Ibid., p. 244.The horizon of a new agrarian economy – investing in inputs, intensifying production, marketing more aggressively – goes hand in hand with the orderly and prudent conduct of young girls and mothers who must get used to calculating and measuring profit. From one book to another, the propagandists’ pens repeat and reinforce the idea that the peasant family’s happiness and progress is in the hands of its women, shaping an ethos in affinity with the desired prospect of the social ascension of the middle peasantry. It thus emerges that the construction of economic and managerial norms was directed primarily at peasant families, even if the models were borrowed with reference to bourgeois figures.
27 F. El Amrani-Boisseau, Filles de la terre: Apprentissages au féminin (Anjou 1920–1950) (2012). Indeed, reflections on how upper-class rural women should be educated only emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, and led to institutionalized education, as I will describe in the next section.