C. R. Day

The Rustic Man: The Rural Schoolmaster in Nineteenth-Century France

Historians who have studied French primary education during the nineteenth century, Maurice Gontard, Jacques and Mona Ozouf, and Peter Meyer, have noted the great gains made by the instituteurs and their growing professionalization from the time of the law of 1833 to the law of the 1880s. Improvements in the quality of teaching derived mainly from the introduction of a national system of normal schools (ecoles normales primaires) by the Law on Primary Education of 1833. This article will discuss the history, programs, and organization of these schools and the origin and backgrounds of their students. It will also examine 280 essays written by schoolmasters in 1861 on the state of primary education in the towns and villages of France; these memoires, written for the most part by graduates of the normal schools, provide first-hand insight into the teacher himself, his professional goals and sense of mission, and how he viewed the world around him in the middle of the last century.2 During the eighteenth century, the teacher usually learned his craft through apprenticeship on the job. Professional qualifications and standards did not exist, and the teacher simply hired out his services according to whatever reading, writing and/or calculating skills that he could sell. A few had been trained by the Christian Brothers (Freres des ecoles chretiennes), an association of lay brothers that first introduced in France the idea of professional