The New Readers of Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract

On the eve of the French Revolution under half (47 per cent) of the male population of France, and about 27 per cent of French women, could read. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, functional literacy had become almost universal for both French men and women.¹ The statistics of literacy, based on the ability to sign one’s name on a formal document, are only one way of measuring the enormous expansion of the reading public experienced by French society between the July Monarchy and the First World War. This expansion, as we shall see, was underpinned especially in its later stages by changes in the provision of primary schooling. It was supported by technological changes which revolutionized the production of print culture, especially the production of cheap fiction and the newspaper press. A mass culture of print was emerging, in which new categories of readers became consumers of print for the first time, and in which publishing strategies evolved to exploit new clienteles.