Primary Schoolteachers in Nineteenth-Century France: A Study of Professionalization through Conflict

Abstract

OVER THE PAST FEW DECADES, scholars have often considered many of the professions to be the natural offspring of the global processes of modernization. Countless studies relate professional development to the broader currents of technological change or structural differentiation. Moreover, since the professions were seen as having a common parentage, much research has been devoted to identifying the characteristics and developmental patterns that all of them shared. In recent years, an increasingly vocal group of researchers has challenged earlier findings. They reject the taxonomic approaches that produced lists of traits supposedly exhibited by all professions because of the inability to apply the lists of criteria to concrete situations.7 In addition, the growing recognition that the professions display considerable diversity in their organizational structures and patterns of development has raised questions about the connections between modernization and professionalization. An alternative approach suggests that the functions, ideologies, and organization of professions derive not so much from large, impersonal forces but from a series of struggles for power and preferment. In this case study of nineteenth-century secular French primary schoolteachers, I argue in support of just such a conflict theory of professional development. We shall see that professionalization was generated by the interplay between teachers and other participants in the funding and control of elementary education, particularly the Catholic Church, families, and the state. This new professional project, however, often ran counter to the visions of schooling and the teacher's place in society held by many priests, parents, and government officials. In the ensuing disputations, teachers responded to their critics by developing a distinctive professional trajectory that was carefully crafted to overcome or coopt their detractors. Thus teacher pro-