Resilient Religiosity: Evidence from School Choice in Late 19th Century France
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Resilient Religiosity: Evidence from School Choice in Late 19th
Century France∗
Raphaël Franck† and Noel D. Johnson‡
Preliminary and Incomplete
This Version: 4 February, 2013
Abstract
This study examines the link between increased public spending and religiosity in the
late nineteenth century. It focuses on school choice in France between 1875 and 1902,
a period when spending by the State on schooling increased dramatically. Despite this
increase, however, catholic school construction and primary school attendance was not
crowded out. On the contrary, the increase in public spending along with the mandatory
laws on education which made schooling compulsory until age fourteen for boys and girls
led to an increase in the number of pupils in Catholic schools. We interpret our findings
as evidence against arguments that the decline in religiosity which occurred in the West
during the twentieth century can be traced to the crowding out of religious institutions
by increased public spending.
Key words: Education, Primary Schooling, Secularization, Religion.
JEL classification: Z12, D72, I28, N33.
∗
We thank participants at the Bar Ilan University Economics Workshop for helpful comments.
†
Corresponding Author. Department of Economics, Bar-Ilan University. Tel: 972-3-531-8935. Fax: 972-3-738-
4034. Raphael.Franck@biu.ac.il
‡
Department of Economics, George Mason University. njohnsoL@gmu.edu.1 Introduction
The timing and determinants of the decline in religiosity in Europe, and particularly in France, are
still debated by social scientists (Chadwick, 1975; Jordan, 1932; Stark, 2004). Was secularization
a side–effect of the rejection of the Catholic Church’s political influence at the end of the Age of
Enlightenment and the violent confrontations of the French Revolution? Or was it a nineteenth
century trend stemming from the scientific discoveries and income increases that occurred during
the First and Second Industrial Revolutions? Alternatively, is secularization better understood as
a twentieth century phenomenon brought about by increases in public spending by welfare states
which crowded out religious charities by providing social services and thus made church attendance
less valuable.1 Despite all these arguments, however, there remains evidence that religiosity in late
nineteenth century France had changed little relative to a century before (Walch and Cholvy, 2000).
This hypothesis is exemplified by the resilience of Catholic schooling despite steady increases in
income, long-term fertility decline, increases in school enrollment and literacy, and even a ten–fold
increase in public spending on education between 1875 and 1902.
In this paper we use data on secular and parochial schooling, and spending by the state and local
governments to investigate the effect of state spending on Catholic school attendance across French
départements. In addition, we use exogenous variations in rainfall to establish a causal relationship
from increases in state spending to increases in the construction of Catholic primary schools and
in Catholic school attendance.2 Our results show that increased public spending did not crowd
out Catholic schooling in late nineteenth century France. On the contrary, it had, along with
the accompanying laws on education which made schooling compulsory until age fourteen had, if
anything, a positive effect on the number of pupils in Catholic schools. We provide evidence that
this resiliency of Catholic schooling in the face of the increasing push for secular schools by the
central government can be, at least partly, explained by a deep historical resistance to centralized
state control in certain regions. In particular, the same regions we find resisting (or positively
reacting against) the secularization of education at the end of the nineteenth century were also
regions which resisted increases in state capacity during the eighteenth century under the Old
Regime and were more likely to resist the centralzing impulses of the French Revolution.
1
On religiosity in France, see Badone (1989), Franck (2010), Gibson (1989), Gough (1986), McManners (1972)
and Rémond (1976). For the crowding out of religion by state spending see Gill (1999) and Gruber and Hungerman
(2007)
2
The validity of our instrument stems from the fact that late nineteenth century French economy was still mostly
agricultural. In such an environment, extreme rainfall could be a significant supply shock causing the central state to
increase its transfers to the locality and thus increasing its share of spending on education. Indeed Solomou and Wu
(1999) found that weather shocks had a substantial impact on France’s agricultural production and GDP between
1870 and 1913.
1This study contributes to our understanding of the relationship between increased public spending
on social services and religiosity by focusing on the impact of state spending on school choice in
France between 1875 and 1902. During these years successive French governments passed impor-
tant laws which reshaped education policy dramatically. This is especially true for the laws of
1881 and 1882 which made school attendance mandatory until age thirteen for boys and girls and
which made state-funded schools secular and free. Of course, these policies were not created in a
political vacuum, but rather reflected political division formed at the birth of the Third Republic
(1870-1940). The Republicans controlled the governmental apparatus but were opposed by the
Monarchists, who were also supported in their endeavour Catholic interests. With regards to ed-
ucation policy, the objectives of the Republicans were both ideological and political: they were
trying to crowd–out the extensive school system run privately by the Catholic Church. They did
this because they believed educated individuals would contribute to the betterment of society, in
particular by supporting the Republicans. Conversely, Catholics opposed the Republicans, which
they associated with the 1789 Revolution and the severe religious persecutions that accompanied
it.3
In addition to contributing to the historical debate on European secularization during the nineteenth
century, this study is related to the literature on the impact of state spending on education. It is
often argued that increases in schooling must (or at least did in fact) come from the increases in
state spending which accompanied the broadening of the franchise during the nineteenth century
(Lindert, 2004; Dincecco, 2011). However, this was not the case in France where most citizens had
at least some primary schooling education before the 1881-82 education laws were passed (Diebolt
et al., 2005; Diebolt and Trabelsi, 2009; Grew and Harrigan, 1991). Indeed, 82% of the conscripts
of the French army in the class of 1880 knew how to read and write. Hence, this paper will also
assess the impact of increased public spending and mandatory education on educational attainment
in late nineteenth century France.
Finally, this paper makes a contribution to the literature on state capacity.4 By state capacity
we mean the development of fiscal capacity (the ability to tax and spend) and legal capacity (the
ability to define and enforce laws). While the building of state capacity had begun in France
in the eighteenth century, the Third Republic also made large investments in centralizing state
institutions.5 The attempt by the Republican government to secularize schools was just one aspect
3
Nineteenth century Church doctrine also strongly opposed state schooling. On the long-run consequences of
Catholic schooling in Western Europe see West and Woessmann (2010) who argue that Catholic schooling had a
positive impact on literacy rates, except in the countries - like France - where Catholicism was a state religion. On
the complex, and often violent, battle between between church and state in Third Republic France see Brown (2011).
4
The literature on state capacity is vast. Good overviews are contained in Besley and Persson (2011) and Dincecco
(2011).
5
On the history of state capacity in France see Johnson and Koyama (2012), Johnson (2007), Bonney (1995), and
Tilly (2004). On increases in fiscal capacity in France during the nineteenth century, see Fontvieille (1982)’s data on
2of this project. Our paper traces the attempt of the Third Republic to build state capacity by
investing in public goods (i.e., free secular schools), under the assumption that its citizens would
abandon their old institutions in favor of those of the central state. We show that ultimately
this strategy of passive investment was a failure and the French government was forced to directly
change laws in order to coerce individuals rather than alter the relative prices they faced in order
to achieve its centralizing aims. This lesson has general relevance for states building capacity, even
today.
The rest of the article will proceed as follows. Section 2 provides an historical perspective on
Catholic schooling and on the state educational policies in late nineteenth century France. Section
3 presents the data and Section 4 the empirical methodology. Section 5 presents the main results
while Section 6 analyzes the long-term determinants of religiosity in France. Section 7 concludes.
2 Catholic Schooling and the French State
During Emperor Napoleon III’s Second Empire (1852-1870) Catholic education was an prominent
institution that enabled large literacy gains. The importance of parochial schools did not stem
from contributions of the Church to the educational system prior to the French Revolution, rather
it resulted from the laws passed under the two political regimes that preceded the Second Empire.6
Both the monarchy of King Louis-Philippe I (1830-1848) and the Second Republic (1848-1852)
favoured the Church’s educational system.7 Still, during the Second Empire neither Catholic nor
public schooling was free. With the exception of the very poor, all families had to pay a tu-
ition fee known as the rétribution scolaire to send their children to school. In practice, however,
the rétribution was paid only in rural areas after 1870. In urban areas, tax revenues from the
the growth of the French central and départemental tax receipts.
6
While the Catholic Church had established a near monopoly on education in France before 1789, its network of
schools did not cover the whole French territory or benefited all French children. On the French education system
before 1789, see, e.g., Lebrun and Quéniart (2003)
7
François Guizot, King Louis-Philippe I’s Prime Minister, enacted on 28 June 1833 the law which reshaped the
organization of schooling in France and enabled the Church to organize its own private education system. But at
the same time, the Church retained its control on public schooling. Religious instruction remained mandatory and
monks and nuns were often employed as teachers in public schools. During the Second Republic, Education minister
Alfred de Falloux enacted the 15 March 1850 law and the 27 August 1851 regulation which organized a system that
favoured the Church even more. They allowed Catholics to organize their system of secondary schools in parallel to
the State while obtaining subsidies from the State and from the local governments. They favoured the Church since
towns would not have fund a public school if there was already a private (i.e., Catholic) school in their jurisdiction.
Moreover all teachers would have to fulfil all the duties that the Church prescribed. Falloux thus gave a new impetus
to Catholic schooling while public school declined. All the policies of the Victory Duruy, Napoleon III’s education
minister after 1863, would be aimed at reversing this decline. His policies thus initiated the conflict between Catholics
and secular politicians which would reach its climax after the establishment of the Third Republic. On this issue,
see, e.g., Mayeur (2003)
3départements and communes paid the lion’s share of school costs.8 However, with the establish-
ment of the Third Republic (1875-1940), school finance policies changed. The dominant Republican
party wanted to consolidate the new political regime, and one of their means to achieve their goal
was to weaken the Church by secularizing education, following Republican leader Léon Gambetta’s
motto Le cléricalisme, voilà l’ennemi (“Clericalism, here is the enemy”).
The Republicans undertook legal reforms to promote secular, state-funded, education.9 A law
issued on 16 June 1881 law and a decree of 2 August 1881 established secular kindergarten schools,
while a 20 June 1881 law made state-funded primary schooling “public, secular and mandatory”
and abolished the rétribution scolaire. Moreover, the 28 March 1882 and 30 October 1886 laws
instituted the neutrality of the state-funded educational system in matters of religion, philosophy
and politics.
The Republicans also dramatically increased the proportion of education spending coming from
the central state at the start of the 1880s.10 Up to that point, the French central state had barely
financed school spending, leaving this task to the local départemental and communal governments.
The first change in policy was brought about by the 1 June 1878 law which made communes
responsible for education policies in their jurisdiction, from the construction of school buildings
to running the school budgets. Additional laws (9 August 1879, 3 July 1880, 2 August 1881, 20
March 1883, 30 January 1884 and 20 June 1885) progressively increased the amount awarded to the
construction of secular schools. This dramatic increase in central state spending on education is
illustrated in Figure 1. Figure 1 also shows that the concomitant rise in the average number of lay
schools across départements. Clearly the Republicans were pushing state-funded secular education.
Despite the large increases in public spending on education and the associated rise in secular school
construction, these policies were not successful in crowding out Catholic schooling. This can be
seen in the maps in Figures 2 and 3 which show the proportion of pupils attending Catholic schools
8
After the loss of Bas-Rhin, Haut-Rhin and Moselle in the 1870-71 French-Prussian war, France was left with
87 départements. These départements were subdivided into small towns known as communes as a legacy of the
1789 Revolutionaries’ belief in the virtues of direct democracy. Because of fusions and scissions between small
communes, their total number varies throughout our sample period: there were 36,056 communes in 1878 (average
per département: 414.44; std.dev per département 185.38 ) and 36,056 communes in 1902 (average per département:
415.99; std.dev per département 185.1 ). For the sake of comparison, there were 34,937 communes in metropolitan
France (excluding Bas-Rhin, Haut-Rhin and Moselle) in 2012.
9
Other examples of legal reforms promoting secularization and undertaken by the Republicans included the
suppression of public prayers and the suppression of the religious oath in courts (respectively the 16 June 1881 law
and 2 August 1881 decree), the (re-)legalization of divorce by the 27 July 1882 law and the suppression of official
public prayers at the start of each new Parliamentary session by the 14 August 1884 law.
10
The Republicans were able to finance much of this increase in public spending by taking advantage of the supply
shock facing agriculture from the mid-1870s due to decreases in grain prices on the world commodities markets. In
the face of this exogenous shock, the Republicans raised the tariffs on grain to protect rural farmers, resulting in a
significant, and protectionist, impact on the relative price of French grain (O’Rourke and Williamson, 1999).
4.2verage
A
Average
Year
0
.2
.4
.6
.8
1
550
600
650
700
750
800
1860
1870
1880
1890
1900
1910
Avg. Number
State State
Number
of LaySpending
Spending ofofLay
Schools
(% Schools
(% of total)
total)
800 1
Average State Spending (% of total)
Average Number of Lay Schools
750 .8
700 .6
650 .4
600 .2
550 0
1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910
Year
Avg. Number of Lay Schools
Avg. State Spending (% of total)
Figure 1: Central State Spending and State-Funded Schools in late 19th century France. Source:
Before 1875: Data from the Statistique Generale de France which were obtained from Claude Diebolt;
After 1875: the Annuaire Statistique de la France.
Prop. Catholic
Prop Catholic
0.02 - 0.12
0.12 - 0.24 0.05 - 0.12
0.24 - 0.36 0.12 - 0.24
0.36 - 0.48 0.24 - 0.36
0.48 - 0.60 0.36 - 0.48
0.48 - 0.60
Figure 2: Catholic pupils as a proportion Figure 3: Catholic pupils as a proportion
of total, 1875. Source Annuaire Statistique of total, 1902. Source Annuaire Statistique
De La France (1875-1907) De La France (1875-1907)
. .
in 1875 and 1902 in each département). These Figures show that, at least on visual inspection, the
proportion of Catholic pupils increased in France precisely during the period the State increased
spending.
Catholic schooling thus resisted the rise in public spending but could not resist the repeated legal
assaults mounted by the republicans at the turn of the 20th century. Despite the efforts of Pope
Leo XIII to mend the relationship between the Church and the French Republic in the early
51890s with his policy of ralliement (“rallying”), this did not soften the hostility of the Republicans
against the Church. Under the premiership of René Waldeck-Rousseau (1899-1902), Republicans
renewed their attack against the Church. The 1 July 1901 law jeopardized the very existence of the
Catholic orders of monks and nuns, known as “congregations”, by forbidding them from teaching
in any schools. Following the 1902 election, the Republicans continued their anti-clerical policies
during the premiership of Emile Combes (1902-1905) and eventually passed the 7 July 1904 law
which effectively barred members of the Catholic congregations from teaching.
Ultimately, the Republicans voted in 1905 in favour of the separation of Church and State under
the premiership of Maurice Rouvier (1905-1906). While the law protected freedom of conscience,
the French State stopped recognizing official religions and ended subsidies to religious groups.
In theory, Catholic schools were to become private institutions outside the scope of the French
government’s reach. However, in practice, the Republicans still wanted to control the curricula of
Catholic schools. This would be the main point of contention between Republicans and Catholics
until WWI. After 1914, the controversies surrounding the respective influences of private religious
schooling and public secular schooling have resurfaced from time to time in France, but they have
not reached the intensity of the 1870-1914 period.
3 Data
Our data comprise information on the eighty-seven French metropolitan départements, including
Corsica and excluding the French overseas territories over the 1875–1902 period.11 Table 1 provides
descriptive statistics for our variables, which are built from the successive issues of the French
Census Annuaire Statistique De La France (1875-1907), as well as of the Bulletin de Statistique et
de Législation Comparée and of the Annales du Bureau Central de Météorologie.
Our dependent variables assess the strength and resilience of Catholic primary schooling in France
between 1875 and 1902. These are the yearly share of Catholic schools, Catholic teachers, and the
share of male or female Catholic pupils within each département. As can be seen in Figure 4, all
these measures increase or remain stable throughout the period, except for the sudden drop in 1902
caused by the passing of the 1901 law as discussed above. Thus, the share of Catholic schools was
equal to 7.7% in 1875 and 18.0% in 1901 while that of Catholic teachers was 29.2% in 1875 and
11
The overseas territories which are excluded from our study are Algérie, Inde Française, Guyane, Guadeloupe,
Martinique, La Réunion, Cochinchine, and Sénégal. This is because we do not have reliable data on the characteristics
of these territories. Even if we had such data, we would have to distinguish between the children of French settlers,
which had access to the state-funded schools, and those of the local population, which usually did not
6Obs Mean Std Dev Min Max
Dependent Variables
Share of Catholic Schools 2436 0.138 0.080 0 0.709
Share of Catholic Teachers 2436 0.294 0.113 0.025 0.958
Share of Pupils in Catholic Schools 2436 0.193 0.092 0.019 0.570
Share of Male Pupils in Catholic Schools 2436 0.105 0.079 0 0.533
Share of Female Pupils in Catholic Schools 2436 0.307 0.133 0.042 0.927
Explanatory Variables
Share of Central State Spending 2436 0.643 0.278 0 0.994
1881 Laws on Education 2436 0.786 0.410 0 1
Fertility Rate 2436 0.274 0.057 0.160 0.585
Share of the Workforce in the Service Sector 2436 0.029 0.011 0.008 0.082
Share of the Workforce in the Industrial Sector 2436 0.226 0.104 0.003 0.706
Share of the Conscripts who Could Read and Write 2436 0.865 0.101 0.064 0.997
Share of the Conscripts who Were High-School Graduates 2436 0.015 0.014 0 0.550
Share of the Population in Urban Areas 2436 0.288 0.164 0.075 1
Instrumental Variable
Rainfall (Year t) 2436 760.060 229.003 172.0 2350.0
Variables for Robustness Checks
Rainfall (Year t+1) 2436 754.93 226.37 172.00 2350.00
Rainfall (Year t+2) 2436 753.43 223.37 172.00 2350.00
Spending of Communes , Excluding Spending on Education 2175 6144918.00 27300000.00 21355.00 327000000.00
Spending of Départements , Excluding Spending on Education 1566 3164755.00 3817014.00 164456.50 42900000.00
Table 1: Descriptive Statistics, 1875-1902
28.5% in 1901.12 Similarly the share of male pupils rose from 3.9% at the beginning of the period
to 13.8% in 1901 while that of female pupils grew from 26.9% in 1875 to 32.9% in 1901. While
these figures indicate that the majority of French pupils were enrolled in secular schools, they also
suggest large regional differences.
Our main explanatory variable is the share of public spending by the central state in every
département out of the total amount of spending by all the levels of government (the central state,
the départements and the communes). Figure 5 shows that spending on education by the central
state rose from 9,706,575 French Francs in 1875 to 136,577,968 French Francs in 1902, almost a
fourteen-fold increase. By contrast, spending by the communes only grew from 48,237,955 million
French Francs in 1875 to 79,875,903 French Francs in 1902 and that of the départements declined
from 5,844,527 French Francs in 1875 to 34,942 French Francs in 1902.13 As we discussed above,
this increase in central state spending on education reflected the desire of the Republicans to crowd
out Catholic schooling.
12
The share of Catholic teachers is the variable with the largest variation during our period: it decreases after the
1881 and 1882 laws which increased public spending and increases in the early 1890s after the ralliement gave an
indirect impetus to Catholic schooling.
13
These data are fully comparable since they are expressed in Franc Germinal which was instituted in 1803 and
lasted until the start of WWI. The Franc Germinal was such that a gold franc contained 290.32 mg of fine gold; in
addition gold and silver-based units could be used interchangeably on a ratio 1:15.5 (in 1864, all silver coins, except
the 5 franc coin, were debased from 90 per cent to 83.5 per cent silver without a change in the weights).
7.4
.3
.2
.1
0
1875 1880 1885 1890 1895 1900
Share of Catholic Schools Share of Catholic Teachers
Share of Male Pupils in Catholic Schools Share of Female Pupils in Catholic Schools
Figure 4: Catholic Schooling, 1875-1902. Source: Authors’ computations.
200
150
Million French Francs
100
50
0
1875 1880 1885 1890 1895 1900
Central State Spending Departements’ Spending Communes’ Spending
Figure 5: Public Spending, 1875-1902. Source: Authors’ computations.
We also include a dummy variable for “1881 Laws on Education” which takes the value one for
all the years from 1881 onwards to assess the effect of the laws on free and mandatory schooling
adopted by the Republicans.
On possible source of bias in our estimates may be the possibility that school choice is correlated
with measures of human capital. To control for this possiblity, we consider the differences in the
educational achievements of individuals living in each département. It may indeed be the case that
8educated individuals would rather send their children to secular rather than Catholic schools.14 For
this purpose, we rely on the statistics for the French Armys conscripts, i.e., 20 year-old men, who
were enrolled in each département. We single out men who were high-school graduates and those
were literate, i.e., who could read and write but who were not high-school graduates, as opposed
to those who were not, and report descriptive statistics in Table 1. On average, nearly 88% of the
French conscripts were literate but only 1.46% were high-school graduates during the 1875-1902
period. These figures should not be surprising: literacy rates progressively increased in France
throughout the nineteenth century but most children were not expected to stay in school beyond
the completion of primary school. Indeed the completion of high-school was only available to a
tiny group of pupils whose parents were rich enough (and willing) to fund the ’long’ studies of their
children.
It may also be possible that areas with low fertility rates may be more secular, and therefore be
associated with a lower rate of Catholic primary school enrollment. We control for this possiblity
using data on the Fertility Coale Index computed by Bonneuil (2007) which provides information
on the fertility rate in each département.
Another potential source of bias may stem from the rural exodus which had begun in the second half
of the nineteenth century leading to urban and industrial areas richer than rural and agricultural
regions.15 We include several measures of economic development as controls including data on
urbanization rates and the occupations of the local populations. We collect data on the share of
the urban population in each département. We also use data on the share of individuals employed
in the industrial and service sectors, while individuals employed in the agricultural sector make up
our control group. As can be seen in 1, between 1875 and 1902 France was still a predominantly
rural country: less than a third of the French population lived in urban areas and only a quarter
worked in the industrial and service sectors.
To address the potential endogeneity of state spending, we rely on rainfall as a source of exogenous
variation. This is plausible because variations in rainfall created income shocks which led to varia-
tions in local tax receipts and, ultimately, in the spending of the local governments. These shocks
could not be compensated by inter-departmental or inter-communal loans since they did not exist
at the time. Thus, we use variation in rainfall levels to generate exogenous variation in the share
of public spending in each département.
We collect yearly data on rainfall in centimeters for the main city (chef-lieu) in each département
14
It is unlikely that Catholic schooling was of systematically higher quality than secular schooling based on some
objective measure throughout France or in the very départements where public spending was high, in which case this
would be accounted for by fixed effects.
15
Sauvy (1965) documents that migrations from the rural to the urban areas even continued after World War I.
9from the Annales du Bureau Central Météorologique de France (1875-1907). These data are a good
proxy for adverse agricultural shocks at the local level since départements were designed in 1790
during the French Revolution to be of relatively small size.16 We use the logarithm of the quantity
of rainfall in the chef-lieu of each département since during our period of study excessive rainfall
was most often associated with agricultural stress.17
4 Econometric Strategy
To assess the impact of higher central public spending on education in late nineteenth century
France, we run a series of regressions based on
Ydt = α + βSdt + ζ1881t + Xt0 ω + θd + φt + δdt + εdt (1)
where Ydt represents one of our measures of school choice in département d in year t. We will
mainly focus on the share of Catholic schools, the share of Catholic teachers, and the share of male
and female pupils in Catholic schools as our dependent variables. Sdt is the share of central state
spending on education and is our main variable of interest. If β is negative then state spending
substitutes for catholic schooling and if it is positive then they are complements. 1881t is a dummy
variable equal to one after the mandatory schooling legislation passes in 1881. Xt0 is a vector of
control variables including fertility, educational achievement, urbanization, as well as the share of
the workforce in the industrial and service sectors. We include département fixed effects (θd ), year
dummies (φt ), and département time trends (δdt ) to account for unobserved heterogeneity that may
potentially bias our estimates. dt is an i.i.d. error term.
If Cov(Sdt , dt ) = 0 then our estimates of β in Equation 1 will be consistent. However, our estimates
will be biased if the proportion of spending by the central government (S) is correlated with some
16
The Revolutionary legislators decided that it would take at most one day of horse travel from any location in the
département to the chef-lieu. Thus, the average size of the eighty-seven départements is 6016.09 square kilometres
(std.dev., 1454.67 square kilometers), which can be compared to the size of Delaware (6452 square kilometres), the
second smallest U.S. state.
17
The use of this one-sided measure of precipitation is motivated by our reading of rainfall data, and which can
also be observed in a Figure available upon request, that no département was affected by drought but some were
hit by heavy precipitations between 1875 and 1902. We also undertook regressions with several additional rainfall
measures. However we found that standardized measures of rainfall, which account for the mean and the standard
deviation of rainfall in each département throughout the period, provided less satisfactory results: they were still
correlated with public spending in the first stage of the regressions but overall provided less robust results in the
second stage. We also tried to interact rainfall data with data on each département’s suitability for growing wheat
but this did not improve the quality of our estimates. Finally, because of the property of logarithms, there was no
point in using the squared value or the absolute value of the logarithm of the quantity of rainfall.
10unobserved département level variable that varies non-linearly with time. To reduce this possibilty,
we rely on rainfall as a source of exogenous variation in S in several of our specifications. We
will report the Limited Information Maximum Likelihood (LIML) estimator rather than on the
Two Stage Least Squares estimator since our first-stage F-statistics suggest the possibility that our
instruments are weak (Moreira, 2003; Stock and Yogo, 2005).18
We hypothesize that abnormal levels of rainfall only have an impact on school choice only through
changes in public spending on education. This seems very likely in the case in nineteenth-century
France where national income mostly stemmed from agriculture and where redistribution policies
were limited. We support this claim by reporting in Table 8 in the Appendix regression results
where we assess the impact of our rainfall instrument on several variables which may have an
indirect effect on school choice: these are the total amount of spending, excluding spending on
education, of communes and of départements, as well as spending on disaster relief by the central
state. We find that rainfall is not correlated with any of these variables, thus suggesting that
variations in rainfall only affect school choice via public spending on education.
5 Results
In this section, we assess the impact of state spending on religious school choice. Tables 2 and 3
present our main results.
Our regression results in Tables 2 and 3 suggest that increased public spending did not crowd out
Catholic schooling. On the contrary, both the OLS and LIML estimates suggest that increases in
central state spending had a positive impact on the share of Catholic schools and Catholic pupils.
Specification 2 of Table 2 suggests that a one standard deviation increase in state spending share
(S) was associated with an increase in Catholic schools of about ten percent of a standard deviation.
Once we control for the potential endogeneity of spending, the estimate increases by a factor of
twenty.
In Table 3 we find no effect of increases in state spending on the share of male pupils enrolled in
Catholic schools under OLS. There is a positive and significant effect one we control for endogeneity
in specification 3. The positive effect of state spending on entry into Catholic schools is stronger
for females. We estimate that a one standard deviation increase in spending led to about a seven
percent increase in enrollment by women in Catholic school. Under the LIML estimates this effect
18
A plausible explanation for the weakness of our instruments is that the relevant consequence of rainfall is soil
moisture, for which we do not have any consistent series at the local level. If anything, rainfall is usually found to be
a weak instrument for income, as in Miguel and Sergenti (2004) for example.
11Share of Catholic Schools Share of Catholic Teachers
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
OLS OLS LIML OLS OLS LIML
Share of Central State Spending 0.0335* 0.0341* 0.674*** 0.0460** 0.0463** 0.298
[0.0177] [0.0181] [0.239] [0.0195] [0.0193] [0.209]
1881 Laws on Education 0.318*** 0.304*** -0.644* 0.00924 0.0969 -0.588**
[0.0601] [0.105] [0.343] [0.0437] [0.113] [0.298]
Fertility Rate -0.311 0.00854
[0.201] [0.284]
Share of Conscripts who Were High-School Graduates 0.0194 0.0193
[0.0135] [0.0157]
Share of Conscripts who Could Read and Write 0.0665* 0.0499
[0.0387] [0.0302]
Share of the Population in Urban Areas 0.160 -0.122
[0.174] [0.134]
Share of the Workforce in the Service Sector 0.00892 -0.105
[0.0892] [0.112]
Share of the Workforce in the Industrial Sector -0.0409 0.113
[0.0508] [0.0735]
Constant -8.749** -1.288 -1.279*** 24.32*** 33.84*** -0.635*
[3.983] [9.572] [0.388] [3.596] [11.23] [0.339]
Within R2 0.805 0.799 0.510 0.514
Adjusted R2 0.795 0.788 0.486 0.488
Number of D épartements 87 87 87 87 87 87
Département fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Year fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Département *Year fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Observations 2387 2347 2387 2388 2348 2388
H0: Share of Central State Spending+ 1881 Laws on Education=0 0.351 0.338 0.030 0.055 0.143 -0.290
[0.055]*** [0.101]*** [0.126] [0.043] [0.112] [0.095]***
Table 2: Public Spending and the Resilience of Religiosity: Catholic Schools and Catholic Teachers.
Note: All specifications include département fixed effects, year fixed effects, and departmental yearly
time trends. Robust standard errors clustered on département are reported in brackets. *** indicates
significance at the 1%-level, ** indicates significance at the 5%-level, * indicates significance at the
1%-level.
increases by a factor of eight. Overall, the estimates of the effects of increases in state spending
are very small but significant under OLS for most specifications. The IV’s increase the economic
significance of the coefficient estimates. Thus, depending on the weight one place on OLS vs. IV,
there seems to have been either no effect or a positive effect of state spending on the prevalence of
Catholic schooling during the Third Republic.
In Table 2 we also control for the effect of the laws on education passed in 1881 and 1882 in
our regressions and finds they had positive effects on the share of Catholic schools in the OLS
regressions, but a negative one in the LIML regressions. Still we find that the 1881 laws decreased
the share of Catholic teachers, and this partly picks the effect of increased public spending on the
hiring new teachers. Finally, none of the additional explanatory variables have a significant robust
12Share of Male Pupils in Catholic Schools Share of Female Pupils in Catholic Schools
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
OLS OLS LIML OLS OLS LIML
Share of Central State Spending -0.0185 -0.0210 0.698** 0.0358*** 0.0333*** 0.242*
[0.0298] [0.0294] [0.317] [0.0125] [0.0125] [0.141]
1881 Laws on Education 0.463*** 0.255* -0.582 0.155*** 0.151** -0.352*
[0.0960] [0.140] [0.442] [0.0417] [0.0721] [0.197]
Fertility Rate -0.0874 -0.141
[0.302] [0.174]
Share of Conscripts who Were High-School Graduates 0.0171 0.0176*
[0.0213] [0.0105]
Share of Conscripts who Could Read and Write 0.0486 0.0353
[0.0622] [0.0290]
Share of the Population in Urban Areas 0.359 0.0622
[0.267] [0.136]
Share of the Workforce in the Service Sector 0.234* 0.0126
[0.135] [0.0676]
Share of the Workforce in the Industrial Sector 0.0697 0.0303
[0.167] [0.0353]
Constant -49.39*** -57.72*** -1.768*** 22.41*** 26.23*** -0.774***
[4.140] [12.16] [0.505] [3.028] [7.024] [0.226]
Within R2 0.764 0.756 0.447 0.441
Adjusted R2 0.753 0.743 0.42 0.411
Number of D épartements 87 87 87 87 87
Département fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Year fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Département *Year fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Observations 2384 2345 2384 2388 2348 2388
H0: Share of Central State Spending+ 1881 Laws on Education=0 0.444 0.234 1.116 0.191 0.184 -0.110
[0.08]*** [0.130]* [0.150] [0.04]*** [0.070]*** [0.062]*
Table 3: Public Spending and the Resilience of Religiosity: Male and Female Pupils in Catholic
Schools. Note: All specifications include département fixed effects, year fixed effects, and departmental
yearly time trends. Robust standard errors clustered on département are reported in brackets. ***
indicates significance at the 1%-level, ** indicates significance at the 5%-level, * indicates significance
at the 1%-level.
effect on any of our measures of school choice.
In Tables 4 and 5, we report the first stage of the LIML regressions that establish a relationship
between rainfall and public spending. We find that increased rainfall, which we associate with
flooding, creates a negative income shock that has a negative impact on public spending. This
result is confirmed by the reduced form regressions which are reported in those Tables. This result
is in line with Franck (2012) who also finds that increased rainfall has a negative impact on tax
receipts in late nineteenth century France.19 More precisely, we find that a 1% increase in the
19
Our result that floods had a negative impact on income is to be expected in a country like France which has a
temperate climate and is in line with the historical evidence gathered by Ladurie (1971) among others. It is different
from previous findings in the literature: Hidalgo et al. (2010) found that both droughts and floods lower agricultural
income in Brazil while the studies by Besley and Burgess (2002) on India and by Miguel and Sergenti (2004) on
13(1) (2) (3) (4)
LIML (First Stage) Reduced Form Regression LIML (First Stage) Reduced Form Regression
Share of Central State Spending Share of Catholic Schools Share of Central State Spending Share of Catholic Teachers
Rainfall (year t) -0.140*** -0.094*** -0.142*** -0.042
[0.052] [0.023] [0.052] [0.026]
F-stat (First Stage) 7.309 7.472
R2 0.91 0.624
Number of D épartements 87 87 87 87
Département fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes
Year fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes
Département *Year fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes
Observations 2387 2387 2388 2388
Table 4: Rainfall and the Share of Central State Spending (First Stage Regressions): Catholic Schools
and Catholic Teachers. Note: All specifications include département fixed effects, year fixed effects,
and departmental yearly time trends. Robust standard errors clustered on département are reported in
brackets. *** indicates significance at the 1%-level, ** indicates significance at the 5%-level, * indicates
significance at the 1%-level.
(1) (2) (3) (4)
LIML (First Stage) Reduced Form Regression LIML (First Stage) Reduced Form Regression
Share of Central State Spending Share of Catholic Schools Share of Central State Spending Share of Catholic Teachers
Rainfall (year t) -0.140*** -0.094*** -0.142*** -0.042
[0.052] [0.023] [0.052] [0.026]
F-stat (First Stage) 7.309 7.472
R2 0.91 0.624
Number of D épartements 87 87 87 87
Département fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes
Year fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes
Département *Year fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes
Observations 2387 2387 2388 2388
Table 5: Rainfall and the Share of Central State Spending (First Stage Regressions): Male and Female
Pupils in Catholic Schools. Note: All specifications include département fixed effects, year fixed effects,
and departmental yearly time trends. Robust standard errors clustered on département are reported in
brackets. *** indicates significance at the 1%-level, ** indicates significance at the 5%-level, * indicates
significance at the 1%-level.
amount of rainfall leads to a 0.142% decline in the value of our main explanatory variable Share of
Central State Spending. As such if a yearly change in rainfall was to increase precipitations from
the average mean (769 cm3 ) by one standard deviation (229.003 cm3 ), this would depress the share
of central state spending by nearly 4.3%.
To check the robustness of our regressions, we run a falsification test in Tables 6 and 7: we regress
the Share of Central State Spending in year t on future rainfall in years t+1 and t+2. As an aside,
we note that the descriptive statistics in Table 1 show that there are differences in the mean and
standard deviation of rainfall in years t, t+1 and t+2. The results of this falsification test show
Africa reported that floods increase crop yields.
14Panel A: Second Stage of LIML Regression
Share of Catholic Schools (year t) Share of Catholic Teachers (year t)
(1) (2) (3) (4)
Share of Central State Spending (year t) 0.0717 0.421 -0.715 2.619
[0.208] [0.656] [0.491] [3.466]
Panel B: First Stage of LIML Regression
Share of Central State Spending (year t)
(1) (2) (3) (4)
Rainfall (year t+1) -0.085* -0.086*
[0.044] [0.044]
Rainfall (year t+2) -0.040 -0.038
[0.052] [0.052]
F-stat (First Stage) 3.661 0.589 3.739 0.548
Number of D épartements 87 87 87 87
Département fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes
Year fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes
Département *Year fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes
Observations 2387 2387 2388 2388
Table 6: Falsification Test for Rainfall and the Share of Central State Spending (First Stage Regres-
sions): Catholic Schools and Catholic Teachers. Note: All specifications include département fixed
effects, year fixed effects, and departmental yearly time trends. Robust standard errors clustered on
département are reported in brackets. *** indicates significance at the 1%-level, ** indicates significance
at the 5%-level, * indicates significance at the 1%-level.
Panel A: Second Stage of LIML Regression
Share of Catholic Schools (year t) Share of Catholic Teachers (year t)
(1) (2) (3) (4)
Share of Central State Spending (year t) 0.0717 0.421 -0.715 2.619
[0.208] [0.656] [0.491] [3.466]
Panel B: First Stage of LIML Regression
Share of Central State Spending (year t)
(1) (2) (3) (4)
Rainfall (year t+1) -0.085* -0.086*
[0.044] [0.044]
Rainfall (year t+2) -0.040 -0.038
[0.052] [0.052]
F-stat (First Stage) 3.661 0.589 3.739 0.548
Number of D épartements 87 87 87 87
Département fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes
Year fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes
Département *Year fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes
Observations 2387 2387 2388 2388
Table 7: Falsification Test for Rainfall and the Share of Central State Spending (First Stage Re-
gressions): Male and Female Pupils in Catholic Schools. Note: All specifications include département
fixed effects, year fixed effects, and departmental yearly time trends. Robust standard errors clus-
tered on département are reported in brackets. *** indicates significance at the 1%-level, ** indicates
significance at the 5%-level, * indicates significance at the 1%-level.
15that in the second stage of the LIML regressions, future rainfall in year t+1 and t+2 has no effect
on school choice in year t. In the first stage, there is still a significant effect, albeit at the 10%-level
and economically small, of rainfall in year t+1 on public spending in year t, probably because
weather patterns have some form of autocorrelation at the annual frequency. In any case, rainfall
in year t+2 is not correlated with public spending on education in year t.
Overall, these results suggest the Republicans (who controlled central state spending on education)
and the Catholics invested their efforts in the same départements of France. These départements
were not specifically those which lacked basic education infrastructure and, more generally, had
a low level of human and economic development, since none of our control variables are found to
have a systematic correlation with our measures of school choice. Rather these were the areas
where Catholic schooling was still strong. Hence our results suggest that the public sector– the
Republicans– was not trying to remedy any market failure caused by historical backwardness which
it had identified. Rather the Republicans were trying to crowd out Catholic schooling in the areas
where the latter was still resilient but failed to do so. The Republican politicians expected that
increased public spending and the laws making primary schooling free and mandatory would lead
parents to send their children to public schools but this is not what happened: parents who were
compelled to send their children after 1881 were more likely to send them to Catholic schools. This
suggests that parents did not trust the state to teach their children properly.
More generally our results indicate that religious schooling, and hence religiosity, was resilient in
late nineteenth century France. They also suggest that church attendance was somehow more
resilient than the religion-market model, and its insistence on the club-good model, would predict:
the club-good model predicts that individuals become less observant when religion itself becomes
more expensive. In France this is exactly what happened once parents had to pay to send their
children to Catholic schools. So why did Catholic schooling become more prevalent as it became
more expensive? One important possibility answer is “ideology”. The reasons for the Republican
policies were political. It’s possible that, conditional on the Church’s stance against the Republic,
the increase in public spending strengthened Catholic identity which was at the time intimately
linked to the political divisions in France. To provide additional context for this hypothesis, in
the next section we look closer at some of the deep historical determinants of school choice across
French départements.
166 The Long-Run Determinants of Religiosity
In the remainder of this paper, we evaluate several hypotheses that can explain the failure of
increased public spending to crowd-out private Catholic schooling, and as such, the persistence of
religiosity in late nineteenth century France.
To be completed
7 Conclusion
This study examines the resilience of religiosity by analysing the effects of increased state spending
on religious schooling in late nineteenth century France Its results show that increased public
spending did not crowd out private Catholic schooling in the late nineteenth century in France.
This is all the more puzzling as France has become a rather secular country by the early twenty-first
century. Further research should therefore evaluate hypotheses that can explain the persistence of
religiosity in late 19th century France.
To be completed
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19Appendix: Additional Tables and Figures
Spending of Communes Spending of Departements
Excluding Spending on Education (1878-1902) Excluding Spending on Education (1885-1902)
(1) (2) (3) (4)
OLS OLS OLS OLS
[Rainfall (year t)]2 0.00501 -0.0230
[0.00895] [0.0140]
Rainfall (year t) 0.0100 -0.0459
[0.0179] [0.0280]
Constant -63.64*** -63.64*** -13.23*** -13.23***
[2.694] [2.694] [2.258] [2.258]
Within R2 0.906 0.906 0.333 0.333
Adjusted R2 0.901 0.901 0.286 0.286
Number of D épartements 87 87 87 87
Département fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes
Year fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes
Département *Year fixed effects Yes Yes Yes Yes
Observations 2164 2164 1566 1566
Table 8: Exogeneity of Rainfall. Note: The regressions on the total amount of spending, excluding
spending on education, of communes cover the 1878-1902 period while the regressions on the total
amount of spending, excluding spending on education, of départements cover the 1885-1902 period. All
specifications include département fixed effects, year fixed effects, and departmental yearly time trends.
Standard errors are clustered on département are reported in brackets. *** indicates significance at
the 1%-level, ** indicates significance at the 5%-level, * indicates significance at the 1%-level.
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