# “Enrichissez-vous !”: The Effects of Primary Schooling and Political Participation on Economic Development in 19th-century France
**Date de l'événement :** 02/03/2025
* Publié le 02/03/2025

### Image(s)
![Page de garde du mémoire](https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/memory-sp-pr.appspot.com/o/prod%2F1y7CgDOTakHDiB3dgoi0%2FprojectsMedias%2FGkaiN803h9usEytWp6NQ%2Fthumbs%2FCapture%20d'%C3%A9cran%202026-02-16%20164930_f9pf9_1600x900.png?alt=media&token=ab575b39-754a-485f-a1e3-8f4d6c23febf) 

## Auteur(s)
Etienne Compérat

## Direction
Roberto Galbiati, Emeric Henry

## Description
**Ce mémoire est issu de la sélection des meilleurs mémoires du master d’économie de l'année 2024-2025 :  
  
Abstract**  
  
Education and democracy are thought to be potential drivers of economic growth, but relationship remains subject to debate. While some argue that democracy only emerges as a consequence of human capital accumulation, others contend it may independently contribute to long-run economic development through institutional improvements. However, there is still scarce causal evidence on either channel, and practically nothing on the interaction between the two. This paper exploits two policy shocks in 19th-century France -the Guizot Law of 1833 on primary education, and the Municipal Law of 1831- to examine the joint effects of primary education and democratic participation on local economic development. Enacted under the July Monarchy, both laws relied on population thresholds at the level of the communes. The Guizot Law of 1833 mandated every municipality with a population exceeding 500 inhabitants to open and fund a primary school for boys. Similarly, the Law on Municipal Organization of 1831 regulated the number of voters for municipal council elections, granted voting rights to millions of citizens while giving communes with fewer residents higher suffrage levels. Using a newly assembled dataset covering nearly all French arrondissements from 1830 to 1865, we implement two models: a static OLS design to estimate links before the educational reforms could affect labor markets, and a dynamic IV design exploiting pre-law population thresholds to instrument changes in schooling exposure and evaluate their effect on industrial wage growth. We find that higher levels of male primary education prior to the Guizot Law are significantly associated with higher industrial wages in the 1840s, but detect no evidence of an independent or interactive effect of local political participation in either model.  
  
\[...\]

**Accéder au mémoire en ligne :** [https://www.sciencespo.fr/ecole-recherche/sites/sciencespo.fr.ecole-recherche/files/COMPERAT-Etienne.pdf](https://www.sciencespo.fr/ecole-recherche/sites/sciencespo.fr.ecole-recherche/files/COMPERAT-Etienne.pdf)

### Type(s) de ressource
`#Texte` 

### Discipline
`#Économie` `#Histoire` 

### Thématique(s)
`#Démocratie / institutions` `#Finance / investissement` 

### Langue(s)
`#Anglais` 

### Famille(s) de contenu
`#Recherche` `#Production étudiante` 

### Type(s) d'accès
`#Accès libre` 

## Droits
Les ressources et les images visibles sur Sciences Po Sources sont susceptibles d’être protégées par un droit de propriété intellectuelle (comme par exemple un droit d’auteur ou une marque) qui peuvent appartenir à Sciences Po ou à des tiers. Pour plus de précisions notamment sur les usages autorisés et non autorisés, consulter les [Conditions Particulières d’Utilisation](https://sources.sciencespo.fr/p/cpu).



---
### Navigation pour IA
- [Index de tous les contenus](https://sources.sciencespo.fr/llms.txt)
- [Plan du site (Sitemap)](https://sources.sciencespo.fr/sitemap.xml)
- [Retour à l'accueil](https://sources.sciencespo.fr/)