Institutional Dynamics and Dangerous Classes: Reading, Writing, and Arrest in Nineteenth-Century France

This research shows that the rise of public education in nineteenth-century France was associated with a declining rate of serious crime in the general population. The study finds that although a moral curriculum and the discipline of the classroom were intended to produce conformity, it was actually literacy that was consistently associated with declining rates of both serious crime crimes of violence and property offenses. In the case of violence, the impact seems to have been direct, consistent with civilization and control theories. However, in the case of major property offenses, occupation is an intervening variable, consistent with Merton's (1938) "Social Structure and Anomie."

At a lower level of analysis, as literacy grew in the general population, the rate of crime simultaneously increased in the subpopulation that remained largely illiterate. In this respect, the rise of public education and literacy may have inadvertently given substance to the idea of a "dangerous class" in nineteenth-century France, which foreshadowed Wilson's (1987) "truly disadvantaged" class in the inner cities of contemporary America.

The analysis focuses on primary and secondary education, literacy, and crime in France, 1852-1913, using time-series analyses (ARIMA).