Progress has been made in all three projects. In particular, my research group and I have undertaken an extensive data collection effort, assembling and cleaning several historical datasets. We have also begun part of the analysis. Below I provide a more detailed description of the progress for each project.
Project 1: We assembled the entire text corpus of the 1789 cahiers des doléances, capturing demands, suggestions, and complaints at the dawn of the French Revolution. We will soon perform the text analysis of the cahiers and we are working on creating a public, interactive website, where users can pose questions about the cahiers (and know which social class, in which electoral district, was expressing specific demands, concerns, and suggestions). We strongly believe that creating such a website is the best way to guarantee broader accessibility to this ground-breaking dataset also for those users who may not be familiar with text-analysis techniques.
Project 2: We collected data on approximately 7,000 French parliamentarians from 1871 to 1942, including information on their biographies and party affiliations. We also classified political parties into broad political groups to facilitate analysis across different legislative periods. In addition, we assembled data on the texts of the parliamentary speeches from 1871 to 1939 (for a total of approximately 1.3 million speeches) and identified all major laws, including each time these laws and the respective articles were voted upon (before being passed or rejected). We are in the process of manually coding how each member of the parliament (MP) voted. These data will also be used for Project 3. In addition, we have identified Jewish and Protestant MPs during the period of the Affaire Dreyfus and we will soon start with the analysis.
Project 3: Two significant improvements have been made to this project (i) instead of collecting school- or city-level data, as originally planned, we were able to get access to individual-level data on Jesuit students; (ii) we identified an additional historical setting, i.e. the United States in the 19th century in which to study another fascinating aspect of the same research question. Specifically, we analyze how cutting funds to religious (in particular, Catholic) schools may have affected the existence of these schools and the assimilation of the Catholic population. As a results, still using the same resources, I am now planning to have an extra project – which I will define P4. Importantly, adding this project will not change the scientific structure of the proposal or require additional funding. On the other hand, it clearly represents an excellent opportunity to further enrich and improve the final research outcomes.
In terms of worked performed and achievements on P3: We digitized individual records from the Archives Jésuites, significantly enhancing the depth of analysis. Originally planned as school- or city-level data, these records now include approximately 230,000 entries detailing the educational backgrounds of around 71,000 students who attended Jesuit collèges from 1850 to 1905. This dataset is one of the first of its kind for research into elite education. We merged these data with individual-level records on French parliamentarians (1871–1942) covering biographical information, political affiliations, parliamentary speeches, and voting behaviors (from P2). We can now analyze the role of Jesuit-educated MPs’ in politics. The curriculum offered by Jesuit collèges, which combined scientific and religious enabled Jesuit-educated MPs to mediate between conservative/religious and progressive/scientific factions in a politically polarized France. Preliminary findings suggest that these MPs often played a bridging role across ideological divides. Further analysis will explore whether MPs’ attitudes shifted during the collège closures.
In terms of worked performed and achievements on P4: P4 introduces a novel context by examining the United States in the 19th century, focusing on the effects of the Blaine amendments. These sought to reduce public funding for religious, particularly Catholic, schools. We investigate how funding cuts impacted the spread and survival of Catholic educational institutions, as well as the assimilation of Catholic communities. The data collection is completed and the analysis underway. Although P4 is closely related to P3, it addresses distinct research questions and will culminate in a separate paper. Examining two distinct contexts enriches the proposal and sheds more light into the broader impact of religious education on political dynamics.
