Literacy and State–Society Interactions in Nineteenth‐Century France

Abstract

Modern states are distinguished by the breadth and depth of public regulation over private affairs. This aspect of state capacity and state power is predicated on frequent and dense encounters between the state and the population it seeks to control. We argue that literacy in the language of state administration facilitates state-society interaction by lowering the transaction costs of those encounters. We support this claim with evidence drawing upon detailed historical data from nineteenth-century France during a crucial period of state and nation building. Focusing on the specific domain of French marriage regulations, we find that increasing literacy predicts greater popular involvement with local authorities across French regions over time. These results demonstrate that literacy plays an important role in political development not solely by enhancing loyalty to the state, as the literature has recognized, but also by lowering linguistic and human capital barriers to state-society interaction. Verification Materials: The data and materials required to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, procedures, and analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YQSBOA. M odern states are distinguished by the breadth and depth of public regulation over private affairs. Indeed, a defining axiom of the contemporary international state system is that state institutions should provide the predominant (if not exclusive) rules and regulations governing social and economic behavior over a given territory (Migdal 1988, 14). Many scholars therefore consider the ability to make and enforce binding rules to be central to conceptions of stateness and state capacity (

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