Alex Taylor

Finals?? Grading??

If you are at the Southerns, come say hi and listen to some interesting economic history presentations!

We will be in room “Edison” all day today

If you'll be at SEA and want more details, come to my session! I present on Monday, November 24 in Session 3.B.32. "Religion, Culture, and the State"

This paper investigates the impact of language mandates on linguistic transition, standardization, and national identity in Early Modern France. Using the Universal Short Title Catalogue, we construct a panel of printing activity in European towns from 1500 to 1650. We then estimate the impact of the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterˆets, an ordinance requiring the use of French—rather than Latin—in all legal documents, on vernacular language printing in France using a difference-in-discontinuities design. To account for the influence of religion on vernacular printing, we leverage a Large Language Model to classify selected authors from the time period as Protestant or Catholic and control for religious print output. Results suggest that the ordinance promoted the general use of vernacular language in print and led to an explosion of vernacular printing within France. We also study the impact of the ordinance on linguistic standardization, finding that the ordinance homogenized printed French to Parisian French standards, but only within France. To explore the long-run effects of language promotion and standardization on national identity, we estimate the impact of the ordinance on expressions of nationalism in the Cahiers de Dol´eances—a collection of grievances and suggestions filed by the three Estates on the eve of the French Revolution—finding more expressions of nationalism in Third Estate cahiers from print towns originally subjected to the ordinance. The findings have implications for the role of the state in shaping national identity, the legibility of the law, and the spread of ideas through language policy.

How did France become one of Europe’s biggest printers of vernacular books, and how did it shape its linguistic and political development?

My paper w/Jacob Hall, "The King’s French," shows how a 1539 language mandate changed printing, standardized French, and strengthened national identity. (1/12)

Check out our draft here, or on my website's research page! Would greatly value constructive feedback.

Email: at154@evansville.edu

www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/tw1x9...

(fin)

Our takeaway:

The state, not the Reformation, acted as the key driver of the vernacular shift in France. This shift played a key role in the development of the French language and French national identity. (12/12)

Bin scatterplot of expressions of national identity in cahiers and the share of total print output printed in French (only French towns)

RDD plot of expressions of nationalism in towns that were within or outside France in 1500 (print towns only)

We find a positive correlation between French print share 1500-1640 and expressions of French identity in the cahiers. Further, in an RDD specification, print towns within the France when the ordinance was adopted were more likely to express national identity.

Printing + Policy = Identity. (11/12)

Cahiers de Doléances

What are the long-run consequences of the state-driven French vernacular shift? Taking on arguments from Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities," we investigate the long-run effect of the ordinance on national identity using the Cahiers de Doléances, grievances from the French Revolution. (10/12)

Linguistic distance event study

Slightly altering our main specification, we confirm linguistic convergence to Parisian standards. Towns further away from Paris, i.e. those with the largest potential for linguistic change, see a 90% decrease in linguistic distance relative to towns just across the French border. (9/12)

Bin scatterplot of linguistic distance and distance to Paris

We use titles in the USTC to measure the average linguistic distance of French titles printed across Europe from Parisian French.

Within France, we see a clear correlation between geographic and linguistic distance of towns from Paris... But it becomes much weaker after the ordinance. (8/12)

We see an effect of the ordinance on French printing, but what about on the language itself? While the ordinance did not require documents to be in a specific type of French, it could change incentives for French printers to match Parisian standards. (7/12)

Vernacular print share event study

Total vernacular print count (levels) event study

Total vernacular print output (logs) event study

We see a large, immediate increase in vernacular printing across several margins:

- 65 percentage point increase in vernacular print share
- increase of 100 vernacular editions (levels)
- 32% increase in vernacular editions

Villers-Cotterêts effectively flips printing from Latin to French. (6/12)

Map of print towns along French border in 1500

To establish causality we exploit the location of the French border in a difference-in-discontinuities design, estimating the difference in discontinuities between towns on either side of the HRE and Spanish borders before and after Villers-Cotterêts. (5/12)

Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts

What caused the vernacular shift in Catholic France? Our findings point to a key policy:

The Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, which required all legal documents to be written in French rather than Latin.

We argue the policy caused spillovers and a subsequent explosion of vernacular printing. (4/12)

Cumulative vernacular editions printed in various European countries, 1500-1640

Vernacular print share in France vs. Germany, 1500 to 1640

Using the Universal Short Title Catalogue, we construct a town–decade panel of print activity, 1500–1640.

We found Reformation era 🇩🇪 clearly produced the most vernacular editions. But *Catholic* 🇫🇷 was a close second. As a share of print output, 🇫🇷 vernacular printing exceeded 🇩🇪 by 1560. (3/12)

The rise of vernacular languages is a puzzle in European history. Why would elites abandon a common language in favor of their local spoken one?

Other excellent scholarship emphasizes the Reformation in the linguistic transition. We give an alternative take, emphasizing state-building. (2/12)

This paper investigates the impact of language mandates on linguistic transition, standardization, and national identity in Early Modern France. Using the Universal Short Title Catalogue, we construct a panel of printing activity in European towns from 1500 to 1650. We then estimate the impact of the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterˆets, an ordinance requiring the use of French—rather than Latin—in all legal documents, on vernacular language printing in France using a difference-in-discontinuities design. To account for the influence of religion on vernacular printing, we leverage a Large Language Model to classify selected authors from the time period as Protestant or Catholic and control for religious print output. Results suggest that the ordinance promoted the general use of vernacular language in print and led to an explosion of vernacular printing within France. We also study the impact of the ordinance on linguistic standardization, finding that the ordinance homogenized printed French to Parisian French standards, but only within France. To explore the long-run effects of language promotion and standardization on national identity, we estimate the impact of the ordinance on expressions of nationalism in the Cahiers de Dol´eances—a collection of grievances and suggestions filed by the three Estates on the eve of the French Revolution—finding more expressions of nationalism in Third Estate cahiers from print towns originally subjected to the ordinance. The findings have implications for the role of the state in shaping national identity, the legibility of the law, and the spread of ideas through language policy.

How did France become one of Europe’s biggest printers of vernacular books, and how did it shape its linguistic and political development?

My paper w/Jacob Hall, "The King’s French," shows how a 1539 language mandate changed printing, standardized French, and strengthened national identity. (1/12)

This, but also a hidden underlying resentment that comes from working for too long on a project and knowing every problem with it.

Hi all, please spread the word and we hope everyone can make good use of this new data drop: cmfdata.org

The full surviving establishment-level Census of Manufactures manuscripts and digitized data from 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880!

After using fixest to output my regression tables in R for so long, one project is forcing me to figure out Stata's esttab for the first time...

Why is it so hard to output a tabular environment so I can do caption, label, footnotes, and width customization in Latex?

That's like four economics awards in a row with a substantial economic-history component, right? That strikes me as a remarkable shift. www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists...

The latest front in the attack on academia:

The coffee shop near campus no longer does faculty discounts because of the tariffs (they mostly use Brazilian beans).

Though I primarily focused on voting in my Monumental Effects paper, some specifications did show this negative effect on lynchings. I always thought it'd be worthwhile for someone to run down that question in a more thorough manner.

Great to see more Confederate monument work!

New APSR sure to spark discussion argues:

Confederate monuments actually reduced violence against Black people historically & that their recent removals have increased anti-Black hate crimes

Monuments "act as a substitute for performative violence in constructing a white supremacist social order"

⚠️ Virtual Workshop in HPE info ⚠️

@adajkanu.bsky.social is presenting a project on "Colonization and the Politics of Belonging in Nigeria" on Thursday! Martha Wilfahrt (UC Berkeley) will discuss. Let me know if you're not on our email list already and would like to be!

Excited to host the All California (formerly All UC) economic history JM conference tomorrow — proud to keep this tradition alive and looking forward to the papers! events.berkeley.edu/events/event...

Good morning!

HPE candidates on the job market Job market season is here.

Looking for rising stars in Historical Political Economy? 🌍📚
Check out this year’s job market candidates: www.broadstreet.blog/p/hpe-candid...

In trying times, may we all strive to find the peace Stanley finds in a simple beam of sunlight

I used copilot in VSCode to switch my github website from jekyll to quarto, and it was almost perfect. Just took an additional prompt to clean things up, but it turned what could've been half a day or more of work into a 10 minute task.

Don't even get me started on how it's sped up my R coding!