Bourses et boursiers de l’enseignement secondaire en France, 1802–1914, by Jean Le Bihan

Jean Le Bihan has written an engaging and clearly organized history of scholarships and scholarship students in French lycées from the creation of the system under Napoleon up to the democratizing rupture of the First World War. His goal is to trace ‘in a way at once synthetic and multiscale the history of scholarship students in secondary education’ in the 19th century.1 The book is successful as an account of the administrative structures and negotiations that called into being the boursier and also in giving us a framework within which to place the diversity of experiences generally covered over by the boursier as a literary or cultural trope. As Le Bihan remarks, ‘there is a big gap… between a boarder in philosophy on a full scholarship and a student on a special course (élève de la filière spéciale) endowed with a half scholarship at a day school (externat).’ Most boursiers were not Charles Péguy. More, as the terms in the above quote suggest, this is a book that plunges readers into the niceties of French administrative language. Le Bihan follows many categories and many procedures, into obscure and sometimes dusty corners, occasionally catching ministers failing, perhaps forgivably, to understand the categories they have inherited. The book’s organization is thematic rather than chronological, yet the occasional repetitions this creates are entirely counteracted by Le Bihan’s clear and economical style. The whole falls into three parts: the first approaches the bourse from the point of view of the state, the second from the point of view of the boursier himself, and the third from the local angle—bourses accorded by either the municipality or the département, and the particular case of the lycée at Rennes, the archive of which Le Bihan has been able to study in a total way.