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"

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

Email: [email protected]

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)