1989/01/01 by Alain Choppin, Choppin, Alain · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy
paper · pdf · doi:10.12759/hsr.14.1989.4.52-58
The Emmanuelle data-base project began in 1980 when I was put in charge of a research project on the history of schoolbooks in the depart ment of historical research (1) at the Institut National de Recherche P? dagogique in Paris. The production of French schoolbooks, which is the largest in the world, was little known at the time. No bibliography existed containing a comprehensive list of textbooks; only a few incomplete and disparate lists were available. No library had published a specific catalogue of its collec tions. The publishing houses themselves -when they still existedhad pre served neither their textbooks nor their former catalogues. Finally, despite the fact that schoolbooks had large edition quantities, their preservation was often poorly done. At the same time a steadily growing number of researchers in history, sociology, didactics, linguistics, etc. was interested in schoolbooks as an object of their study. I decided, as a result, to gather the titles and to collect the main charac teristics of all the textbooks published in France since the Revolution, with the double objective of helping researchers in their work and of saving a cultural heritage (2). An initial estimation, which later turned out to be correct, showed that the total number of works published in the past two centuries was close to 100 000 -all subject matters and teaching levels combined (3). The quantity of this production and the diversity of researchers' inter ests led me to resort to the aid of a computer. The data-base EMMANUELLE (?MANUEL? means textbook in French) gathers the entire production of schoolbooks published in France, or within territories under its jurisdiction, from 1789 to the present. It concerns all subjects and teaching levels. It indicates all of the published editions and the places where they are preserved. The present volume of this data-base is around 7 000 items, which represents the total number of Greek, Italian, Latin and German textbooks. The final number of items