Agricultural History Review, Volume 44 Part 1 (1996), pp. 47–62

After reviewing briefly the development of agricultural education in France as a whole during the nineteenth century, this paper examines in detail the history of one farm school (La Charmoise) which operated in the Sologne, near the Loire valley town of Blois, in the mid-nineteenth century. The creation of the school is shown to have owed much both to the general context of government encouragement of agricultural education and to the specific enthusiasm of its founder, Edouard Malingie, who was strongly committed both to a scientifically and economically rational agriculture and to an active, benevolent Christianity. Examination of the functioning of the school is followed by an assessment of its impact. While the school was widely perceived by contemporaries as being both very useful and successful, consideration of the recruitment and retention of pupils, of staffing, and of the school's financial position indicates that the school had both weaknesses of which contemporaries appear to have been unaware and problems which they were reluctant to acknowledge. The farm school functioned for only eighteen years and its impact was probably not as great as contemporaries thought. It was, nonetheless, one noteworthy component of Malingie's wide-ranging activities as an agricultural improver, which became famous internationally because of his production of a new, fixed breed of sheep, the Charmoise, based in part upon imported pure New Kent rams. 

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