Falloux Laws
French law of 1850
The Falloux Laws promoted Catholic schools in France in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s. They were voted in during the French Second Republic and promulgated on 15 March 1850 and in 1851, following the presidential election of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte as president in December 1848 and the May 1849 legislative elections that gave a majority to the conservative Parti de l'Ordre. Named for the Minister of Education Alfred de Falloux, they mainly aimed at promoting Catholic teaching. The Falloux Law of 15 March 1850 also extended the requirements of the Guizot Law of 1833, which had mandated a boys' school in each commune of more than 500 inhabitants, to require a girls' school in those communes. The 1851 law created a mixed system, in which some primary education establishments were public and controlled by the state and others were under the supervision of Catholic congregations.
The new law created an association between Church and state that lasted until the anti-clerical Jules Ferry laws in the early 1880s established free and secular education in the Third Republic. The Falloux laws provided universal primary schooling in France and expanded opportunities for secondary schooling. In practice, the curricula in Catholic and state schools were similar. Catholic schools were especially useful in schooling for girls, which had long been neglected.
Main features
The main objectives of the Falloux Laws was to replace the revolutionary and imperial system, which had placed the whole of the education system under the supervision of the University and of state-trained teachers, who were accused of spreading Republicans and anti-clerical ideas, by a system giving responsibility for education back to the clergy.
The public source identifies “Falloux Laws” as french law of 1850. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Falloux, Laws and French.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3258177. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1850, 1851, 1848 and 1849.
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This entry incorporates text from “Falloux Laws” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.