‪Profiles of 19th-century male secondary school pupils are still hard to determine: the sources available were mostly produced by the educational authorities and rarely cover their everyday lives, preferring an accounting perspective. Consequently, the article examines how the surviving administrative documents were created and used by educational authorities to determine the prism through which students were viewed. Although this approach does not account for the lack of information regarding the social profile of students, the paper assumes that by identifying the administrative reading grid at different levels we can highlight how the authorities created different types of pupils through the elements which they deemed important and necessary for the proper functioning of the public secondary school network.‪