1827 : la mode de la statistique en France; origine, extension, personnages

Abstract

Independent to a great extent from the scientific development of the discipline, a trend for statistics has developed in France, from 1827 on. It was probably sparked by Charles Dupin's 'Carte figurative de l'instruction populaire', with its famous Saint-Malo Geneva line, supposed to separate the educated North from the ignorant South. It became attractive to produce, under the name 'statistics', more or less quantitative descriptions on any subject. Beyond literary records, the phenomenon can be measured by its semantic penetration in the press. Even if the ambition of most of these amateurs has remained strictly descriptive, some of them did raise the issue of proving through numbers. This is particularly remarkable, since within institutional science, the techniques of statistical proving, that had been introduced by Laplace at the end of the 18th century, have remained largely ignored for a very long time.