Power of Large Numbers

French government officials have long been known among Europeans for the special attention they give to the state of their population. In the first half of the nineteenth century, as Paris doubled in size and twice suffered the convulsions of popular revolution, civic leaders looked with alarm at what they deemed a dangerous population explosion. After defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, however, the falling birthrate generated widespread fears of cultural and national decline. In response, legislators promoted larger families and the view that a well-regulated family life was essential for France.In this innovative work of cultural history, Joshua Cole examines the course of French thinking and policymaking on population issues from the 1780s until the outbreak of the Great War. During these decades increasingly sophisticated statistical methods for describing and analyzing such topics as fertility, family size, and longevity made new kinds of aggregate knowledge available to social scientists and government officials. Cole recounts how this information heavily influenced the outcome of debates over the scope and range of public welfare legislation. In particular, as the fear of depopulation grew, the state wielded statistical data to justify increasing intervention in family life and continued restrictions on the autonomy of women.

Cole has produced a work of impressive scholarship. He has synthesized a vast array of material to produce a book that is worth reading by anyone with an interest in the human sciences or French history in the nineteenth century., This book functions at different levels: it is a clear narrative of the history of statistics,... it is an interesting approach to the cultural history of the science of the population in the nineteenth century, and it is a fresh approach to familiar issues using the governmentality literature developed over the past twenty years to explain how this science attempts to be a tool to understand groups and aggregates and defend individual rights. Furthermore it is a good read., This book does not fit into an easily definable category: its auther cuts across different subfields and problematics—the history of statistics and family policy, in particular—to examine the way in which population studies, politics, and gender ideology intersected and interacted in nineteenth-century France.... In his close reading of texts of French demography and statistics, Cole shows a great deal of skill and perception.... He is convincing in arguing that we must pay attention to the contribution that quantitative population research made to the gendered articulation of new ideas of collective interests and social responsibility., Cole's exploration... is broadly cast.... An informative and thought-provoking addition to our knowledge of nineteenth-century France., Cole's superb cultural study... is eloquently written, meticulously researched, with comprehensive bibliography and informed graphs.... His humanization of French demography is a model study for social, cultural, and gender studies and especially French 19th-century history.

Joshua Cole is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Georgia.