Census in France

From the mid-17th until the beginning of the 20th century, French censuses became increasingly more frequent and organized. This article focuses on the purposes of the first censuses (military), how the population was conceived of, and what variables were collected. The main characteristics of included individuals, the data considered important during each period, and the major categories chosen are examined. Also included are the evolution of reasons for knowing the precise age of individuals and how age groups were standardized because these aspects are closely linked to census operations. Censuses have been used to obtain an overview of the population and, during the 19th century, how they were central to the discussion of the decline in fertility and, more generally, the changes occurring in the French population.

For a long time, the history of population statistics has focused on the invention of new arithmetical methods and on the development of the different stages of statistics gathered for the state, such as the quality and precision of vital statistics and what information is included in the censuses. Historians have been more interested in what they could calculate from censuses than the history of specific operations. The purposes of the first censuses and the way the population was conceptualized will be examined because organizing a census seems impossible without dealing with categorization.

In France, as in other European countries censuses, their applications and systematization seem to be linked to the construction of the modern royal state and to what Foucault (1976, pp. 182–191) has designated as biopolitics. Not coincidentally, census taking rose to an unequalled level in the city of Florence, which was also the site of Machiavelli’s proposal of rationalization as a method of government. The improvement of the enumeration lists was clearly connected with the instruments developed to serve an orderly administration. However, the remarkable Firenze catasto (cadaster of Florence; 1427–1430) did not include the ages of individual inhabitants among its paramount data. The initial description of 260,000 Tuscans focused on their property, animals, land, and investments in trade or industry rather than on the composition of their households, household members, and occupations. Age was mentioned only in the description of dependents (Klapisch-Zuber & Demonet, 1972). In the 16th century, when Jean Bodin presented the arguments in favor of census taking, the age composition of the population was not among his main concerns. A little less than a century later, in his "Note sur le recensement des peuples", Vauban lengthened the list of information that censuses should collect.

Several developments combined to lead to greater precision about age. These included new criteria of what constitutes good administration, calculations of tables d’extinction (life tables) required for the development of insurance and a life annuities system, and new measures for pension payments or admission to hospitals. During the reign of Louis XIV, various enumeration operations attempted to specify the size of the population through small administrative units that counted the number of mouths to be fed during the food shortage of 1693, and through the establishment of a new taxation (a capitation tax) the following year. Population data were kept secret, as elsewhere in Europe. To reveal them would have alerted adversaries about the real size of the country’s military forces in the event of a conflict. Sweden, however, was more advanced. Beginning in 1749, Swedish clergy in each parish had to provide data relating to vital statistics (baptisms and burials) and the distribution by sex, age group, marital status, and occupation. In 1762, Wargentin was authorized to publish population statistics, except for the number of inhabitants, which was classified as a military secret. Disclosure of secret information could be considered high treason, punishable by decapitation. Such was the case on May 27, 1780, when a Swiss priest, Johann Heinrich Waser, calculated the population of Zürich and its canton for the period 1467 to 1748 and published the results. He should have taken more seriously the accusations made by the City Council against Pasteur Jean-Louis Muret, who, a few years earlier, had used and published data from the 1766 census of Bern (Mols, 1954–1956).