OFFICIAL STATISTICS AND MEDICINE IN 19TH-CENTURY FRANCE - THE SGF AS A CASE-STUDY

The Statistique Generale de la France (SGF), permanently established in 1833, was the nearest French equivalent to the General Register Office (GRO) of England and Wales. It was the department of government responsible for publishing both the results of the quinquennial census and the annual totals of births, deaths, and marriages. Despite an earlier interest in public health affairs on the part of its first chief, Alexandre Moreau de Jonnes, the SGF did not subsequently become much involved in medical and epidemiological matters. Various reasons for this are examined, in particular the divisions within French medicine generated by contemporary debates over the role of statistical methods and the validity of probabilistic as opposed to deterministic forms of causal reasoning. Unlike the GRO, the SGF was located within the Ministry of Trade and increasingly directed its attention to the economic and industrial utility of census information. It was attached to the Ministry's new Labour Bureau in 1891. From then until 1920 the engineer, Lucien March, was in charge. He successfully introduced US tabulating machinery and the statistical methods of Galton and Pearson, though proving much less successful in importing their eugenic creed to France.