The Power of Large Numbers

by Cole, Joshua

• ISBN13: 9780801437014
• ISBN10: 0801437016
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-03-01
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr

Summary

French government officials have long been known Europeans for the among 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 informat

Author Biography

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

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Abbreviations	xi
Introduction	1	(20)
The Universal and the Particular	21	(34)
The Chaos of Particular Facts	55	(31)
The Individual Body and the Body Social	86	(31)
Working Women and Market Individualism	117	(32)
``A Sudden and Terrible Revelation''	149	(31)
``There Are Only Good Mothers''	180	(32)
Conclusion	212	(5)
Bibliography	217	(28)
Index	245