The Power of Large Numbers: Population, Politics, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century France 9781501722608

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The Power of Large Numbers

THE POWER OF LARGE NUMBERS PoPULATION, PoLITics, AND GENDER IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

JosHuA CoLE

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright© 2000 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2000 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cole, Joshua, 1961The power oflarge numbers : population, politics, and gender in nineteenth-century France I Joshua Cole. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8014-3701-6 (cloth) r. France-Population policy-History-19th century. 2. France-PopulationHistory-19th century. 3. Statistics-France-History-19th century. I. Title. HB3593.C614 2000 304-6' 0944' 09034-dc21 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetablebased, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. Books that bear the logo of the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) use paper taken from forests that have been inspected and certified as meeting the highest standard for environmental and social responsibility. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

ro 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 r

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Abbreviations

Vll XI

Introduction I.

The Universal and the Particular

21

2.

The Chaos of Particular Facts

55

3·

The Individual Body and the Body Social

86

4·

Working Women and Market Individualism

II7

5·

"A Sudden and Terrible Revelation"

149

6.

"There Are Only Good Mothers"

180

Conclusion

212

Bibliography

217

Index

245

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grants and fellowships from the Council for European Studies, the French government's Chateaubriand program, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the University of Georgia made the research for this book possible. I am grateful for the support given by these institutions. I thank the editors and anonymous readers of Cornell University Press for their help in bringing the manuscript to the light of day. Chapter 5 appeared in The journal ofFamily History vol. 21, no. 4 (1996) and is reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc. Chapter 6 appeared in French Historical Studies val. 19 no. 3 (Spring 1996) copyright© 1996 Society for French Historical Studies. I owe a tremendous debt to Susanna Barrows at the University of California, Berkeley, who first encouraged me to think about the depopulation debates in France and who patiently guided my work in this area. Susanna's seminar was my introduction to nineteenth-century France, and ever since leaving Berkeley I have been trying to reestablish in my own classes that combination of rigorous questioning and community endeavor that characterized our discussions with her. At Berkeley, I also learned a great deal from Lynn Hunt and Thomas Laqueur, whose work and teachings are still models for me today. Perhaps the best part of my graduate education was association with a marvelous cohort of scholarsin-the-making, both in Berkeley and in Paris, who offered their help: Andrew Aisenberg, David Barnes, Marjorie Beale, Ian Burney, Sarah Farmer, Paul Friedland, Jennifer Jones, Sheryl Kroen, Catherine Kudlick, Rene Marion, Thomas Pepper, Tip Ragan, Jeffrey Ravel, Dan Sherman,

V111

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Regina Sweeney, Vanessa Schwartz, Matthew Truesdell, Jeffrey Verhey, and Susan Whitney. I owe special debts to Sylvia Schafer and Lou Roberts, who generously shared their ideas and research with me on many occaswns. While working on another project, Jay Winter, Jean-Louis Robert, and Catherine Roller taught me a great deal about demographic research, and the book has benefited from their influence. Rachel Fuchs helped me navigate the Archives de Paris and later encouraged me to develop Chapter 6 into an article. Alain Corbin read and commented on my initial proposal, and Paul-Andre Rosental guided me through the sources available in France for research into the history of population questions. Libby Schweber gave me the benefit of her tremendous knowledge of French population research, Catherine Roller shared with me her remarkable thesis on infant welfare policies in the Third Republic, and Elinor Accampo drew my attention to her important work on Nelly Roussel, Paul Robin, and Manuel Devaldes. Kirstie McClure, Patricia O'Brien, and Ann-Louise Shapiro commented constructively on papers arising from this work at the Society for French Historical Studies and the History of Science Association meetings. Oto Luthar invited me to Slovenia to present Chapter 5 to the Historical Seminar at the University of Ljubljana, and he and his wife, Breda, were marvelous hosts. I finished the book at the University of Georgia, where I have enjoyed the company of an exceptionally generous community of scholars and friends. Monica Chojnacka, Michael Kwass, Laura Mason, Miranda Pollard, Chris Rassmussen, David Schoenbrun, Bryant Simon, and Eve Troutt Powell have all read parts of the manuscript and offered their criticisms and encouragement. Ann Marie Reardon has not read the manuscript, but she has listened to me talk about it so much on our runs through Athens that I'm sure she feels as though she has. In the last year, Judith Coffin, Peter Hoffer, Lynn Hunt, Joan Scott, and Simon Szreter read the entire manuscript, and I thank them for their comments, which both saved me from several embarrassing errors of fact and helped clarify my argument in several key sections. Of all of my teachers, Joan Scott has shaped my scholarship the most, and this book owes its greatest material and intellectual debts to her. Ever since she directed my undergraduate thesis in 1983 she has been a constant support of my work, offering advice, criticism, and, most generously, her time. I dedicate this book to my family. My mother, Susan Cole, has always been my role model as a historian and as a teacher. Her scholarly obsessions and cheerful curiosity about the world are matched only by her indignation at what's wrong with it. My father, Brock Cole, taught me to

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IX

take writing seriously and when and how to take naps. My brother, Toby, has shared more of this project than most siblings would or should tolerate. Finally, Kate Tremel married me as I was finishing this book. I can't think of a better ending than that. JOSHUA COLE

Athens, Georgia

ABBREVIATIONS

MP AdP

AN APP

BARM RSVP

Archives Archives Archives Archives

de I'Assistance Publique de Paris Nationales de la Prefecture de Police

Bulletin de l'Academie royale de medecine, v. r (r836 -37) Recherches statistiques sur Ia ville de Paris et le departement de Ia Seine

The Power of Large Numbers

INTRODUCTION

THE PowER OF LARGE NuMBERS

The belief that a strong and vigorous nation requires a large population has a peculiar history in modern France. Before the Revolution of 1789, royal administrators justified population growth, territorial expansion, and colonial conquest by equating numbers of people with wealth. This assumption became more difficult to maintain during the turbulent first half of the nineteenth century. Between 1800 and 1850, Paris doubled in size from half a million to a million people, and this growth was accompanied by violent revolutions in 1830 and 1848. Influential political economists looked at the poor, illiterate, and often angry crowds filling French cities and reconsidered their enthusiasm for population growth. The tide of opinion shifted again in the 186os, when some of these same economists noted population declines in rural areas, and the Malthusian warnings of overpopulation that had been so common in the 1840s were heard less frequently. After the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, widespread fears of cultural and national degeneration led many public figures to call once more for increases in the number of births. These changes in attitudes toward population growth in France took place against the background of another development: the emergence of statistics as a new language for describing the population, its composition, behavior, and vital characteristics. Compiled for the first time in regularly published official tables, population statistics revealed unsuspected patterns and consistencies in the apparently chaotic complexity of social life. Inevitably, this new knowledge about the dynamics of population transformed the nature of political, social, and economic debate in the nineteenth century. The most pressing concerns of the French nation- the benefits of economic development, the causes of revolution, the need for social reform, the nature of citizenship, and the proper relationship between state and society-all were more or less recast by the

2

INTRODUCTION

language of number. This power of numbers to represent the life and death of the French and, in so doing, to transform the process by which social reformers justified their proposals in nineteenth-century France is the subject of this book. The French preoccupation with population is both comparable to and different from parallel developments in other European countries. The most significant difference arises from the unique position occupied by the French in what historians have come to call "the demographic transition." 1 This transformation, which began in Europe in the late eighteenth century and continued through the first half of the twentieth, was characterized by substantial declines in mortality and fertility rates, as people began to live longer and restrict their family size. No single pattern or sequence of factors seems to explain this transition in all areas where it has been recorded, but it was usually accompanied by industrial development, immigration from rural areas to cities, and widespread changes both in family organization and in attitudes toward marriage and sexuality. For reasons that demographers have yet to explain completely, the French experience differed markedly from that of their European neighbors. In other countries, the decline in mortality preceded the decline in fertility by several generations. A period of rapid population growth followed throughout much of Europe until fertility declines began to slow the rate of expansion in the twentieth century. In France, however, the mortality and fertility declines began almost simultaneously at the end of the eighteenth century, so that for the next hundred years French population growth was very slow. These trends were not immediately apparent in the first half of the nineteenth century, but even if they had been, most social observers would probably have welcomed any evidence of slow population growth. During these years, French attitudes toward such questions were heavily influenced by Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle ofPopulation (1798), first translated into French in 1809. Malthus drew a much more somber picture than that traced by his more optimistic eighteenth-century preOn the demographic transition see Ansley J. Coale and Susan Watkins, The Decline ofFertility in Europe (Princeton, 1986); Etienne Van de Walle, "La Fecondite fran p. 669. 84- Andre-Germain-Casimir Pretavoine, representative from Eure in 1871, owed his political career to the Bonapanist administration that had appointed him mayor of Louviers in 1851. He continued to support the cause of the fallen Empire until he retired from politics in 1875.

178

THE POWER OF LARGE NUMBERS

the problem in somewhat guarded terms. "The truth is," he wrote, "that whenever the wage that enters the house of the worker is not sufficient to allow the wife to devote herself exclusively to the care of its interior, it is a great misfortune. The domestic foyer is troubled, and the peace of the household is menaced." 85 This consensus on the subject of women's labor lay behind the lack of controversy which the Roussel Law raised in the assembly. If paternal authority still stood as an obstacle in the minds of some legislators to the extension of state power, there was little disagreement that maternal responsibility was a different matter altogether. In late nineteenth-century France, political talk about the family served a specific ideological function: it bound the natural world, with its ineluctable laws of death, reproduction, and renewal, to the social universe of French families. Because the heterosexual union of man and woman was perceived to be both the most "natural" of relationships and the most fundamental unit in the "social" organization of the French nation, the republican defenders of the family could claim nature as an accomplice in their plans for national regeneration. At the same time, however, the accumulated evidence of families in distress, of working women who were forced to send their infants out to nurse, created an anxiety-ridden paradox for republican social reformers. Unable to see the existence of the wet-nursing industry as the result of socioeconomic factors that left working women little choice, Roussel and his supporters could only interpret the evidence for infant mortality as signs of maternal irresponsibility, of nature gone awry. By focusing on the mother's responsibility in the high rates of infant death, observers such as Brochard, Monot, and Mayer opened the way for Roussel to resolve this anxiety through increased state involvement in the lives of French families. By the 186os, a growing proportion of lawmakers and reformers had come to expect more from the state in its supervision of commercial wet-nursing than a simple guarantee of the essentially free economic transaction between parents and nurses. No longer primarily concerned with the guardianship of a sphere of paternal authority, the officials at the end of the Second Empire and the beginning of the Third Republic chose to "protect" a different set of relations within an idealized vision of the family, those between the mother and child. Claiming that the nursing industry consisted of a demonstrably "perverse" exchange of money for mother's milk that harmed infants and disrupted the proper relations between mothers and their children, these re85. Andre Pretavoine,fourna/ Ojjiciel, 6 February r8n p. 869.

"A SUDDEN AND TERRIBLE REVELATION"

179

formers called on the government to act, even at the cost of diminishing individual liberty and familial autonomy. This imperative motivated the campaign for reform led by Brochard's and Monot's research and Mayer's Societe protectrice and ultimately acted as the catalyst for the Roussel Law ofr874· The Roussel Law became a precedent for the intercession of the state in the interest of the child. It opened the way for later legislation, such as the education laws of the early r88os, the 1889 law on "moral abandonment," and the 1892law on assistance to indigent pregnant women which protected the fetus. Having resolved the question of the family's autonomy in favor of state intervention, the champions of the Roussel Law established a principle that would resonate throughout the history of family policy during the Third Republic: "the right of the child to his mother." 86 In the end, however, the paradox of finding the French family's staunchest supporters among those who did the most to weaken any notion of family autonomy is not a paradox at all. Insofar as it was politically significant, the discussion was always weighted toward the collective needs of the social body. The power of republican familialism had little to do with the power of families. 86. Roussel, "Rapport," p. 7·

CHAPTER

6

" THERE ARE ONLY GOOD MOTHERS "

DECEIVING THE ORGANS

"There are good and bad wives," wrote Jules Simon in 1892, "[but] there are only g