Lot 220
Guerry, André-Michel
Essai sur la statistique morale de la France
Auction: Books & Manuscripts | 01 October 2026 from 10am | Lots 209 to 220
Description
Paris: Crochard, 1833. First edition, 4to (33.9 x 24.8cm), later library buckram by Warner, xi 69 [3] pp., 6 engraved sociological maps of France, engraved table, ex Manchester Public Libraries (with associated markings: shelfmark to spine, library plate and lending slip to endpapers, and ink-stamp to title-page), bound without the half-title, wear to spine, split to head of front joint, text-leaves spotted
Footnote
A landmark in the history of statistics and social sciences, widely praised by contemporaries but often overlooked today. ‘Guerry can be considered as the founder (or at least co-founder, together with the Belgian, Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874)) of the scientific study of criminology and ultimately modern sociology … His findings, regarding crime, suicide and other moral aspects, were both startling and compelling. His presentation, in tables and cartes figuratives, showed that the rates of crime and suicide remained remarkably stable over time, when broken down by age, sex, region of France and even month or season of the year; yet, these numbers also varied systematically across departments of France. This regularity and variation of “social numbers” created the possibility to conceive, for the first time, that human actions in the social world were governed by social laws, just as inanimate objects were governed by laws of the physical world’ (Michael Friendly, ‘The Life and Works of André-Michel Guerry (1802-1866)’, 2007, online).