Statistics

Laplace, Gauss, Bayes, all three were mathematicians, all geniuses of their era and all wielded statistics. This particular science first saw the light in Antiquity but was used only for troop censuses or resource calculations and was basically limited to data collection. It was not until the 18^thcentury that this data began to be the subject of interpretation, used for predictive ends. Probability theory developed throughout the 19^thcentury, driven by the period’s obsession with classification, inventory and typology. 

Thanks to statistics, it is possible, for instance, to determine the mortality figures for a particular groups of humans, and action can then be taken to modify factors and improve these figures.

Abuses soon followed. Any and all data were treated as interpretable, and could be made to say anything at all, cloaked in the legitimacy of mathematical rigour. Balzac, very much abreast of this science, which interested him greatly because related to social groups, uses the concept to comedic effect in developing his more provocative theories. His Physiologie du Mariage, in which a most improbable string of statistical calculations leads the reader to the proportion of virtuous women amongst France’s female population, is a particularly delightful example.

« MEDITATION II –

“The administration has been occupied for nearly twenty years in reckoning how many acres of woodland, meadow, vineyard and fallow are comprised in the area of France. It has not stopped there, but has also tried to learn the number and species of the animals to be found there. Scientific men have gone still further; they have reckoned up the cords of wood, the pounds of beef, the apples and eggs consumed in Paris. But no one has yet undertaken either in the name of marital honour or in the interest of marriageable people, or for the advantage of morality and the progress of human institutions, to investigate the number of honest wives. What! the French government, if inquiry is made of it, is able to say how many men it has under arms, how many spies, how many employees, how many scholars; but, when it is asked how many virtuous women, it can answer nothing!“

Honoré de Balzac, La Physiologie du Mariage, 1829 (Translation Katharine Prescott Wormeley)