BERTILLON, JACQUES

(1851–1922)

Jacques Bertillon was a French physician and statistician, who played a key role in developing the international classification of causes of death and was a leader of France's pronatalist movement. Several members of Bertillon's family were distinguished in the field of demography. His maternal grandfather, Achille Guillard (1799–1876), coined the term demography (1855); his father, Louis-Adolphe (1821–1883), taught the first course in demography at the Paris Medical School (1875) and was director of the Bureau de Statistique Municipale in Paris–a post also held by Jacques.

Several decades of effort had been devoted to devising a classification for the causes of deaths by the time Bertillon began his research in the area. He used the work he had done on Parisian death data, and drew on the scheme proposed by William Farr (1807–1883), which had been adapted to the new bacteriological knowledge. The resulting classification system, known as the Bertillon classification, was first promulgated at the Chicago conference of the International Statistical Institute in 1893 and was accepted by the American Health Association in 1897. It became the International Classification in 1900 after approval by an international commission in Paris.

Bertillon also wrote demography manuals and a series of studies on fertility characteristics, the latter using the latest statistical techniques, such as parity-specific birth probabilities. But Bertillon is better known in France as the founder, in 1896, of the first pronatalist movement, the Alliance nationale pour l'accroissement de la population française. He attempted to explain why couples had small families (adducing reasons such as high taxation and small apartments), proposed new pronatalist measures such as a cash bonus for the fourth child, and conceived the notion of population aging. It was largely at his urging, through the Conseil Supérieur de la Natalité, that a law was passed in 1920 forbidding dissemination of birth control information and techniques.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SELECTED WORKS BY JACQUES BERTILLON.

Bertillon, Jacques. 1883. Étude démographique du divorce et de la séparation de corps dans les différents pays de l'Europe. Paris: G. Masson.

——. 1895. Cours élémentaire de statistique. Paris: Société d'études scientifiques.

——. 1911. La dépopulation de la France, ses conséquences, ses causes, mesures à prendre pour la combattre. Paris: Alcan.

SELECTED WORKS ABOUT JACQUES BERTILLON.

Bourdelais, Patrice. 1993. L'âge de la vieillesse. Histoire du vieillissement de la population. Paris: Odile Jacob.

Dupâquier, Michel. 1983. "La famille Bertillon et la naissance d'une nouvelle science sociale: la démographie." Annales de démographie historique 293–311.

Dupâquier, Jacques, and Michel Dupâquier. 1985. Histoire de la démographie. Paris: Perrin.