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Death and the Afterlife in Modern France
By Thomas A. Kselman PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1993 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-03190-3
CHAPTER 1
PROGRESS AND ANXIETY IN FRENCH DEMOGRAPHY
In 1855 Achille Guillard, a French educator and engineer, invented the term démographie to describe the "mathematical knowledge of populations, their general movements, their physical, civil, intellectual, and moral condition." Guillard was not the first person to interest himself in this field; during the eighteenth century a number of Frenchmen made important contributions to the quantitative study of population. But it was only during the nineteenth century that accurate national statistics about birth, marriage, and death began to be collected and that demography established itself as a distinct intellectual discipline. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, France was a leader in demographic research; it is not coincidental that the term used to describe the scientific study of population was taken from the work of a French scholar and that demography is, as Pierre Chaunu has written, the last science "to write and speak French."
The study of demography, and particularly of human mortality, provides a crucial background for the cult of the dead that emerged in the nineteenth century. In acknowledging the importance of demography, however, I do not mean to imply a reductionist account in which cultural changes arise exclusively or even primarily from shifting patterns of mortality. Demography is interesting in part because it throws objective light on the emotionally charged subject of death. The questions and conclusions of Guillard and his colleagues, along with the invention of a term to describe a new and specialized discipline, also suggest that in the middle of the nineteenth century changes were occurring in the perception as well as the experience of death.
Demographic research placed death in a rationalistic and quantitative framework that reflected the professional concerns of civil servants and medical professionals who used mortality rates as an index to measure social problems and public health. Their work reveals anxieties about the deadly consequences of urbanization, poverty, crowded housing, changed working conditions, and new family patterns. These concerns were not restricted to a small professional elite. Growing numbers of literate French men and women were eager to learn about the changing patterns of mortality; about how often death struck; which places, professions, and age groups were most at risk; and how these changed over time. Demographic data trained people to think in terms of averages and encouraged them, as well, to adopt an abstract and secular perspective on the self and mortality. We will see in later chapters that folk traditions, ecclesiastical practices, state institutions, and private enterprise provided an increasingly wide range of choices through which families and communities could express their sense of loss and their desire to remember the dead. Although these cultural forms evolved from past practices and contemporary quarrels, perhaps some of the attention focused on the dead was an attempt to preserve a sense of the individual, who needed to be distinguished from the anonymity of demographic statistics.
The following section briefly summarizes the general trends in mortality that prevailed in the nineteenth century. For most of this chapter, however, I will focus on demography as a cultural form that people used to approach and understand death. In the nineteenth century, demography provided not only data but also a new discourse for interpreting mortality.
The Decline of Mortality
Mortality in France during the ancien régime followed the grim patterns of the rest of Europe. The principal features as summarized recently by Michael Flinn were "dramatic short-run fluctuations, low expectation of life, high infant and child mortality, and a high endemic and epidemic incidence of disease." Sometime during the eighteenth century, for reasons that are not yet clear, a decline in mortality began. Survival rates as shown in table 1.1, based on the number of people per thousand still alive according to age group, show that starting around 1750 increasing numbers of people were reaching adulthood (see table 1.1). These figures apply to the countryside; the evidence from urban areas is less clear. Despite all the qualifications that might be introduced, however, John McManners's judgment that "death was being defeated" in the eighteenth century seems a fair one.
Mortality rates continued to decline gradually throughout the nineteenth century. From an average of 29.8 deaths per thousand for the period 1801 to 1805, the rate dropped to 21.6 during the last five years of the nineteenth century. In the period just before World War I, the mortality rate dropped and stayed below 20. Despite the clear progress indicated by these figures, demographers now tend to emphasize the relatively slow pace of change for most of the century. About ten years were added to life expectancy during the nineteenth century, which went from thirty-five to forty-five for males, and from thirty-eight to forty-eight for females. But this performance was no better than that of the eighteenth century, which also added ten years to the life expectancy of the average Frenchperson. By comparison, the twentieth century shows much more dramatic progress. The mortality rate dropped from 21.6 per thousand in 1900 to 12.5 in 1950, and during the same period life expectancy increased from forty-five to sixty-two for men and from forty-eight to sixty-eight for women. This amounts to an increase in the first fifty years of the twentieth century virtually equivalent to that of the previous two hundred years.
From a contemporary perspective it is easy to understand Andre Armengaud's judgment that the demographic balance sheet for the nineteenth century was far from brilliant. Those who studied population trends in the nineteenth century were also frequently ambivalent about their findings. The overall decline in mortality confirmed by recent research was already evident in the early part of the century, but despite this good news demographers anxiously observed countertrends as well. Studies of mortality focused on the growth of cities and the expansion of industry, on infant mortality, and on the spread of cholera and tuberculosis—all of which were observed to be major threats to health, and to life, and which seemed to be growing more severe. The research that analyzed these problems tells us much about the incidence of death in the nineteenth century but is equally valuable because it illuminates the mortal fear provoked by social change. The beliefs and rituals that people turned to for consolation, which will take up most of my attention in the following chapters, assumed their meaning in part as responses to an experience of death in a world whose dangers were known with ever-greater precision.
The Mortal Dangers of an Urban Society
During the first half of the nineteenth century, demographers were preoccupied by the mortality rates in urban areas. J. P. Graffenauer suggested that the level of anxiety accompanying urban growth equaled that during the plague. The evidence from Paris analyzed by the influential investigator Louis-René Villermé revealed shockingly high mortality rates, especially in the poorer neighborhoods, where they reached 41.7 per thousand. As Louis Chevalier has demonstrated, the work of early demographers reinforced the fears provoked by the novels of Balzac, Hugo, and Eugène Sue—Paris was threatened by violence and disease carried by the laboring and dangerous classes.
In this golden age of statistics, readers sought in figures, including mortality rates, a way of grasping the changes in their society. Even Le Magasin pittoresque, a middle-class journal normally devoted to edifying images and texts, published population tables and charts that would allow readers "to calculate the life expectancy in France according to age (see fig. 1)." But despite some of their gloomy findings, demographers frequently made a special point of indicating that mortality rates for all classes had declined over the past several centuries. In his study of Parisian mortality, Villermé concluded with a consoling message that progress had occurred for all social classes by comparison with the fourteenth century. This long-term decline in mortality led him to an encomium to modern civilization that seems at odds with the grim evidence that makes up most of his essay: "The development of civilization, which has purified the air, and reduced the ignorance and misery of the people, has resulted in the considerable decline in their mortality." According to the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet, whose influential essay Sur l'homme summarized a vast amount of demographic research from all the states of Europe, "it appears clearly established that in countries where civilisation makes the greatest progress, we may also observe the greatest diminution of mortality." Quetelet's statement exemplifies the indecisive judgments of the early nineteenth century, in that he follows this assertion with a series of twists and turns that reveal his confusion. Quetelet pulls back from his optimistic view about civilization to note the inaccuracy of many mortality statistics but nonetheless reaffirms that progress has occurred in major cities. Quetelet's conclusion is perfectly equivocal: "I repeat that I am far from giving my belief to the prosperous state which these figures seem to point out. However, we cannot but be inclined to admit that deaths have diminished with the development of civilisation and affluence."
Quetelet, like Villermé, was both appalled by the high mortality among the poor revealed by contemporary research and conscious that in the past conditions had been even worse. A positive judgment about the present would seem insensitive, but a negative one would be ahistorical. The liberal principles shared by Villermé and Quetelet led them to argue that individual effort rather than state intervention was the key to progress, but their research pulled them in the opposite direction. The ambivalence of these early demographers was commented on by socialists such as Eugène Buret, who noted in 1840 that "M. Villermé ... drifts indecisively between optimism and those ideas that have inspired our own work," by which he meant a commitment to dramatic social reforms as the way to correct the problems of inequality. Villermé's capacity to resist such a program testifies to the strength of his conviction that modern society was progressing despite the obvious misery that resulted from the growth of cities and the beginnings of industrialization.
French concern with urban mortality continued in the second half of the nineteenth century, but at this point the evidence of the dangers of city living began to be challenged more aggressively. In 1869 officials of the Second Empire, proud of Georges-Eugène Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris, claimed that mortality in the capital was no longer higher than in the countryside. By the 1870s, the article "Mortalité" published in the Grand Dictionnaire of Larousse argued that it was difficult to determine whether or not mortality was higher in urban areas: "Although the air is purer in the countryside, and agricultural labor more favorable to health, the superior quality of food and the greater availability of medical help when ill reestablish an equilibrium to the advantage of cities." In an article published in 1893 that reviewed the debate of the previous twenty-five years Gustave Lagneau argued that Paris remained relatively dangerous, but his work acknowledged that measures of public hygiene had provided the opposition with evidence of progress in urban health.
Although cities themselves may have appeared less deadly in the later part of the century, a number of changes associated with urban and economic development continued to trouble demographers. Influenced by the work of Villermé early in the century, investigators began measuring social health through a study of mortality rates. Accidental deaths and suicides were among the indexes used, for example, by Alfred Legoyt, director of the Statistique Générale de France during the Second Empire, to judge the consequences of modern industrial civilization.
In an essay on accidental deaths Legoyt shows that these rose from fifteen per one thousand inhabitants in the period 1827–1830 to twenty-eight for the period 1836–1860. In his analysis Legoyt showed that whereas "natural" sudden deaths and drownings were declining, accidental deaths due to industrial accidents, commercial transportation, and construction were increasing. Legoyt's purpose, stated in his introduction, was not only to measure the changes that were occurring but also to suggest areas where reforms could be introduced: "If the frequency of accidental deaths is the result of a particular situation, this situation can be modified by the combined efforts of individuals and governments." Legoyt's list of potential reforms includes regulating industrial and mining establishments, requiring cities to take measures to prevent drownings, and inspecting both new and aging housing to ensure its solidity. The urban and industrial environment that had preoccupied demographers in the first half of the century was still seen as a mortal hazard, but with Legoyt the key to the problem is no longer the misery of the laboring classes but the unwillingness of private employers and the state to take effective action.
Official statistics on suicide, like those on accidental deaths, began to be collected in 1826, and as with accidents suicides were understood to be the result of social changes introduced by the modern world. As Lisa Lieberman has written, "Depending upon the perspective of the observer, suicide was explained as a consequence of industrialization and the growth of cities, of poverty and the exploitation of the working class, of decadent art and sacrilegious thought, of the erosion of the family or the rise of an overly ambitious class of citizens, the bourgeoisie." Interest in suicide seems to have intensified in the second half of the century, when it became a leading index for observing and judging a broad range of social problems.
The work of Legoyt, who contributed both an essay in his collected studies and a full-length monograph to the debate, typifies the combination of sociological and moral analysis that prevailed in discussions of suicide. Legoyt began by characterizing suicides as "déclassés" and "misérables," but his analysis went beyond this simple correlation of poverty and suicide. He noted that workers and members of the liberal professions were more likely to take their own lives than peasants, whose lives were "calmer, more regular, less vulnerable to accidents, and more influenced by religious sentiments." Legoyt proposed that the elimination of hierarchy, the increased emphasis on the individual, progress in public education, and the frequency of political and financial crises all help explain why the suicide rate was increasing more rapidly than the growth in population. Legoyt's argument can be placed within the context of the general fear of social dissolution in the nineteenth century—a position that links him to Emile Durkheim, who also used suicide rates as an indication of social malaise.
Ten years before the publication of his classic study of suicide, Durkheim had already begun to explore the links between demographic trends and social health. In "Suicide and the Birth Rate: A Study of Moral Statistics," published in the Revue philosophique of 1888, Durkheim argued that the lower birth rate that was a preoccupation during this period and the increase in suicides both resulted from the decay of "domestic sentiments" and the "cold wind of egoism" that accompanied the urbanization of modern France. In Suicide: A Study in Sociology, which first appeared in 1897, Durkheim extended his argument in a brilliant analysis that has become one of the seminal works of modern social science. Durkheim believed that the suicide rate increased as a result of social disintegration, which resulted from the loosening of the bonds of religion, family, and polity observed in France and Europe. This is not the place to submit Durkheim's analysis to extensive scrutiny, and at any rate there is no shortage of critical responses to his work. For my purposes, Durkheim's significance resides in the clarity and power with which he expressed an idea that was characteristic of nineteenth-century French demography—that statistical studies of mortality were both an instrument of social analysis and a measure of current anxieties. The fault lines that Durkheim followed in his study of suicide will appear repeatedly in my account, for changes in religious and family feeling and in the role of the state helped determine how people responded to the dead. But whereas Durkheim used suicide to indicate the dissolution of social ties, the cult of the dead can show how people worked to construct new rituals and new meanings that reflected their experiences in an increasingly urban society.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Death and the Afterlife in Modern France by Thomas A. Kselman. Copyright © 1993 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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