André-Michel Guerry presents his Essay on moral…

André-Michel Guerry presents his Essay on moral statistics of France to the French Academy of Sciences on July 2, 1832, a significant step in the founding of empirical social science.

Published in 1833 after it had been awarded the Prix Montyon in statistics, his presentation, in tables and thematic maps, shows that rates of crime and suicide remained remarkably stable over time, when broken down by age, sex, region of France and even season of the year.

Yet, these numbers also vary systematically across departments of France.

This regularity of social numbers creates the possibility to conceive that human actions can be described by social laws, just as inanimate actions are governed by physical laws.