Andre-Michel Guerry
| André-Michel Guerry | |
|---|---|
| Born | December 24, 1802 Tours |
| Died | April 9, 1866 (aged 63) Paris |
| Residence | 123 Boul. St. Michel, Paris |
| Citizenship | France |
| Alma mater | University of Poitiers |
| Known for | moral statistics |
| Notable awards | (statistics), 1833 & 1864 |
| Signature | |
André-Michel Guerry (December 24, 1802 – April 9, 1866) was a French lawyer and amateur statistician. Together with Adolphe Quetelet he may be regarded as the founder of moral statistics which led to the development of criminology, sociology and ultimately, modern social science.
Guerry was born in Tours, Indre-et-Loire, the only child of Michel Guerry, a building contractor, whose family had a long history as innkeepers, merchants, farmers and trades-people. About 1817-1820 he studied at the Imperial College of Tours (now the Lyceum Descartes, founded in 1807) and subsequently studied law at the University of Poitiers.
About 1824-1825 he moved to Paris and was admitted to the bar as a royal advocate. Shortly after, he was employed by the Ministry of Justice. Guerry worked with the data on crime statistics in France collected as part of the General office for administration of criminal justice in France, the first centralized national system of crime reporting. Guerry was so fascinated with these data, and the possibility to discover empirical regularities and laws that might govern them, that he gave up the active practice of law to devote the rest of his life to study crime and its relation to other moral variables.
Guerry's first work on what would come to be called moral statistics was a large, one page sheet containing three shaded maps of France, prepared together with the Venetian geographer, Adriano Balbi in 1829. These showed the departments of France, shaded according to crimes against persons, crimes against property, and school instruction. Such statistical maps, now called choropleth maps had just been invented in 1826 by Baron Charles Dupin.
Guerry is best known for his Essay on moral statistics of France, presented to the French Academy of Sciences on July 2, 1832 and published in 1833 after it was awarded the in statistics. His presentation, in tables and thematic maps, showed 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 varied systematically across departments of France. This regularity of social numbers created the possibility to conceive that human actions could be described by social laws, just as inanimate actions were governed by physical laws.
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