The life and works of André-Michel Guerry, revisited

Abstract

André-Michel Guerry was born and raised in Tours in a family whose touraine roots go back at least to the early 1600 s. He can be considered one of the founders of the empirical study of criminology and modern social science. His accomplishments were honored in his lifetime, yet he remains largely unrecognized and under-appreciated today, both in history and in his native city. This article traces his life and the contributions he made to social science, thematic cartography and statistical graphics. Moreover, we provide an account of his family background and genealogy. The present article is an expanded update to one written 15 years ago and includes some commentary on the priority dispute between Quetelet and Guerry.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Kevin Breault for suggesting a revision of my earlier paper on Guerry and for his generous comments and encouragement throughout this process. For the details of Guerry’s life, I am immensely indebted to Jacques Borowczyk, without whose active collaboration and extensive historical research this article could not have been conceived, no less written. I am also grateful to Gilles Palsky, who initiated my interest in Guerry and to Antoine de Falguerolles who has been a constant companion in this historical research. Further, Christopher Green and Howard Wainer and an anonymous reviewer provided helpful comments on the initial draft.

Supplementary materials

An associated web site, https://www.datavis.ca/papers/guerryvie, provides ready access to source materials on Guerry’s work and early papers by Quetelet, with some English translations.

Notes

1 Diard (1867:8): « Il était enfant de la Touraine, et tous ses condisciples ont gardé le souvenir des habitudes sérieuses de sa jeunesse. Son goût pour la statistique s’est manifesté sur les bancs de l'école. »

2 The similarity of their names has caused some writers to conclude that Guerry and Guerry de Champneuf were related, but this is now known to be an error (Whitt 2002:xxii).

3 Guerry (1864, p5) says the machine was offered by Guerry’s heirs to the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris. Friendly and de Saint Agathe (2012) trace the history of this device, which unfortunately vanished during renovations, sometime before 1988.

4 The details are described at https://moserm.free.fr/beaumont/bio3.html. Among Guerry’s Beaumont neighbors, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote "Democracy in America" in 1833.

5 See: https://moserm.free.fr/beaumont/acte3.html. A transcription and English translation appears at https://datavis.ca/papers/Guerry-death-notice.pdf.

6 Translated and illustrated by R. J. Andrews, https://infowetrust.com/project/minard1861

7 See https://datavis.ca/gallery/images/guerry/guerry-balbi-600s.jpg for a higher- resolution version.

8 Dupin (1827) used this to illustrate the effects of popular education on France’s prosperity, by shading each department lighter in proportion to the number of young people who attended schools.

9 The data on crime were combined with data from the census to give measures of population per crime; the data on instruction were based on the number of male children in primary schools, also in the form of inhabitants per student.

10 This distinction and the coined phrase were first noted by Conrad Malte-Brun in 1823 from inspection of Balbi’s (1821) tables, Journal des Débats, 21 Jul 1823, p. 3–4.

11 One digital copy is available from the University of Marburg, https://bit.ly/38W6dud

12 The overall level of darkness in these two maps should not be taken as evidence that personal crime was much greater in France than in England. The difference is more accounted for by the quality of the scans of these images.

13 “libration” is an astronomical term, referring to a real or apparent oscillatory motion, especially of the moon. Guerry uses this here in a poetic sense to refer to the ups and downs, waxing and waning of the various crimes he is charting.

14 In this formula, X should be in radians, so the term is sin(age * π/180). See https://rpubs.com/friendly/propensity for an exploration of Quetelet’s data and the fitted curve.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science and Engineering Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Michael Friendly

Michael Friendly is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, Professor of Psychology and coordinator of the Statistical Consulting Service at York University, and an associate editor of the Journal of Graphical and Computational Statistics. He received his Ph.D. in psychometrics and cognitive psychology from Princeton University. His current research work includes the development of graphical methods for data visualization (where he is a principal innovator of novel methods for visualizing categorical and multivariate data), and the history of data visualization, where he is a world leader. In the latter, he directs the Milestones Project, a comprehensive catalog and database of the principal developments in the histories of thematic cartography, statistical graphics and data visualization. He is author of multiple books and numerous research papers on these topics. His current book, published by Harvard University Press in 2021, is titled, A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication.