Cole has produced a work of impressive scholarship. He has synthesized a vast array of material to produce a book that is worth reading by anyone with an interest in the human sciences or French history in the nineteenth century.
- J. Rosser Matthews, University of Wisconsin—Madison (Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences) This book does not fit into an easily definable category: its auther cuts across different subfields and problematics—the history of statistics and family policy, in particular—to examine the way in which population studies, politics, and gender ideology intersected and interacted in nineteenth-century France.... In his close reading of texts of French demography and statistics, Cole shows a great deal of skill and perception.... He is convincing in arguing that we must pay attention to the contribution that quantitative population research made to the gendered articulation of new ideas of collective interests and social responsibility.
- Silvana Patriarca, Fordham University (Journal of Modern History) Cole's exploration... is broadly cast.... An informative and thought-provoking addition to our knowledge of nineteenth-century France.
- Dora Dumont, SUNY Oneonta (History) Cole's superb cultural study... is eloquently written, meticulously researched, with comprehensive bibliography and informed graphs.... His humanization of French demography is a model study for social, cultural, and gender studies and especially French 19th-century history.
(Choice) This book functions at different levels: it is a clear narrative of the history of statistics,... it is an interesting approach to the cultural history of the science of the population in the nineteenth century, and it is a fresh approach to familiar issues using the governmentality literature developed over the past twenty years to explain how this science attempts to be a tool to understand groups and aggregates and defend individual rights. Furthermore it is a good read.
- Bertrand Taithe, University of Manchester (French History)
