The powerhouse of the statistical movement was Adolphe Quetelet, the greatest regularity salesman of the nineteenth century. As soon as Parisian judicial statistics were published he noticed ‘the terrifying exactitude with which crimes reproduce themselves’. The number of criminals is constant; the relative proportions of different sorts of crime remains the same. ‘We know in advance how many individuals will dirty their hands with the blood of others, how many will be forgers, how many poisoners, nearly as well as one can enumerate in advance the births and deaths that must take place.’ He described the phenomenon as a ‘kind of budget for the scaffold, the galleys and the prisons, achieved by the French nation with greater regularity, without doubt, than the financial budget’.