Durkheim's Suicide of 1897 was the masterpiece of nineteenth-century statistical sociology. The choice of the most morbid of behaviours was no accident: there were mountains of suicide data upon which Durkheim could build. They came from the French fascination with deviants, especially those who were degenerate or could not contribute to the growth of the French population.

Durkheim invented his idea of anomie, of social and moral decline, of alienation or disintegration, in the context of suicide. That was his measure of communal pathology. In this way a medical notion (pathology) was transferred to the body politic on the back of statistics. As my epigraph illustrates, the connection between suicide and anomie was fixed much earlier. This little salvo fired in 1815 at the demoralized French — the French whose morals had been destroyed by revolution and Napoleon — inaugurates numerical sociology. I do not mean that suicides had not been counted before. The extraordinary records of suicide in Geneva from 1650 to 1798 have been carefully studied, and there are doubtless many more, in Switzerland alone, of comparable precision.