Statistical Interlude (Halbwachs 1913; Maupassant 1889)

In 1913, French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs was already putting his fingers on the fact that the distribution of mortality in a population could be understood as an indicator of whose social existence is fostered and whose is not. Lives are not just lived but administered. Going against the statistical model developed by Adolphe Quetelet, Halbwachs assigned a social systematicity to the frequency of variations. It means that statistics are not solely descriptive. They too tell a story. For Maupassant, this is more than a figure of speech but the premise of his short story “L’Endormeuse” (1889).