The Three Main Western Revolutions and Their Censuses

Abstract

This article considers national censuses in the US, France, and Russia based on new principles and held after their respective revolutions. The authors aim to find out to what extent the authorities succeeded in following enumeration procedures based on international regulations. It is demonstrated that a census is a dialectical process involving the state and the population, requiring reciprocal trust. France had no experience of organising censuses with the exception of those in the country's American colonies. The gentry wanted to keep control over their lands and would not share information about their population with the central authorities. In postrevolutionary France, the census held during the Jacobin terror was not entirely successful, with the state bureaucracy not being strong enough to organise a coherent census and different revolutionary committees taking uncoordinated measures to register the population. The US, however, had had a number of censuses organised by the British prior to the War of Independence. The first census in the United States was held in 1790 in compliance with the Constitution. As a result, the US has held censuses at decadal intervals ever since, but it faced a number of problems for a considerable amount of time, especially concerning the registering of racial minorities. Russia was at an advantage in that respect since it held the first all-Russian census in * The research is sponsored by the Russian Science Foundation grant (project 16-18-10105).

Mixed Marriages in Late Nineteenth to Early Twentieth Century: Comparing Russia and Norway

“…Due to lack of resources, foreign interventions, and civil war, it could never cover the whole territory. 13 Ekaterinburg, however, managed to register its population, reflecting the general population decline and the changes in the ethnic composition of the city caused by the civil war. There was no question about religion, but we use ethnic markers to distinguish religious identity, for they were closely related.…”

Bottom‐up Nation‐building: National Censuses and Local Administration in Nineteenth‐Century Spain

“…146–152) also highlights the important role of local administration in the development of public administration in the West during the nineteenth century. Besides, as recent studies on the subject have shown, censuses cannot be considered a state enterprise separate from society, an imposition by central government, rather they require the collaboration of the various local authorities, of the elites and worthies, as well as of people representing each community (Emigh et al., 2016b; Thorvaldsen & Glavatskaya, 2017). In short, the creation of censuses in Mallorca during the second half of the nineteenth century was another form of bottom‐up nation‐building.…”

“…Staff with no training in statistics, politicians and local civil servants, the clergy and the local elites still played an outstanding role, as was also the case in neighbouring countries. This kind of local organization, together with the importance of local authorities in carrying out censuses, has been seen in the United Kingdom, Italy, the United States, and also in France and Russia (Emigh et al., 2016b; Thorvaldsen & Glavatskaya, 2017).…”

“…However, new studies have appeared recently which question its exclusivity as the only actor capable of gathering official information and show how the acceptance and collaboration of other social agents was required. It is argued that mutual trust between the State and the population is necessary for this type of enterprise (Emigh et al., 2016a; Slack, 2004; Thorvaldsen, 2018; Thorvaldsen & Glavatskaya, 2017). Regional and municipal authorities were key to explaining the increase in the administrative capacity of states during the nineteenth century and, by derivation, the compilation of statistics.…”

The Ural Population Project. Demography and Culture From Microdata in a European-Asian Border Region

“…Attempts to register the population in order to arrange an efficient food supply were made by Russian municipalities in 1916 and 1917. However, these and the Bolshevik attempt to take a census in 1920 partly failed, due to lack of resources during the turbulences of the foreign interventions and civil war (Thorvaldsen & Glavatskaya, 2017). Source: Andreev and Andreev (n.d.), Thorvaldsen (2018).…”