Pierre Guillaume Frédéric le Play (; April 11, 1806 – April 5, 1882) was a French engineer, sociologist and economist.

Life

The son of a custom-house official, Le Play was educated at the

École Polytechnique (, ; also known as Polytechnique or l'X ) is a ''grande école'' located in Palaiseau, France. It specializes in science and engineering and is a founding member of the Polytechnic Institute of Paris. The school was founded in 1794 by mat ...

and the École des Mines. He took an interest in sociological questions even as a young man at the École des Mines, befriending a follower of the socialist thinker Saint-Simon. In the late 1820s, Le Play undertook an immense walking tour of Germany investigating its mines. In 1830, a laboratory accident seriously damaged Le Play's left hand and left him disabled for life. While he was recovering in Paris, he was a witness to the events of the

July Revolution The French Revolution of 1830, also known as the July Revolution (), Second French Revolution, or ("Three Glorious ays), was a second French Revolution after French Revolution, the first of 1789–99. It led to the overthrow of King Cha ...

, and thereafter resolved himself to studying the issues that plagued French society. In 1834, he was appointed chairman of the permanent committee of mining statistics. He spent the remainder of the 1830s traveling the backroads of Europe as a mining expert, and conducting empirical studies on the state of mines and their workers. In 1840, he became engineer-in-chief and professor of

metallurgy Metallurgy is a domain of materials science and engineering that studies the physical and chemical behavior of metallic elements, their inter-metallic compounds, and their mixtures, which are known as alloys. Metallurgy encompasses both the ...

at the École des Mines, and was made inspector in 1848. In the 1840s he also became the manager of a mining company in the

Ural Mountains The Ural Mountains ( ),; , ; , or simply the Urals, are a mountain range in Eurasia that runs north–south mostly through Russia, from the coast of the Arctic Ocean to the river Ural (river), Ural and northwestern Kazakhstan.

. During this time he also met with many of France's leading thinkers and politicians, including Félix Dupanloup, Alphonse de Lamartine, Charles Montalembert,

Adolphe Thiers Marie Joseph Louis Adolphe Thiers ( ; ; 15 April 17973 September 1877) was a French statesman and historian who served as President of France from 1871 to 1873. He was the second elected president and the first of the Third French Republic. Thi ...

, and

Alexis de Tocqueville Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville (29 July 180516 April 1859), was a French Aristocracy (class), aristocrat, diplomat, political philosopher, and historian. He is best known for his works ''Democracy in America'' (appearing in t ...

, to discuss social issues. For nearly a quarter of a century Le Play travelled around Europe, collecting a vast amount of material bearing on the social and economic condition of the working classes. In 1855, he published ''Les Ouvriers Européens'' (''The European Workers''), a series of 36 monographs on the budgets of typical families selected from a wide range of industries. This work was crowned with the Montyon prize conferred by the Académie des Sciences. In 1856, Le Play founded the ''Société internationale des études pratiques d'économie sociale'' (''International Society for Practical Studies of Social Economy''), which has devoted its energies principally to forwarding social studies on the lines laid down by its founder. The journal of the society, ''La Réforme Sociale'', founded in 1881, is published fortnightly. Emperor Napoleon III, who had met Le Play in Russia during his travels across Europe in the 1840s and held him in high esteem, entrusted him with the organization of the Exhibition of 1855. The following year Napoleon III appointed Le Play to the Council of State, the legislative assembly of the

Second French Empire The Second French Empire, officially the French Empire, was the government of France from 1852 to 1870. It was established on 2 December 1852 by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, president of France under the French Second Republic, who proclaimed hi ...

, where his official duties included overseeing numerous industries. He was made commissioner general of the Exhibition of 1867, senator of the empire and Grand Officer of the Légion d'honneur. At the prompting of the Emperor, Le Play published his recommendations for improving French society in his work ''Social Reform in France'' (1864). Initially an atheist, Le Play gradually became convinced of the need for religion. In the essay he defended Christianity against

Darwinism ''Darwinism'' is a term used to describe a theory of biological evolution developed by the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and others. The theory states that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural sel ...

scepticism Skepticism ( US) or scepticism ( UK) is a questioning attitude or doubt toward knowledge claims that are seen as mere belief or dogma. For example, if a person is skeptical about claims made by their government about an ongoing war then the pe ...

, and

racialism Scientific racism, sometimes termed biological racism, is the pseudoscientific belief that the human species is divided into biologically distinct taxa called " races", and that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racial discri ...

. After the

Franco-Prussian War The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the War of 1870, was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the North German Confederation led by the Kingdom of Prussia. Lasting from 19 July 1870 to 28 Janua ...

and the fall of the Second Empire in 1870, he founded and directed the Unions of Social Peace, an organization composed of study circles of leading men dedicated to healing France's political and social divisions. He converted to

Roman Catholicism The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the List of Christian denominations by number of members, largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics Catholic Church by country, worldwid ...

in 1879, three years before his death.

Thought

Le Play's essay, ''Social Reform in France'', expounds the basis of his thinking and provides his recommendations to heal the divisions within French society. Le Play situated himself within the French Counter-Enlightenment and

Counter-Revolutionary A counter-revolutionary or an anti-revolutionary is anyone who opposes or resists a revolution, particularly one who acts after a revolution has occurred, in order to try to overturn it or reverse its course, in full or in part. The adjective "c ...

tradition by criticising many of the social trends that were the result of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Le Play was critical of the Enlightenment idea that man was by nature good, and that moral

progress Progress is movement towards a perceived refined, improved, or otherwise desired state. It is central to the philosophy of progressivism, which interprets progress as the set of advancements in technology, science, and social organization effic ...

inevitably followed from material progress. He also opposed theories of political and racial

determinism Determinism is the Metaphysics, metaphysical view that all events within the universe (or multiverse) can occur only in one possible way. Deterministic theories throughout the history of philosophy have developed from diverse and sometimes ov ...

. He believed that societies, like human beings, are truly free, and that a society that uses its capacities to overcome the human propensity for evil would flourish and those that did not would decay. He looked to the past to glean examples of how this could be done, and he especially held up the

Middle Ages In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and ...

as the exemplar for social relations. For this reason he opposed the French Revolution's uncritical rejection of the past, especially France's Christian past. Le Play also believed strong families played a key role in the health of a society, and he placed particular emphasis on the role of mothers and women. ''Social Reform in France'' makes two key points about the family: the first is that social progress is tied to support for

homeownership Owner-occupancy or home-ownership is a form of housing tenure in which a person, called the owner-occupier, owner-occupant, or home owner, owns the home in which they live. The home can be a house, such as a single-family house, an apartment, c ...

and family inheritance. Like Louis de Bonald before him, Le Play opposed partitive inheritance and held the agricultural family as the ideal. His second key point was that women are the driving force of social and moral progress in any society.

Legacy

Le Play's work was further developed by his many disciples: Adolphe Focillon (1823–1890), Émile Cheysson (1836–1910), Alexis Delaire (1836–1915), Henri de Tourville (1842–1903), Claudio Jannet (1844–1894), Edmond Demolins (1852–1907), Paul de Rousiers (1857–1934), Gabriel Olphe-Galliard (1870–1947), the Belgian Victor Brants (1854–1917) and the Canadian Léon Gérin. After an eclipse between the 1940s and the 1960s Le Play's methods resurfaced when the "

history of the family The history of the family is a branch of social history that concerns the sociocultural evolution of kinship groups from prehistoric to modern times.Hareven 1991, p. 95. The family has a universal and basic role in all societies. Research on the ...

" became a new field of interest in social science. In Britain,

Peter Laslett Thomas Peter Ruffell Laslett (18 December 1915 – 8 November 2001) was an English historian. Biography Laslett was the son of a Baptist minister and was born in Bedford on 18 December 1915. Although he spent much of his childhood in Oxford, h ...

who worked within the ''Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure'' used le Play's methods at the end of the 1960s to study family structures from census and property transmission data, describing particularly the nuclear family structure which Le Play had not worked on. At about the same time in France, legal history academics working on customary law were the first to re-apply Le Play's methods in scientific research. In the early 1970s, a growing number of ethnologists and historians joined this trend, especially those within the historical anthropology school: André Burguière, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. In a 1989 book which became a reference in its field, ethnologist Georges Augustins reshaped Le Play's family types classification. Some sociologists rediscovered Le Play's work as well from the late 1960s on, overcoming the general opinion that Le Play's views were just overly conservative, particularly

Paul Lazarsfeld Paul Felix Lazarsfeld (February 13, 1901August 30, 1976) was an Austrian-American sociologist and mathematician. The founder of Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research, he exerted influence over the techniques and the organizat ...

, Antoine Savoye and Bernard Kalaora. At the end of the 1970s historian and demographer Emmanuel Todd, a disciple of both Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Peter Laslett, was struck by the geographical similarity between the area of prevalence of the communitarian family system (patriarcal family in Le Play's words) and the regions where communism had become dominant in the 20th century. He reprocessed Le Play's study of family structures and published a number of widely publicised books establishing a link between traditional family structures and the great ideological and society movements in European history (religious and political choices, economic development, ...).La troisième planète (1983, translated into English in 1985 as: Explanation of Ideology: Family Structure & Social System); L’Enfance du monde (1984, translated into English in 1987 as: The causes of progress: culture, authority, and change); L’Invention de l’Europe (1990); Le Destin des immigrés (1994).

Gallery

File:Frédéric le Play Luxembourg.jpg, Statue of Frédéric Le Play, by André-Joseph Allar, at the

Jardin du Luxembourg The Jardin du Luxembourg (), known in English as the Luxembourg Garden, colloquially referred to as the Jardin du Sénat (Senate Garden), is located in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, France. The creation of the garden began in 1612 when Mar ...

(Paris, 1906). File:F. Le Play.jpg, Le Play, by L. Rousseau, 1879. File:Bust of Frederic Le Play.jpg, Bust of Frédéric Le Play, by Chapu, 1869.

Works

* (1843
"Sur la Fabrication de l’ Acier en Yorkshire"
''Annale des Mines'', 4e série, Tome III, pp. 195ff. (bound with the following:) * (1846
''Mémoire sur la fabrication, le commerce et l'emploi des fers à acier du Nord de l'Europe''
* (1864). ''La Réforme Sociale''. * (1871). ''L'Organisation de la Famille''. * (1875). ''La Constitution de l'Angleterre''. (in collaboration with M. Delaire) In English translation * (1872)
''The Organization of Labor in Accordance With Custom and the Law of the Decalogue.''
Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger. * (1962)
"Household Economy."
In: Parsons, Talcott ''et al.'', editors, ''Theories of Society.'' The Free Press of Glencoe, Inc. * (1982). ''Frederic Le Play on Family, Work, and Social Change''. Silver, Catherine Bodard, editor and translator, University of Chicago Press. * (2004). "Social Reform in France." In: Blum, Christopher Olaf, editor and translator, ''Critics of the Enlightenment''. Wilmington DE: ISI Books, pp. 197–258. * (2020). "Social Reform in France." In: Blum, Christopher O., editor and translator, ''Critics of the Enlightenment''. Providence RI: Cluny Media, pp. 103–149.

Notes

Sources

* Brooke, Michael Z. (1970). ''Le Play, Engineer and Social Scientist: The Life and Work of Frederic Le Play''. Harlow UK: Longmans. * Herbertson, Fanny Louisa Dorothea (1950). ''The Life of Frédéric Le Play,'' Ledbury, Herefordshire: Le Play House Press. *

External links

Reforming Vision: The Engineer Le Play Learns to Observe Society Sagely
{{DEFAULTSORT:Le Play, Pierre Guillaume Frederic École Polytechnique alumni Mines Paris - PSL alumni Corps des mines 1806 births 1882 deaths French economists French engineers French Roman Catholics French sociologists French male non-fiction writers Counter-Enlightenment