Jean-Baptiste Moheau on the moral causes of diminished fertility

摘要

It has been said that most of the founders of demography were astronomers (viz., Halley or Quetelet) or clergymen (viz., Sussmilch or Malthus). Jean-Baptiste Moheau, the author of a treatise, published in 1778 under the title Recherches et considerations sur la population de la France, was an exception to this rule. He seems to have been an obscure bureaucrat, and left so few tracks in the record that his very existence was long in doubt. Today, however, the rough outlines of a biography have beentraced. Moheau was born in 1745, and died in 1794; he was not thirty years old when he wrote the treatise. He made no other contribution to science, and appears to have been unwilling even to make simple corrections to his text when changes were requested by the 1780 German translator of the work. (There exists no translation in English.) He was the personal secretary of Montyon, the Intendant (the equivalent of a provincial governor, delegated by the central government) of the generalite of La Rochelleon the Atlantic coast of France. There is still a controversy about Montyon's possible contribution to the work, but it appears that Montyon was not interested in population, that he was not even in residence in La Rochelle, and that Moheau as his secretary was substituting for him, taking a special interest in the collection of population statistics that were requested by the royal administration.