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Claude Marin Saugrain.
Dénombrement du royaume par generalitez, elections, paroisses et feux.
Paris: Chez Claude Saugrain, 1709.
Acquired through the Andrew B. Hammond Fund.
Claude Saugrain was a Parisian bookseller who sensed a market among financiers and merchants for a work detailing the demographics of France. In 1709 he published this Dénombrement, based on the lost 1694 census conducted by the controller of finances, Louis Phelypeaux, comte de Pontchartrain, and on the Mémoires of the intendants that had been gathered under his term of office in the late seventeenth century. Compiled between 1697 and 1699, these Mémoires serve as the basis of all early eighteenth-century French population studies, and form a unique collection of material on France. Saugrain's Dénombrement divides France into regions, and then "elections" or tax-jurisdictions, and finally parishes, giving the number of hearths for each, and thus an estimate of population. Information on commerce is included, and the very organization of the data illustrates the importance of the political and financial structure of the nation, since it shows a kingdom based on the hierarchy of jurisdictions. One scholar has called this volume an example of the symbolic capital of the state; its purchasers had chosen to carry the state around in book-form.
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