Pierre Guillaume Frédéric le Play

The son of a custom-house official, Le Play was educated at the École Polytechnique and the École des Mines.[1] In 1834, he was appointed chairman of the permanent committee of mining statistics. In 1840, he became engineer-in-chief and professor of metallurgy at the École des Mines, where he became inspector in 1848.

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, 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, 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.

Napoleon III, who held him in high esteem, entrusted him with the organization of the Exhibition of 1855, and appointed him counsellor of state, commissioner general of the Exhibition of 1867, senator of the empire and Grand Officer of the Légion d'honneur.

Initially an atheist, Le Play gradually became convinced of the need for religion. In 1864, he published an essay defending Christianity against Darwinism and Scepticism.[2] He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1879, three years before his death. Blum (2004) included Le Play in his anthology of French counter-revolutionary thinkers.

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" became a new field of interest in social science. In Britain, Peter Laslett 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.[3]

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.[4] 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.[5] In a 1989 book which became a reference in its field,[6] ethnologist Georges Augustins reshaped Le Play's family types classification.[7]

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,[8] particularly Paul Lazarsfeld, Antoine Savoye and Bernard Kalaora.[9]

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, ...).[10]

• (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.

• 
  Statue of Frédéric Le Play, by André-Joseph Allar, at the Jardin du Luxembourg (Paris, 1906).
• 
  Le Play, by L. Rousseau, 1879.
• 
  Bust of Frédéric Le Play, by Chapu, 1869.

• 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.
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Le Play, Pierre Guillaume Frédéric". Encyclopædia Britannica. 16 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 479.

• Beaver, S. H. (1962). "The Le Play Society and Field Work," Geography 47 (3), pp. 225–240.
• Beum, Robert (1997). "Ultra-Royalism Revisited," Modern Age 39 (3), pp. 290–322.
• Healy, Mary Edward (1947). "Le Play's Contribution to Sociology: His Method," The American Catholic Sociological Review 8 (2), pp. 97–110.
• Herbertson, Dorothy (1920). "Le Play and Social Science," The Sociological Review 12 (2), pp. 108–110.
• Higgs, Henry (1890). "Frédéric Le Play," The Quarterly Journal of Economics 4 (4), pp. 408–433.
• Pitt, Alan (1998). "Frédéric Le Play and the Family: Paternalism and Freedom in the French Debates of the 1870s," French History 12 (1), pp. 67–89.
• Rousiers, Paul De (1894). "La Science Sociale," Annals of American Academy of Political and Social Science 4 (4), pp. 128–154.
• Sorokin, Pitirim A. (1928). "Frederic Le Play's School." In: Contemporary Sociological Theories, New York: Harper, pp. 63–98.
• Swinny, S. H. (1921). "The Sociological Schools of Comte and Le Play," The Sociological Review 13 (2), pp. 68–74.
• Zimmerman, Carle Clark (1935). "Le Play Theories." In: Family and Society. New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., p. 71.

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• Reforming Vision: The Engineer Le Play Learns to Observe Society Sagely