Statistical Recycling of Documentary Information: Estimating Regional Variations in a Pre-Censal Population

In the process of studying the French Revolution, the authors were faced with the problem of how to use rather poor " pre-censal " data. Not only were there many different sources available, but there is little information on how they were collected, or how reliable they were. Rather than abandoning hope, or arbitrarily choosing one or another of the sources, the authors factor analyzed them, and found that there had been two main methods of collecting provincial population and estimates in eighteenth-century France. The censuses loading heavily on the most important factor turned out to be those based on counts of births. Using factor loadings to adjust each of the provincial population estimates according to the source will permit the authors to use this data with considerable confidence. The authors use this methodological discussion in order to examine broader issues of data reliability and the utility of quantitative sources in social historical work in general.