Pierre Guillaume Frédéric le Play

Pierre Guillaume Frédéric le Play (1806 to 1882) was a French engineer, sociologist and economist. Educated at the École Polytechnique and the École des Mines, he became a mining expert and in 1840 professor of metallurgy at the École des Mines. For nearly a quarter of a century he travelled Europe collecting material on the condition of working class families, and in 1855 he published Les Ouvriers Européens, 36 monographs on the budgets of typical families, which won the Montyon prize. In 1856 he founded the Société internationale des études pratiques d'économie sociale; Napoleon III entrusted him with the organization of the Exhibition of 1855, appointed him to the Council of State and later made him a senator. In Social Reform in France (1864) he placed himself in the French Counter-Enlightenment tradition, defended Christianity, and held that strong families, home ownership and family inheritance underpin the health of a society. After 1870 he founded and directed the Unions of Social Peace. His classification of family types was taken up again in the late twentieth century by historians, ethnologists and demographers. He died in 1882.