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*3 Organizations of workers in France concerned with care of the unemployed, sick, etc., but often functioning as nascent labor unions
(which were illegal until 1884).—Ed.
10 “The progress of poverty is parallel and adequate to the progress of wealth,” Proudhon used to say, only to contradict himself a
moment later.
14 The Origins and Functions of Elites 1899
*1 From Les Transformations du pouvoir (Paris: Alcan, 1899), pp. 70–78.
*2 Those citizens of the Roman Empire living in Rome itself.—Ed.
1 Innovations destined to become the most widespread are like plants brought in from outside; they need to become acclimated at first
in a restricted culture in a hothouse or a small enclosure. Every civilization has begun thus, by flourishing in a garden before germinating
in open earth. I have said in my Laws of Imitation that even that innovation which consists of admitting the equality of members of a
society is not exempt from this law, and that, like most other styles, it owes its first steps to the example set by an aristocracy. And in fact
it was among the highest nobility, peers in England and courtiers in France, that the habit of treating one another as equals became daily
practice. Whatever their diversity of origin and rank, the English peerage equated all who achieved it. Court life was the same. Of it one
could say, as Cicero did of friendship, pares aut facit aut invenit [“it either makes equals or finds them”]. It was of just this that Saint-
Simon complained when, for the ducal rank of which he was a member, he so arrogantly claimed a prerogative of superior consideration
and deference, which he saw slighted more and more around him. For the gradual assimilation produced by the intensity of court
relationships was inevitably accompanied by a gradual equalization. Later the salons continued and generalized this assimilative and
equalizing movement. The various levels of English society evidenced a similar movement to equalize each one despite the distance
separating them from one another, a distance which changed a good deal from one period to another, sometimes diminishing, sometimes
growing.
2 Without being the least inclined to abuse biological comparisons, I may add that perhaps in the animate world as well the creation of
a new species requires a concurrence of unique and local circumstances that are reproduced at infrequent intervals (which explains why
we never see them), whereas the habitual circumstances are well suited to the propagation of extant species.
3 Among the faults from which the “honnête homme” is exempt, the Chevalier du Méri lists, besides “injustice, vanity, avarice,
ingratitude, baseness, bad taste, an air of the law courts or the bourgeoisie, laziness, etc., and behavior which is too attached to custom
and [which] sees nothing better.” Which proves that even in his time [the seventeenth century], the aristocracy—of which
“l’honnêtêté” was the purest expression—was thought of as the class most open to innovations.
4 See Laws of Imitation pp. 225–33 of the second [English] edition, and Penal Philosophy, the chapter on crime, sec. 2.
5 According to him, the patrician families were those who alone had “the power to create gods, to institute a cult, to invent the hymn
and the rhythm of prayer.” Agreed, but if that were the true and unique cause of the patriciate, how could it be that the lesser families
who were incapable of inventing a cult (an invention moreover, which probably not all the patrician families had a hand in) did not dream
of ennobling themselves by imitating the patrician families, something which would have been very easy? Is there not cause to think that,
having had fetishes originally like all savage families, the plebeian family lost theirs, eclipsed as they were by the strikingly superior
domestic gods of the patrician families? Where then did this striking superiority come from?
6 In antiquity we find the two nobilities almost mingled, but in Greece and Rome we see exclusively sacerdotal families.
*3 The noblesse d’épée or nobility of the sword was ennobled for military services to the crown; the noblesse de robe or nobility of
the gown (referring to the robes worn by judges) were bourgeois ennobled for their legal and juridical services.—Ed.
15 Criminal Youth 1897
*1 Revue pédagogique, February 1897, reprinted in Etudes de psychologie sociale (Paris: Giard & Brière, 1898), pp. 195–204,
209–25.
[At the time this letter was written, Tarde was director of the criminal statistics section of the Ministry of Justice as well as an
established criminologist and sociologist. He was thus able to draw from unpublished statistical materials collected by the Ministry of
Justice to report the most recent figures on delinquency.
Buisson, who asked Tarde to comment, was one of the most influential men in France in reforming the educational system near the
turn of the century. An ardent republican, he gave up his chair (in pedagogy) at the Sorbonne when he entered the National Assembly.
Because of this vacancy, Durkheim was called to Paris in 1902 as a substitute for Buisson, and a few years later he was named as
permanent incumbent of the chair, the title of which was later changed to sociology.—Ed.]
1 In 1895, with only 32, there is a noticeable decrease.
2 The progression continues: in 1895 I find 90 suicides in children of this age of which 8 are 13-year-olds, 2 are 10, one is 9, and one is
8 years old.
3 In 1895 there were 474 suicides in this age group.
4 For the first time, in 1895, the figure decreased; that year there were only 9,963 [sic] suicides. But the advance continued for