Statistician and demographer whose application of quantitative methods to the analysis of a variety of social questions led to the increased use of statistics among social scientists.
Though educated as a physician, Bertillon in the 1870s turned to statistics, publishing articles onn comparative divorce and suicide rates among nations, and in 1883 he succeeded his father, Louis-Adolphe Bertillon, as head of the Paris bureau of vital statistics (his brother Alphonse Bertillon was long the chief of criminal identification for the Paris police). Over the next 30 years, the bureau, under his direction, increased the kinds of data gathered and developed more elaborate kinds of analysis.
Bertillon worked to establish uniform international statistical standards and saw his "Bertillon classification" of causes of death come into use in a number of nations. To facilitate the collection of data in French government offices, he wrote an elementary course in administrative statistics (1895).
Increased alcoholism in France and a decline in French population growth relative to the rates in other countries were problems that particularly interested Bertillon and gave rise to several works, including L`Alcoolisme et les moyens de le cambattre jugés par l´experience (1904) and La Dépopulation de la France (1911).
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