We have great respect for census enumerators, for it is a job we
could never, ever do. Tramping down a crowded street, knocking
on every door, bravely stepping over rats would bring such
discouragement and despair about the human condition that we
would forget to count the babies. As a genealogist, of course,
we are awash with gratitude that the census has been taken and
all of those babies not only counted but named. The taking of a
nation-wide census of individuals, les recensements or les
dénombrements, began in France in 1836 and has been repeated
every five years since then, except when locally fought wars
disrupted the scheduling (the Franco-Prussian War and the two
World Wars). And then there was Paris, where census-taking did
not begin before 1926. One imagines that the thought of trying
to visit all those homes, as described above, was too dreadful
for any bureaucrat to contemplate. Perhaps it was Haussmann's
ripping out of half the warreny streets and most of the medieval
city that made the Paris ce