The self-important statisticians with their ponderous tables were figures of fun. Thus Célestine Magis, secretary of the Statistical Society of Vierzon. A little later, in a play that ran at the Palais Royal, a statistician tried to find the number of married people per kilometre in his département. Result: 16½ married men, and 17¾ married women. Bad jokes abounded. We have seen that Balzac, in the era of enthusiasm for statistics, came to take them seriously. What began as a parody, the ‘conjugal statistics’ of The Physiology of Marriage, became a reflection on the very nature of classifying human beings. That was 1829. An era of optimism about the possible uses of statistics ended in 1848, prompting many kinds of backlash.

One was political. The statisticians were typically advocates of liberal utilitarian reform. People who had no truck with their philosophy, or with its pretensions to resolving current social issues, held them in contempt slightly mingled with fear. The numbers, to use Poisson's prescient words, did strip human beings of their individuality. The utilitarians, seemingly so concerned with the welfare of humanity, became, like Dickens's Gradgrind, indifferent to people. Ephemera such as Captain Tic spoke for a less reflective version of this resentment.