Certaines statistiques sont développées dans un mouvement cohérent qui inclut à la fois objectifs de gestion administrative, projet politique et projet intellectuel. Ce fut le cas en particulier de la statistique de la justice criminelle qui se développa en France dès les années 1820 et évolua avec la criminologie et la politique pénitentiaire tout au long du XIXème siècle. Nous étudions la statistique officielle de la justice civile et commerciale, en particulier sa partie consacrée aux faillites, et montrons que bien que de bonne qualité techniquement, cette statistique déclina parce qu'aucun usage réel n'en fut fait : son usage à des fins de gestion administrative fut rapidement remis en cause, probablement non sans lien avec l'absence de véritable usage politique (c'est-à-dire législatif), lui-même affaibli par l'absence de théories économiques ou sociologiques capables d'utiliser efficacement ces statistiques pour expliquer des phénomènes économiques ou sociaux significatifs.###[english_abstract: Some statistics are developed within a consistent intellectual, political and administrative project, as was the case of criminal statistics which appeared and developed with criminology during the XIXth century, particularly in France and Belgium. We examine the official statistics of civil and commercial justice, and particularly those of bankruptcy, which were created by the same administration as the criminal statistics in the same period (in the 1830s). We show that the statistics were well done, but that they were unable to attract users in spite of an early use by the justice administration as a management device. Neither members of Parliament nor social scientists used them, probably because they weren't developed in order to answer adequate questions that would have been embedded in a clear and developing scientific framework. This led to a decline of these statistics, in spite of the fact the data they contained provide interesting insights on XIXth century's society and economy.]###
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Paper provided by PSE (Ecole normale supérieure) in its series PSE Working Papers with number
2008-30.