Louis Roussel (1921-2011)

Louis Roussel died on 26 January 2011, just before his 90th birthday. Widely acclaimed by his colleagues at INED and the University of Paris-Descartes, as well as by members of the general public who had become fervent readers of his works, Roussel was one of the first French authors to use demographic analysis to describe the evolution of family structures, thus giving family sociology - a hitherto neglected speciality - its rightful status in this country. His best-known writings were published between the mid-1970s and the late 1990s. Affable yet reserved, Louis Roussel never spoke at length about his past. It is worth tracing his career, however, which followed a remarkably coherent course. While best known for his essays on changes in the family, in which he showed great perspicacity tinted with nostalgia, he personally placed greatest emphasis on his qualification as an expert demographer: he long gave priority to observational data before feeling free to express his personal opinions about what was happening in society. Many people were surprised when this rather belated about-turn occurred in the late 1980s: Roussel had already reached the age of 68 when his best-known essay, La famille incertaine (The uncertain family), was published. For most of the Parisian sociologists in vogue at the time, this change of approach "came out of the blue". With hindsight, there is no doubt that Louis Roussel made an outstanding contribution the history of social science in France.

Louis Roussel's youth was marked by the Second World War, which forced him to interrupt his education. In 1943, he trained as a member of the resistance group called Pericles, which was set up in Haute-Savoie before moving to the Jura region. After being mobilized in October 1944, he was awarded the "Croix de Guerre" and mentioned twice in dispatches. He graduated in philosophy at the University of Aix-en-Provence in 1947, then worked for ten years as a secondary-school teacher. His real vocation lay elsewhere, however. The writings of Jean Stoetzel, Pierre George and Alfred Sauvy inspired him to pursue further university studies at the age of 35. After graduating in social psychology and political economy, he enrolled at the Sorbonne Institute of Demography and qualified as an expert demographer at the age of 40.

Louis Roussel resigned from his secondary teaching position in 1961 and joined the Société d'études pour le développement économique et social (SEDES), an organization linked to the Caisse des dépôts and the Banque française pour le commerce extérieur, forebear of today's Agence française du développement. In the wake of decolonization, SEDES was conducting market research on various third world nations, but these missions were soon replaced by more general surveys on the socioeconomic changes occurring in these countries. In this context, Roussel drafted several demographic and sociological monographs on the Côte d'Ivoire and other West African countries (see the bibliographical references). These surveys were cited for many years by French ethnologists working at organizations such as EHESS⁽¹⁾ and ORSTOM⁽²⁾ (which later became the IRD⁽³⁾), and Roussel himself made a few discreet allusions to his early findings in the works he published between 1970 and 1980.

Reading these early studies, one is struck by the fact that Roussel was already addressing the themes he was to develop later in the setting of French society. When studying the Senoufo populations of Côte d'Ivoire who began migrating in large numbers after the period of forced labour, he described the many different forms of union between the sexes, the customary practice of extremely free sexual relations prior to marriage, and the fact that couples still did not form a real decision-making unit: the husband was a sort of visitor, and a woman's children were under the authority of her brother. However, as modernization took hold, the Senoufo witnessed "the break-up of the general system of their institutions", and young people looked for a means of escape by joining the rural exodus, driven by aspirations which focused less on seeking employment...