ABSTRACT
With the Revolution, France was flooded with census questionnaires, although resulting in no high quality census when several revolutionary committees tried to take its own census independently. Progressive Danish bureaucrats organized the first full-count numeric census in 1769 and the nominative census of the Danish homeland in 1787. The radical coup in the Danish Kingdom, the revolution in France and the ending of British supremacy in America concentrated enough power in Copenhagen, Paris and Washington to control census taking throughout their countries – regional and local interests could no longer block it. The census organized in the Danish realm in 1801 was the first nominative census for an entire nation state. This can be included among proper censuses even if taken before Quetelet worked out his standard in Belgium from the 1830s. The census taken in Britain in 1801 was only numeric, but still a breakthrough signalling the end of the gentry’s age-long political blocking of central censuses. The US primarily took censuses to monitor the electorate as an integral part of the democracy introduced after the Revolution.
