Institut national d'études démographiques

In 1941, Nobel Prize winner Alexis Carrel, an early proponent of eugenics and euthanasia, and a member of Jacques Doriot's French Popular Party (PPF), advocated for the creation of the French Foundation for the Study of Human Problems (Fondation Française pour l'Étude des Problèmes Humains), using connections to the Pétain cabinet.

Charged with the "study, in all of its aspects, of measures aimed at safeguarding, improving and developing the French population in all of its activities", the Foundation was created by decree of the collaborationist Vichy regime in 1941, and Carrel appointed as 'regent'.

[clarification needed] The Foundation was behind the 16 December 1942 Act mandating the "prenuptial certificate", which required all couples seeking marriage to submit to a biological examination, to insure the "good health" of the spouses, in particular with regard to sexually transmitted diseases (STD) and "life hygiene".

Carrel's institute also conceived the "scholar booklet" ("livret scolaire"), which could be used to record students' grades in French secondary schools, and thus classify and select them according to scholastic performance.

Besides these eugenic activities aimed at classifying the population and improving its health, the Foundation also supported the 11 October 1946 law instituting occupational medicine, enacted by the Provisional Government of the French Republic (GPRF) after the Liberation.

By way of comparison, the whole Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) was given a budget of fifty million francs.

Since the early 1930s, Carrel had advocated the use of gas chambers to rid humanity of its "inferior stock", and endorsed scientific racism discourse.

It was created on the initiative of the eminent paediatrician Robert Debré (1882-1978), who had submitted a report on the institutionalization of demography to the Comité français de la Libération nationale d'Alger in January 1944.

To head the institute, General Charles de Gaulle appointed the statistician and economist Alfred Sauvy who, as advisor to the President of the Council, Paul Reynaud, had drafted the French government's first pro-natalist measures in 1938.

INED moved into the premises of the Fondation française pour l'étude des problèmes humains headed by Dr Alexis Carrel, and employed around 7% of the foundation's personnel, which counted only a handful of demographers.

But before long, INED was asked to study the consequences of the baby boom and its effect on housing, school enrolment, employment, infant and maternal mortality.

A second generation of INED researchers joined the institute in 1965, some from the Ecole Polytéchnique (Daniel Courgeau, Henri Leridon, Hervé Le Bras) and others from wide-ranging backgrounds (Jacques Vallin, Georges Tapinos [1940-2000], Patrick Festy, Chantal Blayo, Jean-Claude Chesnais).

Since 2000, INED has hosted the world headquarters of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP), of which it is a member along with other national demographic research organizations.

Its researchers have very diverse fields of expertise, including sociology, economics, geography, history, political science, public health and statistics.