François Simiand

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François Simiand (Grières 18 April 1873-1935) was a French sociologist and economist best known for role as a participant in the Année Sociologique.

Simiand's career was an eccentric one. Like many destined to become influential academics in France, he entered the École Normale Supérieure and agregated in philosophy at the top of his class in 1896. However, he quickly became interested in law and economics and submitted a thesis on the wages of coal miners in France (1904) to the faculty of law rather than becoming an academic. As a result, he foreclosed forever the possibility of a prominent university appointment. Thus in 1901 he became the librarian for the French Ministries of Commerce and Labor, a post he was to hold until the outbreak of World War I. From 1910 on he also began teaching Economic History at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes, an institution which did not require a doctorate from its lecturers.

It was during the end of the nineteenth century that he joined the editorial board of the Année Sociologique. Simiand was a central member of the group and served as its expert on statistics. At the same time, as someone removed from the politics of French academics, he was at an institutional remove from Émile Durkheim's ambitions for transforming the French university.

Simiand moved further into the administrative apparatus of the French state during World War I when he left his position as a librarian for work in the Ministry of Armaments where he played a prominent role in making policy. After the war, he served for a year as the Director of Labor for the province of Alsace-Lorraine. In addition, he took up a more permanent position as a teacher at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. In his later years, his contribution to French social science was recognized in 1931 when, at the age of 58, he was elected to a chair in labor history at the Collège de France.