Mortality Experience of Assured Lives and Annuitants in France

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The publication of the tables of mortality based upon the experience, collected by the Committee representing the four principal insurance companies of France, puts us in possession of an extensive and valuable body of statistics bearing upon the mortality of assured lives and annuitants in that country, and at the same time places the Actuarial profession under a considerable obligation to the Committee of French Actuaries to whom we are indebted for the collection and publication of the data and the resulting monetary tables. As in this country, the life assurance companies on the Continent had for a long time, necessarily, to depend upon statistics of mortality based upon observations of the population generally, which, whatever the skill with which they were prepared, were not only affected by the uncertainty attaching to all such statistics, but were not in any case specially suited to represent the probable mortality, either of assured lives or annuitants. The earliest of these tables, to which any value could be attached, are those of Deparcieux and Duvillard, corresponding in point of date, approximately, to the Northampton and Carlisle Tables in England, and it was not until 1860 that the three companies, the Compagnie d'Assurances Generales, Union, and Nationale, published their annuity experience, nor until 1874 that the first of these companies published a table representing the mortality experience of their assurants.