“Father and head of the family, this scholar was intended to be as by tenderness instinctive conviction sociological. The family may have been his subject of study and its course of choice .He believed in its necessity and its charitable intimate. He feared anything that could disrupt or weaken it. He saw it, the household moral by excellence, where to develop and where to practice, with the example and under the authority of the parents, all the fundamental virtues, the respect of duty, the taste of justice, the habit of altruism”
G Davy, Emile Durkheim, Yearbook of the Association amicale of former students of the normal school, 1919
cited in Christophe Charle, ” The beautiful marriage of Emile Durkheim “, Acts of Research in Social Sciences, 1984, n° 1, pp. 45-49.