This doctoral research studies the links between workers' struggles and statistics in France and Great Britain. It looks at the production of statistical data on living and working conditions as an instrument of struggle within the world of work. The presence of figures is both an important and recurrent feature of workers' struggles, calling for a review of certain aspects of the history of these struggles and of the history of statistics and workers' surveys. To trace the origins of this use as far as possible, this research focuses on the early days of workers' actions in the contemporary period (1770-1840). The hypothesis underlying this research is that the data produced in the context of workers' struggles in the nineteenth century contributed to the development of what was to become, from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, the corpus of 'labour statistics', i.e. data measuring the living and working conditions of the working classes.