The SFdS was officially constituted on the 6th of August, 1997 (declared as of the 23rd of August 1997 issue of the Journal Officiel), and recognized of public utility by the decree of the 3rd of December 1998. It was brought about by the merging  in December 1996 of these 3 associations: 

• The ASU (Association pour la Statistique et ses Utilisations), founded in 1969  
• The SSP (Société de Statistique de Paris), founded in 1860  
• La SSF (Société de Statistique de France), founded in 1976

The SFdS currently has about 1000 members. Its objective is to promote the use and understanding of statistics, to foster its methodological development, and to represent everyone who uses, teaches or does research pertaining to statistics. More specifically, the SFdS helps ease the flow of information between statisticians working as administrators, in businesses and research/teaching establishments. For more information on Marie-Jeanne Laurent-Duhamel's involvement in French statistics, and more specifically in the societies that led to the creation of the SFdS, click here.

The SFdS is an officially declared teaching organism (number 11753108575, as of 16.12.1998)The SFdS is a member of the International Institute of Statistics (IIS), and maintains relationships with other national statistics societies, especially European ones. It also has a privileged relationship with other French associations such as: 

• The Random and Statistic Modeling Group (MAS), part of the SMAI
• The French-speaking Society of Classification 
• The French Society of Biometrics
• The Group of French Members of the IIS

Note that a convention is signed with each one of the first three societies.