570 million Frenchmen
France's decline coincided with a collapse in its birth rate – now we know why.
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In the eighteenth century, France was the China of Europe. But after a thousand years of dominance based on particularly fertile land, she declined over the next 250 years to be just another European power. Around this time, more than 100 years before the rest of Europe, French women began to have fewer children. In 1700, almost 1 in 25 inhabitants on Earth, and one in five in Europe, was French. Today, less than one percent of humanity is French. Why did France’s population decline in relative terms so dramatically, and did it really mark the decline of France?
The demographic transition is usually thought to be driven by economic forces, but – in France at least – culture came first. Using data from online family trees, my work shows how the loosening of traditional religious moral constraints in Ancien Régime France drove the decline in fertility, setting France off on a wholly different course from England, which was about to see a dramatic increase in its population.
From the dawn of humanity to the eighteenth century, human life was dominated by starvation, poverty, wars, and pandemics. It was nasty, brutish, and short, just like that of apes or any other animals.
Whenever innovations raised the productivity of land, labor, or capital – and these innovations did take place – these simply led to fewer children dying or more children being born, with the extra economic output used to feed more hungry mouths. This was the history behind Thomas Malthus’s bleak 1798 prediction, in An Essay on the Principle of Population, that, since population growth is geometric but agricultural productivity growth can only be arithmetic, humanity was doomed to constant subsistence, with growth in the population always outstripping its ability to feed itself.
Malthus’s prediction proved false due to two paradigm shifts working together: the industrial revolution and the demographic transition. With the industrial revolution, unprecedented technological advancements took hold. The pace of human technological, scientific, and economic progress increased significantly and the human condition changed forever. But technological progress was not working alone.
The decline in fertility during the demographic transition was also a turning point in human history, because it marked the escape from the Malthusian mechanism. Instead of simply allowing for more and more people, the technological innovations brought by the industrial revolution could lead to better living standards, and economic growth was no longer short-lived. Investments in human capital and mass education could take place following the decline, which further propelled societies on the path to sustained economic growth.
If we were to condense all of human history into one short telling, it would look like this: millennia of stagnation, then the industrial revolution (in the eighteenth century), then the demographic transition (in the nineteenth century), then sustained economic growth – the dramatic leap forward experienced by humanity in the past few centuries.
Broadly, this narrative is accurate. But for Europe’s first superpower it is out of order. The historical decline in fertility took hold in France first, in the mid-eighteenth century and more than a century earlier than in any other country in the world. At the time, there were 25 million inhabitants in France and 5.5 million in England. Today, there are 68 million inhabitants in France and 56 million in England. Had France’s population increased at the same rate as England’s since 1760, there would be more than 250 million French citizens alive today.
According to Alfred Sauvy, the French demographer who coined the term ‘third world’, in 1962, the decline in fertility is ‘the most important fact of the history of France’. France was eclipsed as Europe’s only real superpower by the relative growth of its rivals, most importantly England and Germany, in the nineteenth century.
France’s emergence as a major global power spanned several centuries, from the foundation and expansion of the Kingdom of the Franks under Clovis and Charlemagne in the fifth and ninth centuries to Napoleon. During the Hundred Years’ War in the fourteenth century, London was by far the most populous city in medieval England, but Rouen, only France’s second city, may have been as large as it.
By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, under the long-lived Louis XIV France boasted the continent's largest population and the world’s second largest colonial empire, after Spain. It was so dominant that it prompted multiple coalitions, or grand alliances, of all the other major European powers together to challenge it. And even then the first Grand Alliance was unable to make significant gains in the Nine Years’ War at the end of the seventeenth century. In the War of the Spanish Succession soon after, the French could field 400,000 troops at times, almost as many as the combined forces of the Holy Roman Empire, Prussia, England, and the Netherlands.
The gap in demographic power and military might stood perhaps at its widest during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars from 1792–1815. The French fought against most of Europe at once and could regularly field over a million soldiers, often outnumbering its opponents, which formed more than six successive coalitions before they could eventually prevail.
Rulers had worried about a projected depopulation of France since the seventeenth century, with the pronatalist Edict on Marriage of 1666, but it was not until much later that these demographic struggles became apparent. The prevailing view is that on 15th June 1815, during the Battle of Waterloo, France lost its position as the preeminent power in Europe. The influence of demographic factors was revealed most dramatically during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when France was defeated after a solitary battle against a single opponent. During World War I, the population and military gap had completely closed, if not reversed, and Germany had substantially larger forces than France.
And yet the early decline in fertility in France is not well understood. Economists tend to view economic development as the primary driver of the demographic transition, by increasing would-be parents’ incentives to invest in human capital instead of having children (trading quantity for quality). But France was still a developing country in the eighteenth century; it was mostly poor, rural, and illiterate, and one to two centuries behind England on all of these metrics, while about 30 percent of babies died before they were one, and half before they reached age five.
You can read the rest of the piece here.
This article first appeared in Issue 10 of Works in Progress.
Guillaume Blanc is an Assistant Professor of Economics at The University of Manchester and Deputy Director at the Arthur Lewis Lab for Comparative Development.
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