France was once Europe’s superpower, thanks above all to its enormous population. Its decline coincided with a collapse in its birth rate – now we know why.
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 a 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.
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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.