France was once Europe’s superpower, thanks to its enormous population. By Guillaume Blanc.
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? …
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. …
The Malthusian trap: Lack of food limits population growth, so hunger was widespread for most of human history
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.
France:
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. …
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. …
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. …
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. …
The decline in fertility took hold in France in the 1760s, more than a century earlier than in any other country.
In the meantime, the average English woman was bearing six children. There, as in the rest of the world, the Malthusian mechanism was very much alive and would be for an additional century. In England, the industrial revolution made people richer, but they spent their additional wealth having more children.
So, the demographic transition took place exceptionally early in France, but why? In my research, I argue that the diminished sway of the Catholic Church, nearly 30 years before the French Revolution, was the key driver of the fertility decline. Since at least Tocqueville, and more recently Emmanuel Todd, we know that a sustained loosening of traditional religious moral constraints took place in the mid-eighteenth century, at a scale and extent that no other country has achieved. …
Whether it was dechristianization, secularization, or simply a loss of influence of the clergy is hard to say, but the data shows that attitudes toward life and death changed radically in the course of the eighteenth century. …
The secularization of France meant that, for the first time, mankind — or, at least, an entire country — could command nature and break the chains of the Malthusian trap. …
With the loss of influence of the Church, the clergy could not oppose fertility controls anymore. …
The regions that secularized experienced a much earlier decline in fertility than those that did not. …
What can we learn from this? Today, the political and economic prospects of an empty planet are a worry for many, as more and more countries reach fertility rates below replacement levels. The population of China is projected to halve by 2100. The historical fertility transition in France shows that demographic decline — at least while still above replacement levels — does not necessarily spell society’s eternal doom. …
The decline of Catholicism, and fertility, in eighteenth-century France turned it from a demographic powerhouse — the China of Europe — to merely a first-rank European power among several, but also allowed it to keep up with British living standards without an industrial revolution. Ideas have consequences.
Large families allow for military adventurism. Parents can withstand losing one or two children to their leader’s wars if they have six or eight children. But if most families have only one or two children — like in most of the West and China today — then losing even a single child to war is traumatic.
Today this means that large Muslim families know they can wear down the West in tit-for-tat low level warfare. And Russia cannot afford to waste millions of men chasing victory in Ukraine, like it did in previous centuries.
