> 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?
It seems far-fetched to use global population as a relative indicator of France's "decline", where the global population exploded after the industrial revolution.
It is actually not true. The global population exploded after industrialized nations developed after WW2 new types of high yield crops and then gave those away to non-industrialized nations.
If the explosion of the global population is driven by the industruial revolution, then it would've impacted France's population the same way. So it makes sense to compare this way.
Also, why would we want to overpopulate? The whole premise is wrong. We need to weigh less on the environment, and currently farmers are receding in France, and it’s the first profession for suicide; All tells us that the next generation will be full-urban, which is an extremely bad thing.
Of course, empires with more dense populations have more ability to dominate others, at least thanks to the variety of skills and the sheer mass of the population. There’s a reason why politicians work to increase population: It increases levied taxes. The system wouldn’t be balanced with stable population.
But even if we equate population with domination, is dominating the world what we want?
As for the “but they’ll pay your retirements!” argument, well, retirement-by-next-generation-paying is a pyramid scheme and the elderly should have thought of it before they set it up.
I think this was intended, to show the relative decline of the birthrates compared to other countries at the time which was the point of the data analysis
The more I read this, the less I get his point on the religious influence.
> It is unclear why the Catholic Church’s influence waned so quickly and why France was the first country to secularize.
But then, if he doesn’t know enough about what’s happening in France during that period, how can he pin down the demographic decline as caused by the Catholic Church’s decline ? What if it was a completely different reason that he couldn’t find in his very limited set of documents ?
> 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
Why wouldn’t it the other way round, with the core causes of the French decline also triggering less religiousness ?
This article has a lot of data, but the base logical argument feels off, like starting from a conclusion and sticking correlated statistics to it without ever coming up with definitive causality.
> how can he pin down the demographic decline as caused by the Catholic Church’s decline ?
He gives several data points for secularization, such as the language people chose to use in their wills. Since there is a strong general correlation between low fertility and low religion, it seems likely that these are causally linked in 18th century France, rather than coincidentally happening at the same time.
It's a harder question why France in particular secularized at this time. The argument he very tentatively proposes is that freedom from religious coercion leads people to tend to become more religious (as can be seen by comparing the US to Europe over the last few centuries) and that France, due to its strong counter-reformation, had an unusually high level of religious coercion.
> Why wouldn’t it the other way round, with the core causes of the French decline also triggering less religiousness ?
What do you mean by "French decline"? Its loss of status as a superpower starting in 1815? That postdates the decline in religiousness.
I'm not sure about France, but the catholic church has definitely been a huge factor in population growth here in Québec.
It's a widely accepted fact in academia here, though I agree the linked article does not make a great argument for a possibly similar effect in France.
> she declined over the next 250 years to be just another European power.
Why would we want 300 millions inhabitants in France ? That's what we would have with the density of the Netherlands.
Why couldn't France be on top of leisure, urban transports, ecology, natural ecosystems, technology, political innovation, and even military defense, with 70 million inhabitants ?
Worlwide politics are biased, always considering GDP first, instead of a myriad of more relevant indicators.
The book, "shall the religious inherit the world" is relevant.
I'd be interested what happens when general birthrate declines and a religious group, that massively encourages tons of children, take larger voting percentages.
Starvation and disease of course were primary concerns of prehistoric peoples and can be experienced by nearly all larger life forms.
Poverty really only came into existence once things like 'wealth' were invented. Those things only really came into being once people started to live in larger communities, though not exclusively food based ones. Places like the Chaco Canyon Culture show signs of 'wealth' (and therefore poverty), but only in it's early period, and then only kinda.
War is a bit of a funny one too, as it kinda depends on what we mean by war. Where is the demarcation between family feuds and true warfare?
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is a good read into the recent developments into the 198,000 years of human history BC.
Marshall Sahlins studied hunter gatherer bands, and many work less than forty hours a week. Programmers I know can't figure out how to get down to a forty hour a week workweek to survive, but these hunter gather bands in sub-Saharan Africa and the Amazon seem to have figured it out.
> France appeared to be a stagnant society before the French Revolution. If culture was not changing, then how could it be responsible for such a climactic shift in such an important social outcome?
> Using this genealogical data, I estimate that the decline in fertility took hold in France in the 1760s
1760s don’t look far from the French Revolution to me. Ending a regime that lasted more than a dozen centuries doesn’t happen from a one night cultural shift, and I’d argue a shift starting in the 1960s seems pretty reasonable.
Of course the cultural itself is coming from other factors, but I’m not convinced it can be dismissed so lightly.
In the 1700s France had John Law, wars, famines, and bad kings.
Geopolitically France is an interesting place with one foot in Mediterranean civilization and one foot in Northern Europe, good natural barriers, and a fairly unified culture.
After the religious wars of the Reformation, there was a period of pretty good kings and increasingly strong state, prosperity importing tech from Muslim world via Italy, and liberalization. During this period, Italy, Germany, UK, low countries had their own problems and France was pretty dominant.
Before the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, France had 4x the population of Great Britain. After Napoleon's defeat, was never that dominant again. Mediocre kings and Napoleon III, played second fiddle to UK in industrial revolution, political unrest, and Germany unified under Prussia and Rhine industrialists and defeated France in 1870.
Yes. French revolution was partly sparked by high food prices due to poor harvests.
When there is surplus, the population can grow. If production does not increase in step with population growth, there will be shortage. When there is shortage, there is hunger and/or starvation.
The article is very selective: For example there is no mention of the Napoleonic wars. Also there was WW1 - that's another big demographic shift. They built a big defensive line, the Maginot line, because they gathered that they would not have the manpower for another big confrontation, in the style of WW1. However France had a higher birthrate than Germany - in the period after WW2.
Interesting. Also funny that this pioneer of the child-free movement has actually the best fertility rate in Europe currently. Not by much, and still in the negative, but.
it's pretty easy to have children in France, like you have typically 25 + 9 paid days off per year (I personally can't use so many, being a company drone. So I have to take days off to see friends and family)
And it's ok to leave work on time to take care of your children _your coworkers understand that they are more important to you, and they make you happy.
You get a lot of assistance and encouragement from both the local governments and the social fabric. Like there are a lot of clubs to have children to do sports. They're managed by all the parents, by cities, schools,... So finding a hobby for your children isn't so hard.
middle class and low income families can get a lot of subsidies to help them pay for a lot of stuff for their children (including the (in)famous allocations familiales, and 'allocation de rentrée scolaire', that are just spent of flat screens according to right wing ppl)
And you can leave your children at some kindergarten or at they grandparents when you need.
So you can have children without being crazy rich like in the USA, or without being a Rabenmutter like in Germany, and you have time to take care of them.
> Malthus’s prediction proved false due to two paradigm shifts working together
So this guy makes a prediction, and his entire argument is proven false, but he apparently had an amazing PR firm so to this day his name is used in serious conversation.
In the article he points to the malthusian dynamic operating in England during the same period-more productivity, more babies. Paradigms can be true in some time periods and locations while being false in others.
GDP in "real dollars" is irrelevant here. Any such measurement can't correspond to something meaningful.
Rather "annual calories from agriculture per capita" would reveal much more of the reasons behind this and other upheavals in Europe during the period.
There were climate/weather changes (not well understood or appropriate to research in light of current climate changes) in Europe during 1500-1850, which caused starvation, upheavals, migrations, wars, and so on. They did not affect all areas simultaneously in the same way.
Blaming the Catholic church specifically for high birth rates is a misstep especially since the author compares to England which has a long and varied history with Protestantism. The argument should be reframed around religiosity in general or he should show data for England that indicates a difference in fertility during the periods of stronger and weaker Catholic influence in England.
Fully agree with the first part, disagree with the second: women elected to work, they did not needed to work. Single income family was in a way better than dual income family, the world was in a great shape in the '60-'70 when women started to move to paid jobs. Now you have a lot more workers, more leverage to employers and a lot less time spent in the family and less time to have kids when you want to build a career at the same time (and that career is just a regular job in 90% of the cases).
> 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.
Yea, it looks like another poltical topic that vary with party. Alarmism about overpopulation is also quite popular.
This is a very thorough piece of research. In particular, if you're saying "in industrialized societies you don't need as many children" you've missed the entire point of the article: he's demonstrating that "having fewer children" began long before industrialization.
> during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when France was defeated after a solitary battle against a single opponent.
I was always curious about that war, since "Sedan" is the only battle you ever read about (plus maybe The Commune), so I read a book on it. There were quite a few battles leading up to it. The Germans had better artillery, and their field commanders had more latitude for improvisation.
> 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
That's the problem with demographic transitions colliding with modern political culture.
You're not getting an 50 million European country out of 80 million contry: instead, you will be getting a 80 million African country occupying the same place.
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.
It more and more seems like "traditional", conservative societies are more successful on aggregate. If they are beneficial to the individuals comprising them, this is a matter of heated debate though. But regardless of that, does the apparent higher fitness of conservative societies (in a global point of view) mean that more "open minded" and "liberated" societies will always be overtaken by the conservative ones ?
Are we cursed to an eternal dance between perceived personal liberty and societal success ?
I'm not sure how you're getting to this enormous generalization. Seems to me that for the past century or so, liberal societies have been the dominant societies on the world stage. Which conservative, traditionalist societies are you thinking of that are more successful or have "higher fitness" than liberal societies?
When I think of an archetypal "conservative, traditional" society, the first countries that spring to mind are Afghanistan and Iran, which I wouldn't call particularly successful countries.
Some like Saudi-Arabia do better by virtue of sitting on an infinite source of money, but even these oil nations have something dysfunctional to them. They tend to be so corrupt and anti-meritocratic that they need foreign companies to perform any non-trivial task, as they can't get anything done themselves and do nothing to foster homegrown talent. They don't produce value beyond what they (or rather, a mix of hired and pseudo-enslaved foreigners) dig up from the ground.
"It more and more seems like "traditional", conservative societies are more successful on aggregate."
Weren't pretty much all societies on the planet in the 1700s and 1800s "traditional and conservative"?
Yet most of them weren't particularly successful against the British, who, on aggregate, weren't that much traditional (superficially, yes, but behind the visible old-school clergy and nobility, ruthless modernization continued apace).
I'd love to see some citation for that since most of the ultra conservative countries around the world are failing states both economically and societally.
Everything from Iran, Iraq to European Hungaries to US bible belt states, you can pretty much directly map failure to fringe conservatism.
From my equally unfounded gut feel, it's actually balanced societies that are the most successful.
When that balance strongly tilts one way, tension occurs and requires rebalancing for that society to continue to prosper. On society lifetime scale, this usually takes decades which is annoying to a single generation, but a speck in the scheme of things.
In the middle of the 20th century, an extremely conservative, traditionalist society that was technologically modernizing at an extremely high rate but still a feudal empire that was one generation away from pastoralism decided they would attack the most self-declared "liberated" society in the world. The situation proceeded not necessarily to their advantage.
(Despite what the fascists want to think, there's substantial evidence that open societies being more adaptable and innovative is an overwhelming advantage)
This is contradicted by all available evidence: “traditional” societies succeed when they industrialize and liberalize. France was 20% of Europe’s population in 1700, but there is no meaningful sense in which the average French subject was “succeeding” in 1700.
[+] [-] franky47|3 years ago|reply
It seems far-fetched to use global population as a relative indicator of France's "decline", where the global population exploded after the industrial revolution.
[+] [-] genman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yamrzou|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MakeUsersWant|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eastbound|3 years ago|reply
Of course, empires with more dense populations have more ability to dominate others, at least thanks to the variety of skills and the sheer mass of the population. There’s a reason why politicians work to increase population: It increases levied taxes. The system wouldn’t be balanced with stable population.
But even if we equate population with domination, is dominating the world what we want?
As for the “but they’ll pay your retirements!” argument, well, retirement-by-next-generation-paying is a pyramid scheme and the elderly should have thought of it before they set it up.
[+] [-] 4gotunameagain|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wouldbecouldbe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makeitdouble|3 years ago|reply
> It is unclear why the Catholic Church’s influence waned so quickly and why France was the first country to secularize.
But then, if he doesn’t know enough about what’s happening in France during that period, how can he pin down the demographic decline as caused by the Catholic Church’s decline ? What if it was a completely different reason that he couldn’t find in his very limited set of documents ?
> 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
Why wouldn’t it the other way round, with the core causes of the French decline also triggering less religiousness ?
This article has a lot of data, but the base logical argument feels off, like starting from a conclusion and sticking correlated statistics to it without ever coming up with definitive causality.
[+] [-] ciphol|3 years ago|reply
He gives several data points for secularization, such as the language people chose to use in their wills. Since there is a strong general correlation between low fertility and low religion, it seems likely that these are causally linked in 18th century France, rather than coincidentally happening at the same time.
It's a harder question why France in particular secularized at this time. The argument he very tentatively proposes is that freedom from religious coercion leads people to tend to become more religious (as can be seen by comparing the US to Europe over the last few centuries) and that France, due to its strong counter-reformation, had an unusually high level of religious coercion.
> Why wouldn’t it the other way round, with the core causes of the French decline also triggering less religiousness ?
What do you mean by "French decline"? Its loss of status as a superpower starting in 1815? That postdates the decline in religiousness.
[+] [-] mardifoufs|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjparrott|3 years ago|reply
It’s still true today: https://ifstudies.org/blog/americas-growing-religious-secula...
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] maelito|3 years ago|reply
Why would we want 300 millions inhabitants in France ? That's what we would have with the density of the Netherlands.
Why couldn't France be on top of leisure, urban transports, ecology, natural ecosystems, technology, political innovation, and even military defense, with 70 million inhabitants ?
Worlwide politics are biased, always considering GDP first, instead of a myriad of more relevant indicators.
[+] [-] langsoul-com|3 years ago|reply
I'd be interested what happens when general birthrate declines and a religious group, that massively encourages tons of children, take larger voting percentages.
[+] [-] mkoubaa|3 years ago|reply
Actually no, human life only started to be dominated by this after the shift from hunter gatherer to agrarian societies.
[+] [-] Balgair|3 years ago|reply
Starvation and disease of course were primary concerns of prehistoric peoples and can be experienced by nearly all larger life forms.
Poverty really only came into existence once things like 'wealth' were invented. Those things only really came into being once people started to live in larger communities, though not exclusively food based ones. Places like the Chaco Canyon Culture show signs of 'wealth' (and therefore poverty), but only in it's early period, and then only kinda.
War is a bit of a funny one too, as it kinda depends on what we mean by war. Where is the demarcation between family feuds and true warfare?
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is a good read into the recent developments into the 198,000 years of human history BC.
https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Everything-New-History-Humanity/...
[+] [-] Convolutional|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makeitdouble|3 years ago|reply
> Using this genealogical data, I estimate that the decline in fertility took hold in France in the 1760s
1760s don’t look far from the French Revolution to me. Ending a regime that lasted more than a dozen centuries doesn’t happen from a one night cultural shift, and I’d argue a shift starting in the 1960s seems pretty reasonable.
Of course the cultural itself is coming from other factors, but I’m not convinced it can be dismissed so lightly.
[+] [-] RockyMcNuts|3 years ago|reply
Geopolitically France is an interesting place with one foot in Mediterranean civilization and one foot in Northern Europe, good natural barriers, and a fairly unified culture.
After the religious wars of the Reformation, there was a period of pretty good kings and increasingly strong state, prosperity importing tech from Muslim world via Italy, and liberalization. During this period, Italy, Germany, UK, low countries had their own problems and France was pretty dominant.
Before the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, France had 4x the population of Great Britain. After Napoleon's defeat, was never that dominant again. Mediocre kings and Napoleon III, played second fiddle to UK in industrial revolution, political unrest, and Germany unified under Prussia and Rhine industrialists and defeated France in 1870.
[+] [-] yobbo|3 years ago|reply
When there is surplus, the population can grow. If production does not increase in step with population growth, there will be shortage. When there is shortage, there is hunger and/or starvation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overshoot_(population)
[+] [-] MichaelMoser123|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twelve40|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hinata08|3 years ago|reply
And it's ok to leave work on time to take care of your children _your coworkers understand that they are more important to you, and they make you happy.
You get a lot of assistance and encouragement from both the local governments and the social fabric. Like there are a lot of clubs to have children to do sports. They're managed by all the parents, by cities, schools,... So finding a hobby for your children isn't so hard.
middle class and low income families can get a lot of subsidies to help them pay for a lot of stuff for their children (including the (in)famous allocations familiales, and 'allocation de rentrée scolaire', that are just spent of flat screens according to right wing ppl)
And you can leave your children at some kindergarten or at they grandparents when you need.
So you can have children without being crazy rich like in the USA, or without being a Rabenmutter like in Germany, and you have time to take care of them.
[+] [-] eternalban|3 years ago|reply
So this guy makes a prediction, and his entire argument is proven false, but he apparently had an amazing PR firm so to this day his name is used in serious conversation.
[+] [-] projektfu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yobbo|3 years ago|reply
Rather "annual calories from agriculture per capita" would reveal much more of the reasons behind this and other upheavals in Europe during the period.
There were climate/weather changes (not well understood or appropriate to research in light of current climate changes) in Europe during 1500-1850, which caused starvation, upheavals, migrations, wars, and so on. They did not affect all areas simultaneously in the same way.
[+] [-] ciphol|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pharke|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amriksohata|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AdrianB1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] t0bia_s|3 years ago|reply
Yea, it looks like another poltical topic that vary with party. Alarmism about overpopulation is also quite popular.
[+] [-] AlbertCory|3 years ago|reply
> during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when France was defeated after a solitary battle against a single opponent.
I was always curious about that war, since "Sedan" is the only battle you ever read about (plus maybe The Commune), so I read a book on it. There were quite a few battles leading up to it. The Germans had better artillery, and their field commanders had more latitude for improvisation.
[+] [-] flooow|3 years ago|reply
> 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
[+] [-] no1groyp|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thriftwy|3 years ago|reply
You're not getting an 50 million European country out of 80 million contry: instead, you will be getting a 80 million African country occupying the same place.
[+] [-] nathan_compton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etothepii|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vaderv|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] 4gotunameagain|3 years ago|reply
Are we cursed to an eternal dance between perceived personal liberty and societal success ?
[+] [-] ookdatnog|3 years ago|reply
When I think of an archetypal "conservative, traditional" society, the first countries that spring to mind are Afghanistan and Iran, which I wouldn't call particularly successful countries.
Some like Saudi-Arabia do better by virtue of sitting on an infinite source of money, but even these oil nations have something dysfunctional to them. They tend to be so corrupt and anti-meritocratic that they need foreign companies to perform any non-trivial task, as they can't get anything done themselves and do nothing to foster homegrown talent. They don't produce value beyond what they (or rather, a mix of hired and pseudo-enslaved foreigners) dig up from the ground.
[+] [-] inglor_cz|3 years ago|reply
Weren't pretty much all societies on the planet in the 1700s and 1800s "traditional and conservative"?
Yet most of them weren't particularly successful against the British, who, on aggregate, weren't that much traditional (superficially, yes, but behind the visible old-school clergy and nobility, ruthless modernization continued apace).
[+] [-] izacus|3 years ago|reply
Everything from Iran, Iraq to European Hungaries to US bible belt states, you can pretty much directly map failure to fringe conservatism.
[+] [-] necovek|3 years ago|reply
When that balance strongly tilts one way, tension occurs and requires rebalancing for that society to continue to prosper. On society lifetime scale, this usually takes decades which is annoying to a single generation, but a speck in the scheme of things.
[+] [-] pjc50|3 years ago|reply
(Despite what the fascists want to think, there's substantial evidence that open societies being more adaptable and innovative is an overwhelming advantage)
[+] [-] woodruffw|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vidarh|3 years ago|reply