French Demographic Collapse: Why did it occur and how do we avoid it?

Nope on all counts

You know, one of the reasons I don't buy your argument entirely is that it requires evidence that France was under demographic pressure during this period.

But the opposite seems to be true. French emigrated less frequently than Germans, Italians, or the Irish; and France was actually a recipient of immigration from neighboring nations.
 
You know, one of the reasons I don't buy your argument entirely is that it requires evidence that France was under demographic pressure during this period.

But the opposite seems to be true. French emigrated less frequently than Germans, Italians, or the Irish; and France was actually a recipient of immigration from neighboring nations.

Hm. Were French peasants in a genuinely Malthusian situation, or were they just controlling their reproduction for their own convenience? The way I had heard it, inheritance and land laws after the revolution simply reinforced a tendency to control child numbers through various crude forms of birth control (including simply marrying rather late). The fact that France was fairly densely populated by western European standards didn't mean it was ramming into some sort of demographc limit.

Bruce
 

MAlexMatt

Banned
Think you mean late 18th/early 19th and late 19th there.

Bruce

No, I really do mean what I said. It was my understanding that France had what was essentially a miniature demographic transition surrounding the agricultural revolution of the early 1700's, one that prevented the sort of population growth that marked latter ones in other countries.
 
You know, one of the reasons I don't buy your argument entirely is that it requires evidence that France was under demographic pressure during this period.

But the opposite seems to be true. French emigrated less frequently than Germans, Italians, or the Irish; and France was actually a recipient of immigration from neighboring nations.

The immigration waves came from a massive advances in agricultural technology in those countries - suddenly the rural areas had a massive surplus which had to sod off abroad or to the cities, whilst those that remained engaged in more demographic restraint. The fact that rural life was nicer in France than many places also helped.

Rural France rose up to its effective employment limits and slowed, it didn't suddenly find itself in excess like many other places did and needed to dump people. You can see this phenomena even on the American Great Plains states - as soon as they hit capacity (in the 1890-1910s) growth slowed and birthrates dropped.

The immigration to France was pretty exclusively to the cities, which are an entirely different kettle of fish (until quite late in the modern period large cities are population sinks rather than sources) to the lake of growth in the rural population.
 
My advice to members interested in this would be to purchase the books by Fernaud Braudel called "the Identity of France" which explores this question and a few others in a lot of detail.

It can't really be done. The reason France did worse than its peers demographically in this period was because it had done better than its peers demographically in previous centuries. The country had bumped up against its Malthusian limits in terms of what it could produce agriculturally to feed its populations, and it doesn't have the economic surplus to buy from abroad. The revolutionary and Napoleonic reforms are almost a best case scenario in terms of improving the economy to improve this surplus: a surviving monarchy or nobility is likely to make it much worse. You can tinker a bit round the edges, but fundamental leaps forward aren't possible, IMHO.

As much as France is Europe's breadbasket at the moment and has been so since the early 20th century. This was not the case during the 18th century and before that. In fact France was more often than not importing grain during these periods, from North Africa, Eastern Europe and later from the Americas.

As someone else has already saif, the French countryside was very slow to adopt innovations like root vegetables, most chiefly the potato. While Germany farmed it on a massive scale as early as the 17th century. This had to wait the 19th century in the case of France.

France also has some two and a half times the area of Great Britain and Scotland, and had a lower population by several million in 1900. Is the land particularly worse for agriculture?

Bruce

France has very good soils in the Seine and Loire valleys, which by themselves amount to nearly 200 000km2. This region is presently the breadbasket of France and the main cereal producing region.

However, huge tracts of France have poor soils for agriculture or requires specially adpated crops to reap the full profits of the soil in these regions. The Champagne region soils are rather poor and very chakly, this is very good in order to make Champagne but not if you want to grow wheat or vegetables. The Massif Central has poor soils and is bets suited for sheep or cattle rearing. The Rhone Valley has good soils but its area is limited, southern France is prone to droughtsand special crops are again needed here in order to obtain high yields.
 
In most cases, fertility is directly related to economic well-being - but anti-proportionaly, that is the better off you are, the less children you have. We could argue a lot about why this is the case, but with respect to France I think that their demographic collapse occured because the French were better off than many other Europeans. Note that this consideration would also be in line with French people not emmigrating - because they don't need to - and the Dutch not experiencing a demographic boom either - they were well off themselves.

In Germany and England, on the other side, you have the poverty of the early industrial or urban workers and the farm workers without own land. In Southern Germany, land often was partitioned between the kids up to a point where all were poor landowners of tiny fields. Indeed, fields were cut in stripes repeatedly up to a point that you find fields of less than a meter width around my homw town. Good luck with an agricultural revolution on these...

To put it shortly and overly simplistic: the French lived well at home and had no kids, the Germans and English on average where poorer, had more kids and emmigrated more often?
 
For those thinking France acquiring the mineral resources along the Rhine can add huge amounts of population, it should be considered that Belgium did have an industrial revolution. This meant Brussels grew from 50,000 in the 1500s to 123,000 in 1846. It's doubtful all of this growth is from industrialisation, but let's be generous and say three quarters of it was, and we get about a 55,000 boost.

Even if we assume that Paris somehow manages to get ten times more population growth from the same resources, that gives you an extra half million. Mirroring the effect in a couple other major cities might give you a couple million in total. But it's simply not enough to double the population of the country.
 
France has very good soils in the Seine and Loire valleys, which by themselves amount to nearly 200 000km2. This region is presently the breadbasket of France and the main cereal producing region.

As opposed to the verdant farmland of Scotland and Wales?

The immigration waves came from a massive advances in agricultural technology in those countries - suddenly the rural areas had a massive surplus which had to sod off abroad or to the cities, whilst those that remained engaged in more demographic restraint. The fact that rural life was nicer in France than many places also helped.

Okay, now I am really skeptical. You're claiming that France's decline in population growth reflects Malthusian limits, but also that rural life was better in France than in many other places. And there was no rush to French cities the way there was elsewhere.

Why didn't France have this massive advance?
 
Okay, now I am really skeptical. You're claiming that France's decline in population growth reflects Malthusian limits, but also that rural life was better in France than in many other places. And there was no rush to French cities the way there was elsewhere.

If that's indeed his argument, it just doesn't make logical sense to me. When I think of Malthusian limits, I'm imagining people starving to death en masse in a mass famine.
 
Okay, now I am really skeptical. You're claiming that France's decline in population growth reflects Malthusian limits, but also that rural life was better in France than in many other places. And there was no rush to French cities the way there was elsewhere.

Why didn't France have this massive advance?

What? I'm not talking about Malthusian limits, I'm talking about employment limits and said so a bunch of frigging times - if additional labour isn't going to increase the yield/value of a plot of land that labour isn't going to get paid/fed even the the land is producing sufficient calories to feed that labour.

In France, the employment limit was approached more smoothly and having lots of children was disincentivised relative to other locations. Working population (P) was less than the employment limit both before (E1) and after (E2) the agricultural revolution.

In other European locales the agricultural revolution - enclosure, much bigger farms, better crop rotation, mechanization, infrastructure, potatoes, winter wheat saw a shift faster than peoples demographic adjustment where it was found E2 < P < E1. The amount by which P < E2 had to leave the rural locales and move to the cities/abroad in a massive surge.

Since they were economically unstable during and just prior to these migrations they had lots of kids (which is always a safe bet when times are uncertain). The new urban populations were also quite fecund as it was advantagous to be so when labour was non-skilled. In rural France you'd need less kids to secure your farm and old age, and since the farm labour was more skill intensive each child is addition costs - so in the absence of cultural incentives to lots of children people try as hard. This meant rural growth was slow and there were no new urban cohorts to push growth.

The reason why E2 << P in some countries and E2 < or = P in France was because non-mountainous France had better infrastructure and farm structure to begin with (so the gain was less), a differing agricultural base, the new crops provided more gain in places other than France, energy in France was more expensive (due to lack of coal, renewable woods, and the distance needed to transport to the ports).
 
Top