Make the french population boom in the XVIII century

While the populations of the UK, Germany, Japan etc increased dramatically after industrialization, France's have barely doubled since the Napoleonic Age, growing mostly after WW2. Funny to notice that they didn't even emigrated as much as several other countries from Western Europe.

They were indeed much more populous than the rest of Europe in the late XVIII century, so even if not to grow on the same race, how could they have grown at least significantly, with any POD after 1750?

An obvious answer could be intensifying the Industrial Revolution in France, but i don't know exactly what inhibited it on the first place.
 
An obvious answer could be intensifying the Industrial Revolution in France, but i don't know exactly what inhibited it on the first place.

If France retained control over Belgium, one of the most industrial regions in the world, and perhaps the Rhineland, that would be more than sufficient to intensify the industrialization of France.

Another idea is stabilizing France, as instability is detrimental to industrialization, and and another is shortening the French Revolutionary/Napoleonic Wars to avoid the depletion of manpower.
 
It is more low demographic growth that curbed French industrial revolution in the 19th century than the reverse.

And as you noticed, in the Industrial Age, the main reason why France was not on par with Britain and Germany was that France did not control Belgium and Luxemburg.

And the main reason for low French demographic growth seems to have been cultural, although there were regional exceptions such as Britanny.
 
It is more low demographic growth that curbed French industrial revolution in the 19th century than the reverse.

And as you noticed, in the Industrial Age, the main reason why France was not on par with Britain and Germany was that France did not control Belgium and Luxemburg.

And the main reason for low French demographic growth seems to have been cultural, although there were regional exceptions such as Britanny.

As you said, the main reason is cultural. French thinkers were quite afraid of lack of agricultural production in regard to the population’s growth. A « green revolution », such as chemical soil conditionning, could remove some of the elites fears. But others, such as age at marriage, sexual pratices or simply new family models, would not disappear that easily.

Another way would be to target not births but infantile deaths. Before the major medical discoveries of the 19th c., no dramatic change of the death rate can be expected, but there is a population where things could be improved : abandonned children. Their number was booming in the 18th c. and they were in public hospitals with an abismal rate of survivals (less than 5%). If the King or the Queen, moved by their unfortunate destinies, chose to put in place a more dense, controlled and efficient network of children’s hospitals (dedicated religious order perhabs), the survival rate could go way higher, maybe up to the 50% of the general population. It means an average of +2,000 kids by year in Paris and maybe +12,000 in all France. That alone provides for +1,200,000 people for the 18th c., not counting the children these surviving children could have
 
One explanation for why French demographics were so different from those of England:

"The French exceptionalism of small emigration was attributed to the French people's love of their land; for example, one French author wrote in 1860: 't must be recognized that the French rarely emigrate. The fact is that among the various races of Europe there is none with a greater regard for his native land than the French, with a more instinctive, more inviolable affection for his home, his village, and his country...Only religious or political persecution have led in France to emigration on a scale of any importance.'75 However, the key to the difference is to be found within the distinctive French pattern of economic development in the long nineteenth century, the major feature of which was the survival of a large agrarian sector. On the eve of the French Revolution, the productivity of workers employed in British agriculture was already well above that of the French; in familiar fashion, the more favorable British land-to-labor ratios fostered more capital-intensive agriculture, producing a surplus for urban investment, which in turn increased rural out-migration. But in France, the revolution 'gave the peasantry what they had long wanted--full rights of ownership and freedom from the burden of feudal exactions from all kinds.' 76 Although French agricultural output remained consistently below that of the British, the landless peasantry formed a far smaller proportion of the rural population. The characteristics of the agrarian sector in turn conditioned the pace and pattern of industrial development along different lines. Compared with Britain, the workshop sector in France survived much longer, and industry used much less unskilled labor. Most significantly for the present purpose, the rural exodus was long delayed. *The French could afford to love their land, so long as they kept their families small.* [my emphasis--DT]

"In short, France made the transition from agriculture to industry and from rural to urban life without experiencing the shock of the Great Transformation. Not only did fewer of the French leave France, but fewer also moved to great urban centers, because the push on rural localities was much weaker than elsewhere. If 'migration begets migration,' the reverse is true as well: the absence of emigration in the early period of transition makes it less likely that, should a 'push' subsequently arise, emigration will follow. Concomitantly, in the absence of surplus population, the state had no reason to turn emigrationist. Although the precocious limitation of fertility in the middle decades of the nineteenth century was rational from the economic perspective of the rural population, it was problematic in other respects. Hence, uniquely in Europe, from the middle of the century onward, the French state became decidedly immigrationist..." http://books.google.com/books?id=Dqawo0Kpvz0C&pg=PA53

For a related but somewhat different analysis:

"It is instructive, in this regard, to review two recent syntheses of what has been called French exceptionalism, the peasant-based fertility decline of France.

"One is by Jean-Claude Chesnais, who begins by citing the revolution of ideas and decline of religious sentiment that unfolded in the course of the eighteenth century, culminating in the political and social revolution of 1789... Dismantling the hereditary estates of the past, this transformation resulted in a more open society in which social ambitions and the thirst for equality were realized. The "pursuit of happiness" thereafter came to include the enhancement of material well-being, perhaps at the cost of having more children.

"Consistent with his interest in migratory movements, Chesnais goes on to cite the failure of France's colonial policy to secure overseas outlets for "excess population," this limitation being reinforced through anti-emigration laws. In addition he analyzes the divergence of French from English agricultural history. Already smallholders before the revolution, French peasants, through their rebellions, interdicted the penetration of a central feature of agrarian capitalism—legally sanctioned enclosures—into the countryside. (Significantly, neither potatoes nor cottage industry gained much of a foothold either [see Lesthaeghe 1990: 18].) This, Chesnais argues, delayed the formation of an industrial proletariat and with it France's industrial revolution, but precipitated a demographic revolution as yet more smallholders remained on the land. The "triumph of the small" or the "revenge of the small against the large estate" was realized. Two-thirds of France's 32 million inhabitants in 1830 belonged to landowning families; in Britain, including Ireland, only 54 percent had this status (see Hobsbawm 1962).

"Chesnais considers, but rejects, the nineteenth-century thesis of Le Play that the Napoleonic Code, with its provision for equal divisions of property among all heirs, was the decisive element inducing peasants to limit family size or face an intolerable fragmentation of their resources. Fertility decline began before the code was instituted--indeed in some regions before the revolution. There was even early evidence for it in places of single-heir inheritance in southern France. He concedes, however, that enforced partibility may well have intensified a process already underway..." https://books.google.com/books?id=Hgzorr7xG3QC&pg=PA200

So you really would have to prevent the Revolution and the advantages it gave to the small landowner--and even that might not be enough, given the divergences that already existed between French and English agriculture before 1789.
 
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