The original idea for this belongs to Carlos Yu, back on soc.history.what-if. The POD here is in the 1870s, but I'm putting it in the "after 1900" forum because most of the effects will be seen in the 20th century.
France went through the demographic transition earlier than any other European country, with birthrates falling steadily from Napoleonic times onward. Up until 1870, nobody thought much of this. After 1870, it became cause for much hand-wringing and alarm.
OTL, the Third Republic never did come up with a coherent response to demographic decline. (Relative decline. France did continue to grow -- just more slowly than its neighbors, especially Germany.) There were some pro-natalist policies -- cash awards for large families, and such -- but not much, and not very effective. More drastic measures were considered, but never passed.
But the early Third Republic was a time of intense intellectual and political ferment, so any number of wild ideas could have passed into policy. Here's one: the state adopts a policy of encouraging adoption of orphans from abroad. This is less daft than it sounds... there was OTL a small surge of adoptions in the late 1870s, thanks to the "Bulgarian Horrors". Let's say that the Republic grabs this with both hands and encourages it.
This being Third Republic France, there will be a secular and a Catholic version. Let's say that the secular version mostly adopts kids from Bulgaria and other Balkan regions (there'll be a boom in Macedonians after 1890), while the Catholics tend to pick kids from the Levant. The secular adopters are mostly childless middle and upper middle class families, while the Catholics are often lower-middle-class families with a child or two already.
Numbers: from the late 1870s to the late 1890s, about 3,000 kids per year, roughly 2-1 Catholic.
Then around 1900 some nosy parker (probably British, possibly female) heads into the darkest Balkans with an umbrella-case and a lorgniette and discovers that, where there is demand, people will do all sorts of things to ensure supply. (cf. modern problems with foreign adoption in places like Romania and Guatemala.) Soon British booksellers are hawking the True Ghastly And Appalling Record of the Horrors of the Gallic Orphan Slave Trade, with ten shocking copperplate illustrations, 7s5d. Watch for something like the famous engraving of "The Greek Slave", except with a tiny child being torn from her chained arms. The copperplate version adds a sneering Brute in a turban and a callous, mustachio-twirling Frenchman. (With a cross around his neck, of course.)
This has some amusing knock-ons on Anglo-French relations. It also changes the character of the orphan business; the secular adopters mostly give up, while the Catholic ones start looking further abroad. For the next decade or so, most of the orphans will come from the Far East -- China, Cochin China, Pondichery -- with a sprinkling from the Caribbean and Mexico.
Let us say WWI happens much as iOTL and more or less ends foreign adoptions.
Total numbers: about 60,000 orphans in the first wave (~1879-1901), and another 30,000 in the second. The orphans have the same demographic characteristics as the native-born French of their generation and class. By 1914 the oldest have kids of their own, so overall we've added just over 100,000 young people to France's population.
We're giving France two or three more divisions in WWI. Let's leave that be for a moment.
Do we assume shiny happy racial integration? I think we might. The numbers involved are small, and the situation is pretty much ideal for making them /French/.
One odd knock-on: because Catholic adopters are likely to be particularly devout, and the Church's orphans are ethnically distinctive, by the 1920s there will be an assumption that Frenchmen with Levantine, Indian or Asian features are Catholic and conservative. Contrariwise, French anticlericalism may pick up a streak of racialism and nativism.
By the 1950s, it won't be at all odd to see policemen, army officers, or bureaucrats who are clearly of Asian descent... and nobody will think much of it. They won't be common (we're talking around 1% of the population) but they won't be noteworthy either. There'll be a government minister or two, and a few representatives in the Chamber, and nobody will think anything of it. 20th century France will have an image of itself as multiethnic (though not multicultural!) long before the rest of Europe.
Hm: if there's a WWII as we know it, God knows what the Nazis will make of these guys. Because they'll be disproportionately conservative Catholics, a lot of them will be popping up in the middle ranks of Vichy...
Thoughts?
Doug M.
France went through the demographic transition earlier than any other European country, with birthrates falling steadily from Napoleonic times onward. Up until 1870, nobody thought much of this. After 1870, it became cause for much hand-wringing and alarm.
OTL, the Third Republic never did come up with a coherent response to demographic decline. (Relative decline. France did continue to grow -- just more slowly than its neighbors, especially Germany.) There were some pro-natalist policies -- cash awards for large families, and such -- but not much, and not very effective. More drastic measures were considered, but never passed.
But the early Third Republic was a time of intense intellectual and political ferment, so any number of wild ideas could have passed into policy. Here's one: the state adopts a policy of encouraging adoption of orphans from abroad. This is less daft than it sounds... there was OTL a small surge of adoptions in the late 1870s, thanks to the "Bulgarian Horrors". Let's say that the Republic grabs this with both hands and encourages it.
This being Third Republic France, there will be a secular and a Catholic version. Let's say that the secular version mostly adopts kids from Bulgaria and other Balkan regions (there'll be a boom in Macedonians after 1890), while the Catholics tend to pick kids from the Levant. The secular adopters are mostly childless middle and upper middle class families, while the Catholics are often lower-middle-class families with a child or two already.
Numbers: from the late 1870s to the late 1890s, about 3,000 kids per year, roughly 2-1 Catholic.
Then around 1900 some nosy parker (probably British, possibly female) heads into the darkest Balkans with an umbrella-case and a lorgniette and discovers that, where there is demand, people will do all sorts of things to ensure supply. (cf. modern problems with foreign adoption in places like Romania and Guatemala.) Soon British booksellers are hawking the True Ghastly And Appalling Record of the Horrors of the Gallic Orphan Slave Trade, with ten shocking copperplate illustrations, 7s5d. Watch for something like the famous engraving of "The Greek Slave", except with a tiny child being torn from her chained arms. The copperplate version adds a sneering Brute in a turban and a callous, mustachio-twirling Frenchman. (With a cross around his neck, of course.)
This has some amusing knock-ons on Anglo-French relations. It also changes the character of the orphan business; the secular adopters mostly give up, while the Catholic ones start looking further abroad. For the next decade or so, most of the orphans will come from the Far East -- China, Cochin China, Pondichery -- with a sprinkling from the Caribbean and Mexico.
Let us say WWI happens much as iOTL and more or less ends foreign adoptions.
Total numbers: about 60,000 orphans in the first wave (~1879-1901), and another 30,000 in the second. The orphans have the same demographic characteristics as the native-born French of their generation and class. By 1914 the oldest have kids of their own, so overall we've added just over 100,000 young people to France's population.
We're giving France two or three more divisions in WWI. Let's leave that be for a moment.
Do we assume shiny happy racial integration? I think we might. The numbers involved are small, and the situation is pretty much ideal for making them /French/.
One odd knock-on: because Catholic adopters are likely to be particularly devout, and the Church's orphans are ethnically distinctive, by the 1920s there will be an assumption that Frenchmen with Levantine, Indian or Asian features are Catholic and conservative. Contrariwise, French anticlericalism may pick up a streak of racialism and nativism.
By the 1950s, it won't be at all odd to see policemen, army officers, or bureaucrats who are clearly of Asian descent... and nobody will think much of it. They won't be common (we're talking around 1% of the population) but they won't be noteworthy either. There'll be a government minister or two, and a few representatives in the Chamber, and nobody will think anything of it. 20th century France will have an image of itself as multiethnic (though not multicultural!) long before the rest of Europe.
Hm: if there's a WWII as we know it, God knows what the Nazis will make of these guys. Because they'll be disproportionately conservative Catholics, a lot of them will be popping up in the middle ranks of Vichy...
Thoughts?
Doug M.