Coale & Watkins
Around 1760, French couples began having fewer children — about a century before the rest of Europe, while France was poorer and less urban than England. Why? Drawing on parish records and family trees, this paper finds evidence that the weakening influence of the Catholic Church helped bring about the decline. It also explores what the early transition meant for France’s population and prosperity.
Coale & Watkins
In 1700, roughly one person in twenty-five alive on earth was French. France could put four hundred thousand men in the field during the War of the Spanish Succession and more than a million under Napoleon, routinely outnumbering everything arrayed against it. Demography was the arsenal.
Under Louis XV, French couples began having fewer children. The decline appears around 1760, long before it became widespread elsewhere in Europe. It began before the Revolution and before France had caught up with England in income, literacy or urbanization.
It is hard to overstate what this cost France, or what it saved it. In 1750 France had about 25 million people; England and Wales had 5.5 million. Over the next two and a half centuries England grew tenfold. France did not quite triple.
France from the Revolution to the millennium, counted department by department in the censuses. Twenty-seven million people in 1793; fifty-eight million in 1999. A country growing, but slowly.
Apply England and Wales’s population growth rate to France from 1750 and the result is about 255 million people. This is an illustrative comparison, not a prediction: many things besides fertility would have changed along a different path.
The standard theory says this should not have happened here first. Development is supposed to drive the transition: technology accelerates, schooling pays, parents trade quantity for quality. France in 1750 fails every part of that test. Its literacy ran at about half of England’s. Its labor force was still overwhelmingly in the fields — a share England had left behind before 1500. Its income per head in 1800 was England’s of 1660. The advanced economy of Europe was across the Channel — and it kept having children until the 1870s.
“Did France cease to be a great power not, as is usually thought, on 15 June 1815 on the field of Waterloo, but well before that, during the reign of Louis XV when the natural birth-rate was interrupted?” Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France
The first French census that can say how many children a woman had is 1851 — ninety years too late for the question that matters. Before that, the record is parish registers: baptisms, marriages and burials, in longhand, in thirty-six thousand parishes, with no index and no ages. For seventy years the only way through was to read them. Louis Henry’s reconstitution of about forty parishes — the series every textbook cites — rests on villages that were all small, all rural, and chosen partly for the legibility of the handwriting.
The alternative is that millions of people have already done the reading — for their own families, and everywhere, because everyone has ancestors somewhere.
Saint-Germain-d’Anxure, in the Mayenne. The priest records the baptism of Michel Rousseau, 12 June 1776 — son of Jean Rousseau and Françoise Philippot, “married in this parish.” None of the witnesses could sign their names.
Two hundred and forty years later someone finds that page, and the pages around it, and reconstructs the family: Michel and his five brothers and sisters, born between 1772 and 1788, all attached to their father Jean. It goes onto geni.com.
Jean Rousseau becomes a row. Born 1748, first child 1772, six children, with pointers to his own parents — which is what makes him usable, because fertility lives in the horizontal branches of a tree and family trees are built vertically.
86 million profiles with parent–child links. 370,242 lived, married or died in France. 31,553 have a sibling line recorded in one of the four preceding generations — enough to count their children.
Family trees are not a random sample: they over-represent people who left records and attracted the interest of descendants. The paper compares the genealogical series with independent historical sources on mortality, urbanization and fertility in France and England. The comparisons are reassuring about broad trends, though they cannot remove every selection concern.
Children ever born, by the year the first child arrived, in France and in England and Wales. About five children each. Both bouncing along a ceiling, wobbling with harvests and epidemics, going nowhere. Hover any year.
Then France leaves. Within forty years the average French couple goes from 4.7 children to under 3.5. England goes up, peaking near six in the 1820s — the Industrial Revolution converted directly into people, exactly as Malthus said it would.
Look at where it starts. Year here is the birth of the first child and childbearing runs about a decade, so an onset at 1760 means births falling through the 1770s. The Revolution arrives in the middle of a decline already thirty years old. Whatever did this was in place under the Ancien Régime.
Here is the objection that should be bothering you. The pill is nearly two hundred years away. The condom is a luxury item made of animal gut. How does a peasant couple in the Beauce in 1770 decide to have four children instead of six?
They always could. Withdrawal is free, silent, needs nothing and has been known for as long as there have been people. And contemporaries were entirely clear that it was spreading, and that this was new. In 1778 Jean-Baptiste Moheau, writing the first serious book of French demography, reported that “the fatal secrets unknown to any animal but man” had reached the countryside:
“Nature gets cheated even in the villages.” Jean-Baptiste Moheau, Recherches et considérations sur la population de la France (1778)
The paper proposes a moral constraint as part of the explanation. The Church condemned contraception, and confession was one way its teaching reached households. A familiar method of birth control could therefore become more attractive as religious authority weakened.
In this account, secularization made it easier for couples to act on a desire to limit births. The evidence below examines whether the timing and geography of religious change match those of declining fertility; the precise decisions made inside households remain harder to observe.
Enormously, and at exactly the wrong moment for coincidence. This is a country that called itself the eldest daughter of the Church, whose kings held the title Rex Christianissimus, where Protestantism had been crushed and then expelled. Historians have known since Michel Vovelle opened the will archives of Provence in 1973 that something gave way in the eighteenth century. What was missing was a measure that covered the whole country and reached below the elite. Here are three, from three unrelated archives.
A Provençal will opened with a formula: the soul commended to God, the Virgin and the saints, masses ordered, money left to the church. Vovelle read the universe of them, decade by decade, and watched the formula shrink to a clause and then to nothing. By the 1780s some testators called death “the indispensable tribute that we owe to Nature.”
Ordinations across France, reconstructed by Tackett and Langlois from fourteen dioceses. Recruitment into the priesthood falls about 40% from its peak in the 1740s. Nobody ordered this. Young men simply stopped presenting themselves — a generation before any revolutionary measure against the Church.
And the measure that reaches the poorest households: first names. 9.5 million birth and baptism records from 2,246 villages under three thousand people, each name scored by how over-represented it is among the patron saints of medieval churches. It peaks around 1750 and falls for a century. Note also the two revivals — this is not a ratchet.
Same axis, same shaded decades. Notarial records, diocesan registers and parish baptisms all bend in the 1750s and 1760s — and so does the number of children in a French household. Four archives with nothing to do with one another, turning together, a generation before the Revolution.
The coincidence in time is suggestive, but not conclusive. The paper also compares places with different degrees of religiosity, using the share of priests who refused the revolutionary oath as a historical proxy. Like any proxy, it can capture other local differences too.
But there is an accident. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy made priests employees of the state and required them to swear loyalty to it — in public, on a Sunday, at the end of mass, in front of the parish. More than fifty thousand parish priests and vicars, over 90% of everyone holding a post, had to stand up and either swear or refuse. About half refused, and the map of refusal turns out to be extraordinarily durable: Timothy Tackett found that “the map of clerical reactions in 1791 was remarkably similar to the map of religious practice in the middle of the twentieth century.”
And the map of refusal is, department by department, the map of when the children stopped. Brittany’s clergy refused at 81%, and its fertility transition arrives around 1926. Provence refused at 23% and had transitioned by 1880. Half a century of demographic history, sorted by an oath sworn on a single Sunday.
The rest of the paper is an argument about whether that survives contact with everything else. Two questions decide it: is it big compared with the alternatives, and does it depend on which alternatives you control for.
All the rival explanations, standardized so they can be compared on one axis. Enlightenment diffusion does something. Literacy, population density and urbanization do essentially nothing. The oath is more than twice the size of anything else on the list — and the only one that survives being controlled for the others.
Run every combination of them instead. Here are all 16,384. The distribution sits at 104 years of delay; the smallest estimate anywhere in it is 81; the weakest t-statistic is 3.7. There is no specification in which this result goes away.
Departments are big, and anything that varies across regions of France is a rival explanation. So the genealogies let you go down a level: 11,727 individuals, born across 440 districts, each matched to the oath where they were born.
Not because it got rich: secularization begins in the Paris basin, in Provence and in parts of the southwest, and Provence was among the poorest regions in France. What those places had in common is that they had been among the most devout.
So: a backlash. But against what, exactly? The paper’s answer needs two institutions of the Ancien Régime, and both of them are strange to modern eyes.
The paper looks to the close ties between Church and crown under the Ancien Régime. The Declaration of the Clergy of 1682 asserted the liberties of the French Church and the monarchy’s authority in temporal affairs. Religious conflict, including the crown’s opposition to Jansenism, and resentment of royal taxes may have made those ties costly for the Church.
On 24 August 1572 the killing of Huguenots began in Paris and spread through the provinces for weeks. It is the moment the Wars of Religion stopped being a war between armies. What followed was thirty more years of it. Through those years militant Catholicism, backed by Spain and the Guise family, held Paris and most of northern and central France against a Protestant claimant to the throne. That alliance was the Catholic League — and where it held, the Counter-Reformation arrived as an imposition rather than a persuasion.
24 August 1572
The second institution is the gabelle, the salt tax. Salt was not optional — you needed it to preserve food through the winter — and under the fiscal machinery Colbert systematized for Louis XIV its price varied across the kingdom by a factor of sixty, depending purely on where you were born. Around Paris every household had to buy a fixed quantity each year at the crown’s price, whether it wanted the salt or not, and smuggling was punished with the galleys. Of all the grievances written down in the cahiers de doléances of 1789, the salt tax appears more often than any other.
c. 1789
The paper asks whether the association between Church and crown helped weaken religious practice where both the Counter-Reformation and royal taxation were strong.
The proposed mechanism is a backlash against the Church’s association with a resented state. The historical patterns are consistent with this interpretation, though they do not directly reveal what each individual believed.
1619–1683
Which is testable, because France measured churchgoing directly in 1966 — four centuries after the League and three after Colbert. Split the country both ways at once.
“Place on the map the zones of widespread Jansenism, of early and persistent dechristianization, and of rapid, continuous, and steep declines in fertility, and you will see that they superimpose perfectly.” Pierre Chaunu, quoted in Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution
England industrialized first. Yet from 1760 to 1870, income per head grew at a similar cumulative rate in France and England. The paper asks whether France’s early fertility decline helped raise income per person even before the country matched England’s industrial development.
Fewer births changed the denominator of income per head; growth in production changed the numerator.
Income per head in each country, expressed as cumulative growth: how much richer a person is than the same country’s person in 1760. Both lines therefore pass through 100 in that year, and the slope — not the level — is the thing to watch.
Read the left half. England climbs steeply toward the line: it is 27% poorer in 1680 than it will be in 1760, so it grows by more than a quarter over those eighty years. France barely moves — it is already at roughly its 1760 income in 1680. England is pulling away.
Then watch the slopes. From 1760 the two lines climb together, and by 1870 both stand at almost exactly twice their 1760 level. A century of the Industrial Revolution, and the country that had it and the country that did not end up with the same cumulative growth in income per head.
Income per head is output divided by people. France’s early fertility decline slowed population growth, potentially raising income per person; England’s industrialization increased production. The comparison motivates the paper’s argument, although the two paths cannot by themselves establish the size of each contribution.
The population comparison is a thought experiment, not a forecast of what would necessarily have happened: France would have had roughly 255 million people if its population had grown at England’s rate since 1750. The paper argues that an early fertility decline also helped raise French living standards. The companion page Escaping Malthus explores the implications for migration.
France’s experience complicates a familiar story in which development comes first and smaller families follow. Here the fertility decline began early, and the evidence points to religious and cultural change as an important part of the explanation.