Coale & Watkins
France was the first country on earth to start having fewer children — around 1760, a full century before anyone else, and while it was still poorer, less literate and less urban than England. Development did not cause it. The collapse of the Church’s hold on ordinary people did. Had France grown at England’s rate instead, there would be a quarter of a billion French today.
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.
Then, quietly, in the reign of Louis XV, French couples began having fewer children. No law told them to. No technology arrived. Nothing in the economy changed; if anything the gap with England ran the wrong way, and kept running that way for a century. It simply started, around 1760, and no other country in the world would do the same thing for another hundred years.
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.
Now the same country at England’s growth rate from 1750. There would be 255 million French people today — more than the United States had in 1990, in a country the size of Texas. That gap is the demographic transition. It is arguably the largest single fact about modern France, and it starts before the Revolution.
The standard theory says this should not have happened here first. Development is supposed to drive it: technology accelerates, schooling pays, parents trade quantity for quality. But in 1750 French literacy was about half of England’s. In 1800 the share of the French labor force outside agriculture was still below England’s in 1500. France reached in 1800 the income per head England had in 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 tell you how many children a woman had is 1851 — ninety years after the thing we want to watch. Before that there are 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 French fertility series, the standard reference, rests on about forty parishes, all small, all rural, 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.
It is the right question, and it has a checkable answer. Genealogies over-represent whoever left records and whoever has interested descendants. So the paper puts the crowd-sourced series beside every representative source that exists — life expectancy from the Human Mortality Database, urbanization from the census counts, French marital fertility from the Princeton census project, Louis Henry’s forty-parish reconstitution, and Wrigley and Schofield’s English parish registers.
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)
So the binding constraint was never technical. It was moral — and it was enforced weekly, in person, by a man in every parish in the kingdom. The Church’s position on contraception, historically discreet, had hardened sharply against the Reformation: marriage was for procreation, and the orthodox reading forbade spilling seed outside the due vessel, interdictio semen effundendi extra vas debitum. The confessional was where that rule met the household.
Which makes secularization, in this story, not a vague change of mood but a specific mechanical release. When the priest stopped being the person whose judgment mattered most, a method everyone already knew stopped being a sin you had to confess. As Roger Chartier put it, the spread of contraception within marriage in eighteenth-century France is a consequence of dechristianization, not a cause of it.
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.
Coincidence in time is suggestive, not conclusive. To do better you need to compare places — which means knowing, place by place, how religious France still was. There is no survey; Easter attendance, the best direct measure, is first collected in 1966.
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.
In France, uniquely, the Church had bought independence from Rome by mortgaging itself to the king: the Declaration of the Clergy of 1682 freed the French Church from the pope and subordinated it to the monarchy. Altar and throne became one institution. Then came Jansenism — rigorist, anti-Jesuit, hostile to religious and political elites — which Louis XIV answered by leveling its abbey at Port-Royal and backing the bull Unigenitus, made a law of the state in 1730. After that, opposing the Church meant opposing the crown. Add a century of fury over the salt tax, and by 1789 they were being pulled down together.
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
So here are two institutions that extracted: one from the soul, one from the cooking pot. Both were regional. Both were resented. And the paper’s claim is that neither of them, on its own, emptied a church.
The salt tax alone bred anger at the crown. The Counter-Reformation alone bred devout provinces that are devout still. It is where the two coincided — where the people policing your morals were also, visibly, the people taking your money — that faith did not survive the association.
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 is the country of the Industrial Revolution. France would not industrialize for another hundred years. And yet, measured from 1760, income per head in the two grows at almost exactly the same rate for a century.
England raised the numerator. France lowered the denominator.
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. England worked on the top of that fraction, with coal and cotton and railways; France worked on the bottom, by having fewer children from the 1760s onward. Different mechanism, same arithmetic — which is why a country that refused to industrialize kept pace with the one that invented it.
So the 255 million is not only a story about lost power. It is also the reason ordinary French people were better off in 1870 than the arithmetic of their economy had any right to deliver — and, on the paper’s reading, the reason several million of them never had to emigrate.
Which is worth holding on to now, when falling birth rates are read almost everywhere as a symptom of decline. The first country to have one did lose its position in Europe. Its people got richer anyway, at England’s rate, without England’s factories. And in the founding case of the demographic transition, the arrow does not run from development to fewer children. It runs the other way, and it starts in the bedrooms of villages where people were quietly deciding that the Church no longer had the last word on what happened in their houses.