France, Fertility - and the Future That Never Was

I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently about demographic shifts in the modern world (and projections for the future). Inevitably, I’ve been looking at historical trends too - and in particular at causes and effects of change in the past.

So today: a long post today about history, fertiliy and France; and some reflections about elsewhere too.

I hope you enjoy.

In 1700, France stood at the apex of European civilisation.

With a population of around 25 million people - more than a quarter of all those who lived in Europe at the time - it dwarfed England, outnumbered the princely states of Germany, and loomed large over Spain and Italy.

Its armies were feared, its monarch admired, its art, literature and music extraordinarily inventive, and its language shaping diplomacy and courtly culture from Moscow to Madrid.

France was not just a power; it was dominant: in 1700, almost 1 in 25 inhabitants on Earth - and one in five in Europe - were French.

Yet three centuries later (and with apologies to my French friends), France commands a far more modest presence in global affairs.

Today, France is home to just under 70 million people - less than one percent of the global population.

Although it is still a country that is powerful, influential and much loved, France has been overtaken not only by its old rivals but by countries that were barely on the periphery of global importance in 1700.

Why? What changed?

I’ve been reading work by the ground-breaking economic historian Guillaume Blanc, including this excellent piece on The Cultural Origins of the Demographic Transition in France.

Blanc argues that the answer lies not in warfare or empire, but in family structure, cultural norms and an early and radical break with the reproductive traditions that governed the rest of the world.

Here’s why.

The French began having fewer children from the mid-eighteenth century onwards - long before modern contraception, before public health reforms and before industrialisation could rationally explain it.

Fertility fell steadily in France even when infant mortality was high and life expectancy low.

This stands in contrast to countries like England, where demographic transition began only in the late nineteenth century, or Germany, where it took hold even later.

France did not wait for wealth to reduce its fertility. It pioneered a new way of thinking about family and reproduction in a world still governed by the logic of subsistence agriculture and dynastic inheritance.

So: in 1760, France’s population was five times larger than England’s.

If it had grown at a similar pace to that of its long-term rival across the Channel over the next two centuries, it would have had over 250 million people today.

If its overseas expansion had mirrored that of Britain, which seeded vast anglophone populations across North America, Oceania, and Africa, there might now be over 570 million people of French descent worldwide.

Instead, the demographic lead France once held evaporated. And as that happened, so too did its geopolitical heft.

This long decline was not the result of disaster or collapse. It happened incrementally, family by family, across parishes and provinces.

Blanc and his fellow researchers worked through data from digital genealogical records - and discovered that French women began marrying later, spacing children further apart and ultimately having fewer children well before similar patterns emerged elsewhere.

This transformation was deeply cultural. It preceded the industrial revolution; it predated compulsory schooling; it even outpaced the availability of clean water - something that has an important link to mortality: poor sanitation, inefficient hygiene practices and dirty water still account for hundreds of thousands of child deaths today.

The echoes of the early cultural shifts in France still resonate - as do similar patterns taking place in other countries.

France’s pioneering role in demographic decline from the mid 1700s is now being emulated - if not eclipsed - by countries that are very different in history and context: Japan, South Korea, and increasingly, the United States.

Japan offers the most striking modern parallel.

In 1949, the total fertility rate in Japan stood at 4.3 children per woman. By 1957, it had already fallen below 2.0.

The transition was extraordinarily fast - much faster than France’s - but the trajectory echoes the same underlying principle: a cultural reassessment of family size.

Following its defeat in World War II, Japan embraced rapid modernisation, urbanisation, and a reorganisation of gender roles. The economic boom of the 1960s coincided with a social shift toward smaller families, driven in part by rising costs, housing constraints, and education pressures.

By the 1990s, Japan’s population was peaking. In 2005, it began to shrink.

Today, Japan has a fertility rate of around 1.26 and one of the oldest populations in the world, with nearly 30% of its citizens over the age of 65. Rural towns are vanishing. Schools are closing. Cemeteries are growing.

South Korea’s story is more recent but more dramatic.

In 1970, the average South Korean woman had 4.5 children.

By 1985, that number had fallen to 2.1—the replacement level. By 2005, it had dropped to 1.08. And in 2023, it hit an unprecedented low of 0.72, the lowest fertility rate ever recorded in a major economy.

The causes are multifaceted - an intense education culture, sky-high housing prices, brutal work hours, and gender inequality - but the consequence is stark: a nation shrinking faster than any in history. Seoul is now dotted with kindergartens that have closed down because of the shortage of children; incentives such as child allowances have not reversed the trend.

Like France in the 1760s, South Korea is ahead of its peers not economically, but culturally.

Women are choosing to delay marriage or to forgo it altogether. Young people are opting out of traditional family structures. A 2022 survey found that over 65% of Korean women in their 20s and 30s do not want children.

This is not because of war, or famine, or disease, or any other limiting factor that would usually accompany the birth of fewer children. Rather, it is the result of a collective reimagining of what life and fulfilment look like.

The United States, by contrast, has long been seen as the exception among developed countries.

With a relatively high fertility rate through much of the twentieth century, the US avoided the demographic stagnation that gripped Europe and East Asia.

Even in 2007, just before the Financial Crisis, U.S. fertility hovered at 2.12 - barely above replacement. But since then, American birth rates have plummeted.

By 2023, the total fertility rate stood at 1.62. Among college-educated women, it is significantly lower. The fall is not limited to white Americans. Hispanic birth rates - once a key driver of population growth - have also declined sharply, falling from 2.7 in 2007 to 1.9 today.

America's demographic transition is also being driven by multiple interlocking factors: economic instability, student debt, delayed homeownership, and a decline in religious participation all play a role. So too, suggest some economists, does the desire to enjoy life, to party and travel and even to waste time on digital devices: all these reflect the fact that more people have more options. So that means more focus on oneself.

Rather than pick these complex motivations apart, I think what matters here most is the convergence of attitudes: like their French, Japanese and Korean counterparts, many young Americans no longer see marriage or childrearing as necessary parts of adulthood. Culture and expectations have changed.

And here is where the French precedent becomes most illuminating.

France’s demographic shift did not depend on secularism, on wealth or on political decree. It emerged organically from shifts in values - about autonomy, about fulfilment, even about the meaning and purpose of life.

When historians look back on the early twenty-first century, they may see not demographic anomalies - France, Japan, South Korea - but a global convergence around the same set of ideas that took root in Normandy and the Dordogne 250 years ago.

This reframes how we think about modernity: it suggests that technological progress and industrial output are not the only - or even the primary - drivers of human behaviour. Culture, norms, belief systems: these are powerful levers.

I think that matters at a time when it is easy to blame the digital revolution for all the problems of the world of today and tomorrow.

In the French case, it was a weakening of traditional religious and patriarchal authority that opened the door to reproductive autonomy. Blanc argues that the grip of the Catholic Church began to weaken around 30 years before the French Revolution - and that this was the key driver of the fertility decline.

This can be charted by measuring how language changed, including reference to debts owed to Nature (rather than to God), by seeing how requiem masses declined in frequency, how invocations of the Virgin Mary fell, and even by assessing how the average weight of funeral candles reduced significantly.

Curiously, it seems that secularization did not pick up fastest in rich, urban regions as one might have suspected, but in peripheries - like Provence, a place that is lovely to live in or to visit, but not famous as a hotbed of radical thinking.

In Japan and Korea, it was the collapse of old Confucian hierarchies and the intensification of consumer modernity. In the U.S., it is a diffuse but potent mix of economic anxiety and post-religious individualism. Each country took its own path, but the destination is similar.

What are the consequences of such decline?

Economically, ageing societies face shrinking workforces, rising pension burdens and slower growth.

Japan’s GDP growth has stagnated since the 1990s. South Korea’s labour force is expected to shrink by over 30% by 2050. France, despite a generous family policy - including paid parental leave, subsidised childcare, and child benefits - still hovers around a fertility rate of 1.8. The U.S. has no coherent family policy at all.

But beyond economics lies something deeper. A society that stops replacing itself must grapple with its purpose: who is the future for? What stories are being told - and lost?

I’m curious too about what might have been.

Had France maintained higher fertility into the nineteenth century, the twentieth century would almost certainly have unfolded along altered lines.

A larger population would have given France far greater military and industrial weight in 1914, perhaps shortening the First World War or changing its dynamics entirely.

With a demographic base comparable to Germany’s, France might not have been forced to rely so heavily on British and American support, and could have emerged from the conflict in a stronger position to shape the post-war settlement.

In the 1930s and 1940s, a more populous France would likely have been better able to deter Nazi aggression; the humiliating defeat of 1940 may never have occurred, or at least not so swiftly.

The colonial empires of Britain and France might have been more evenly matched, potentially altering the speed and nature of decolonisation.

After 1945, a France with 150 or 200 million citizens would have been a central pillar of NATO and of the European project, reducing the dominance of the United States within the Western alliance.

And the entire Cold War balance might have looked less bipolar, with France - not just the USSR - acting as the counterweight to Washington’s global power.

As all good history should do, it makes you think….

More soon.