Introduction

Even though neglected by historians since E. Levasseur and a few other precursors, the demographic analysis of the labour force has been the subject of much contemporary attention, and it is not surprising that the failings of historians have been redeemed by demographers and economists. One fundamental demographic fact is apparent, however: the weakness of French population growth from the 1800s until the 1940s. With its 28.3 million inhabitants at the end of the eighteenth century, France was the ‘China of Europe’, accounting for 15 to 16 per cent of its population, while Napoleon's military success was based largely on her big battalions. But this population growth was checked very early and slowed down after 1850, when it reached 35.7 million. In 1911, France's 39.6 million inhabitants made up only 9 per cent of the European total, and the density of her population was the lowest on the continent, at a level in 1846 that Great Britain had reached in 1775. The population increased by only 14 per cent in 60 years or so, as against 78 per cent in Great Britain, 64 per cent in the Netherlands, 56 per cent in Belgium, and 57 per cent in Germany. The nineteenth century, long considered the period of decisive transformation, was in fact one of stagnation, and a catastrophe intervened after the First World War before a spectacular reversal of the situation, in a twentieth century which, beneath superficially confused trends, was to prove an epoch of real change.