Strength in Numbers

Population, Reproduction, and Power in Eighteenth-century France

© BnF - Fashionable mother. The mother as she should be; anonymous

"All wealth and strength lie in people," wrote the French jurist Jean Bodin in 1576. This succinct pronouncement came to constitute the basis of populationism, a doctrine that took hold in Europe-particularly France-in the eighteenth century and that Carol Blum, in a book just translated into French and published in the/INED’s "Etudes et Enquêtes Historiques" collection, rightly characterizes as "polymorphous."

From that moment, the countries of Europe became obsessed and indeed haunted by the thought of a terrible loss in population since Antiquity. Montesquieu proclamation in the Lettres Persanes (1720) that Europe now contained a mere one-fiftieth of the number of inhabitants it had at the time of Julius Caesar marked the end of any possible optimism on the subject. His greatly underblown figure was not corrected until thirty years later-to one-tenth as many. One effect of the celebrity of the thinker who was yet to write the Esprit des Lois was that populationism and depopulationism became protagonists in a demographic battle that, albeit on a matter of questionable urgency, remained quite virulent throughout the century.
It is these controversies that Carol Blum retraces in her new book, organized chronologically overall. Much attention is naturally devoted to the great thinkers of the century:

  • Montesquieu, who saw the Christian prohibition against divorce as a factor in depopulation, a view that enabled him to take a dig at his favourite adversary-religion;
  • Voltaire, who, though sceptical about the issue, used statistics to establish a more objective point of view;
  • and Rousseau, for whom population growth could only be a "catastrophe" if not linked to family reconstruction and preservation.

But Carol Blum went beyond examining these well-known stances and clashes between the ideas of famous thinkers; many considerably less familiar authors are also brought into the debate. For example, Le Guay de Prémontval, who vigorously defended polygamy as a means of repopulation; Cerfvol, who argued in favor of divorce for the same reason, and a swarm of litterateurs, including Dorat and Bablot-not to mention Diderot-who set out to rescue the threatened doctrine of populationism with their representations of the beneficial effects of kinship.

All these claims and theses necessarily gave rise to population policies, including those implemented during the French Revolution-a moralizing of mores, first of all, and the practice of virtue, understood as the best means to produce an abundant, healthy population. But the continuing triumph of populationism soon opened the way for Malthusianism, a development announced at the end of Blum’s work. Malthus’ 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population opened an entirely new perspective on the history of populations.

Source: Carol Blum, 2013, Croître ou périr, Ined, Collection : Études et enquêtes historiques [FR]
Online: November 2013