How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too)

by David Goldman

So the first frost of the coming demographic winter was already felt in the France of 1840, just two generations after the French Revolution. Not gradual attrition of traditional society by modernization, but the sudden upheaval of revolution and war had transformed France from a country of peasants. The French Revolution was the world’s first attempt to found a society upon reason rather than religion. Specialists still debate the causes of the great French fertility decline in the nineteenth century. The usual factors such as urbanization and literacy do not explain it. Some demographers argue that the contraceptive methods employed by a licentious aristocracy at Europe’s most hedonistic court were adopted by the population at large.33 Perhaps Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo and the national humiliation France suffered in its aftermath played a role. Perhaps the secularism of the French Revolution eroded the fertility of the earlier traditional society. Whatever the cause, during the second half of the nineteenth century, the population of France simply ceased to grow. In 1800 there were 29 million Frenchmen and only 21 million Germans; by 1900 there were 40 million Frenchmen and 56 million Germans. England in 1800 had fewer than 9 million inhabitants; by 1900 it had 31 million. French married couples simply had fewer children than their German or English counterparts.34 Mommsen, de la Malle, and other scholars observed the slow decline of France, once Europe’s most populo...

populous country and now a second-rate power, in an era when general staffs wrote battle plans on the basis of manpower tables.