France’s population growth was beginning to stagnate, and the country was unable to make good the loss of nearly one and a half million men on the battlefield. France’s share of the European population became steadily smaller. For the rest of the nineteenth century, there was more or less an equilibrium of power between the major continental European states, and on a larger scale, European colonial rivalries, so disruptive in the previous century, were now settled by international agreement, building on the experience of the Congress system and the Concert of Europe.
