Impact of Political and Industrial Revolutions 213Kingdom leaped upward from 14.5 million in 1791 to 18.1 million in1811.^56
In France, government policy was no less successful in coping with
the problem presented by unemployed and underemployed man
power; but the mix was different. A larger proportion of young
Frenchmen went into the armies, while industrial-commercial growth,
though real enough, went more slowly, partly because, as the territo
rial base of French power expanded, it brought new industrial regions
under the jurisdiction of the government in Paris, so that Liège and
Turin as well as older armaments centers in France proper began to
contribute to the French war effort. Similarly, cotton mills and other
new industries, when they sprang up, clustered in Belgium and Alsace
on the borders of historic France.
The different balances of military as against commercial-industrial
occupations that divergent government policies opened up for previ
ously underemployed young men in France and Britain had long-
range consequences of great importance. French war losses, totaling
between 1.3 and 1.5 million between 1792 and 1815,^57 together with
the notable drop in birthrates in France that became manifest with the
new century, meant that the stimulus (and problem) of rapid popula
tion growth disappeared permanently from French soil with the resto
ration of the Bourbons, whereas Great Britain and Ireland, as well as
Germany and the rest of continental Europe, continued to exhibit a
rate of population growth throughout the nineteenth century that left
the French far behind.^58
56. Figures from Deane and Cole, British Economic Growth, p. 8.
57. Jacques Dupaquier and Christine Berg-Hamon, “Voies nouvelles pour l’histoire
démographique de la révolution française: Le mouvement de population de 1795 à
1800,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 47 (1975): 8, offer a total for French
war losses of 1.3 million; but by adding Lefebvre’s total of 600,000 war losses for the
years 1792–99, cited in n. 21 above, to a new total of 900,000 for losses under the
empire worked out by J. Houdaille, “Pertes de l’armée de terre sous le premier Em
pire,” Population 27 (1972): 42, one gets a total of 1.5 million. Inasmuch as Houdaille’s
data and methods are clearly superior to previous calculations, the larger figure is likely
to be correct. Houdaille calculates that no less than 20.5 percent of all French males
born between 1790 and 1795 inclusive died before 1816 from war-related causes.
These were the age classes most severely affected. Ibid., p. 50.
58. What happened to French birthrates to set them off from the rest of Europe is a
capital question of historical demography. The prevalence of peasant property in land
must have mattered; postponing marriage until inheritance of land was in sight for the
newlyweds could have a powerful effect in slowing population growth, as the history of
Ireland after the famine of 1845 proves. But the French must also have resorted to
deliberate birth control on a scale other European peoples did not approach until the
twentieth century. It seems possible that French soldiers’ experiences with prostitutes
in the wars may have spread familiarity with birth control methods among the French,