(^214) Chapter Six
Thus it appears that the French learned to control births and the
British learned how to employ a growing population in industry and
trade largely as unintended by-products of the actions of their re
spective governments between 1792 and 1815. British technological
advantage lasted for half a century or so as a result of being first in the
field; the French moved far more slowly towards industrialization and
urbanism, retaining a numerical preponderance of peasants in their
society until after 1914.
Overall, one should recognize that both countries were strikingly
successful in coping with the crisis presented in the late eighteenth
century by unprecedented population growth occurring in a landscape
where uncultivated land was already in short supply. For in the
tumultuous years from 1789 to 1815 both France and Britain raised
their national wealth and power to new heights, whereas eastern
Europe lagged behind, even though, by any other standard, the eco
nomic and military growth of Russia and Austria was spectacular. But
increase in population and in army size did not require new forms of
human cooperation and management in the parts of Europe where
new hands could readily be put to work turning woods and wasteland
into fields. Extensive development of this sort was less valuable to
governments than the French-British pattern of exploring more inten
sive forms of integrating human effort on a mass scale, whether prin
cipally through command, as in France, or primarily through the mar
ket as in Great Britain. This was so because new settlement on former
wasteland quickly ran into the law of diminishing returns. Cultivators
occupying less and less fertile soil could only put a shrinking surplus of
agricultural products at the disposal of governmental and other urban
authorities. Ireland went the same way after 1815, in stark contrast to
the continued urban and industrial development of Great Britain. Like
eastern Europeans during the latter part of the nineteenth century, the
Irish had to resort to emigration as an escape from rural impoverish
ment, when the brutal force of famine did not supervene.
The precarious and spectacular success of French policy between
1792 and 1812 disguised a weakness that became flamingly apparent
and this, with the general secularization and break with Catholic teachings that the
revolution brought, may explain what happened to French birthrates. Jacques
Dupaquier, “Problèmes démographiques de la France napoléonienne,” Annales his
toriques de la Révolution française 42 (1970): 21, is the only authority I have seen who
recognizes the possible importance of wartime military experiences of sex as affecting
French family patterns after 1800; but any veteran of twentieth-century wars can
confirm the plausibility of this suggestion—and the improbability of finding written
sources as evidence.
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(Brent)
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