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Starting around 1800, the historical evolution of the population in France has been extremely atypical in the Western World. Unlike the rest of EuropeFor the band of the same name, see Europe (band . Europe is a continent forming the westermost part of the Eurasian supercontinent. Europe is bounded to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the west by the Atlantic Ocean, to the south by the Mediterranean Se, France did not experience a strong population growth in the 19th century and first half of the 20th century. The birth rateIn demography, the crude birth rate of a population is the number of childbirths per 1000 persons per year. In some other contexts, birth rate may be taken to mean the average number of children born to each woman. 1 children per woman is considered a "ma in France diminished much earlier than in the rest of Europe. Consequently, population growth was quite slow in the 19th century, and the nadir was reached in the first half of the 20th century when France, surrounded by the rapidly growing populations of GermanyThe Federal Republic of Germany ( German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland is one of the world's leading industrialized countries, located in the middle of the European Union. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark and the Baltic Sea, to the east and the United Kingdom, experienced virtually zero growth. This, and the bloody losses in France's population due to the First World War, may explain the sudden collapse of France in 1940 during the Second World War. France was often perceived as a country irremediably on the decline. At the time, theories based on races were quite popular, and the dramatic demographic decline of France was often attributed (particularly in Nazi Germany, and also in some conservative circles in England and elsewhere) to the genetic characteristics of the French "race", a race destined to fail in the face of the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon races. These racial theories were ironicaly proven wrong right when they were offered, as the population of French descent living in French Canada was in those days experiencing the fastest population growth that was ever achieved by any Caucasian people around the world (not even Russia in its wildest population growth of the 19th century).
To better understand the demographic decline of France, it should be noted that France was historically the largest nation of Europe. During the 17th century one fifth of Europe’s population was French. Between 1815 and 2000, if the population of France had grown at the same rate as the population of Germany during the same time period, France's population would be 110 million today. If it had grown at the same rate as England and Wales, France's population would be 150 million today. And if we start the comparison at the time of King Louis XIV (the Sun King), then France would have the same population as the United States! This helps understand why France was so overwhelming in Europe at the time of Louis XIV or Napoleon, and it shows how much of a demographic decline the country experienced after 1800.
After 1945 however, France suddenly underwent a demographic recovery that no one could have foreseen. It is a fact that in the 1930s the French government, alarmed by the decline of France's population, had passed laws to boost the birth rate, giving state benefits to families with children. Nonetheless, no one can quite satisfactorily explain this sudden and unexpected recovery in the demography of France, which was often portrayed as a "miracle" inside France. This demographic recovery was again atypical in the Western World, in the sense that although the rest of the Western World experienced a baby-boom immediately after the war, the baby boom in France was much stronger, and above all it lasted longer than in the other countries of the Western World. In the 1950s and 1960s France enjoyed a population growth of 1% a year, which is the highest growth in the history of France, not even matched in the best periods of the 18th or 19th centuries!
After 1975, France's population growth has significantly diminished, being more in tune with the rest of Europe, but it still remains slightly faster than in the rest of Europe, and much faster than in the end of the 19th century or the first half of the 20th century. At the turn of the millennium, population growth in France is the fastest of Europe, matched only by Ireland and the Netherlands. However, it is significantly slower than in North America, where population trends have diverged from Europe after the 1970s.
The ranking below will help understand the past, present, and future weight of France's population in Europe and in the world:
(historical populations are counted in the 2004 borders)