France’s national institute for statistics and economic studies, INSEE, on Tuesday reported that close to 678,000 babies were born in the country in 2023, representing a year-on-year fall of 6.6%. The figures cap a progressive decline in the birth rate in France since 2011.
Just hours after publication of the INSEE report, Emmanuel Macron held a televised press conference in which he spoke of reviving the birth rate through a “demographic rearming”, a phrase and notion that appeared to be targeting a rightwing electorate, like other comments and proposals during his more than two-hour exchange with the press.
Mediapart turned to the eminent and veteran French demographer and historian Hervé Le Bras, 80, a director of studies at the prestigious School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, and a Fellow of Churchill College at Cambridge University, to ask for his analysis of the pronounced fall in the numbers of yearly births in France. In the interview below, he also gives his views on the French president’s comments on Tuesday, and the approach of the far-right in France and elsewhere towards the issue of national birth rates.
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Mediapart: Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday spoke of a “demographic rearming”, adding that “France will be stronger through the revival of its birth rate”. What do you think of this link made between the strength of a country and the birth rate?
Hervé Le Bras: The expression “rearming” is grotesque. One doesn’t produce children with guns. Furthermore, on the link between the birth rate and the power of the country, Emmanuel Macron is very dated. Usually, people cite [French philosopher] Jean Bodin from [his published work] Les six livres de la République, which dates from the 16th century. In it, he writes that “there are no riches, other than in men”.
Since then, there have been many studies carried out on the relationship between economic growth and demographic growth, and it has never been possible to prove the least causality. Germany provides the evidence of that. The country succeeded at an economic level better than France while having, for nearly 50 years, a birth rate of ‘half a child’ less than France.
On this subject, it would be better to interest oneself in what ecologists have to say about the question of the population. Today, we are no longer at all in this idea that numbers provide the strength.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Mediapart: How can one explain the regular fall of the birth rate in France over more than a decade?
HLB: In 2014, we were [editor’s note: at a rate of] two children per woman. In 2022, were at 1.8 [children per woman]. We were observing a slow fall. Then, all of a sudden, there was a drop of minus 6.6 percent.
The slow decline, over the long-term, is linked to a profound change in family structures. We can see, moreover, a convergence at a European level. The gaps between European Union member countries have been reducing for quite a while, because the birth rate is falling in countries where it was previously strong, and it is either steady or growing in those countries where it was weak.
The second explanation is the evolution of men-women relationships concerning diplomas and household tasks. In the 1980s, a slogan was launched in France according to which family life needed to be reconciled with professional life. It consisted of trying to make sure the family was not an obstacle to women’s careers. But it in fact led to women taking on a double day’s work – a day at work and a day for household chores, the family and the children.
For it to work well this model supposes that men take on more family tasks than in the past, whereas the surveys by INSEE [France’s national institute of statistics and economic studies] show that there has been a little bit of progress, but not much.
At the same time, and I think this is the important factor, women have over the last 40 years become clearly more [academically] qualified than men. So they don’t see why they would do these double-days, and they believe that their careers also count for something.
Take the three countries of southern Europe, Greece, Italy and Spain. They have very weak birth rates. This is explained by the difficulty in reconciling family life with professional life. A young woman with a child in Italy has nearly no chance of finding employment. The result: Italy is the country in Europe with the highest average age of maternity, and the lowest birth rate.
The possibility for women to have access to employment in relatively egalitarian conditions is really an important variable in the birth rate. Yet Emmanuel Macron didn’t pronounce the word “maternal” [as in the French for primary school] or the word “crèche” in his speech. It’s a true problem.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
There is a third explanation. The real cause of the baby boom is the rejection of the only child. There were major campaigns between the two wars which explained that to be an only child was bad for the child. This idea impregnated French mentality for a long time, but this taboo has been eroded. Psychologists have demonstrated that an only child is as well as the others, and the proportion of one-child families in France has risen.
Mediapart: There were fewer than 700,000 births in France in 2023, representing a fall of 6.6 percent compared with 2022. Is that sharp fall surprising?
HLB: We weren’t expecting it. We observed a slow fall since quite a few years, but that is an abrupt drop. It’s quite mysterious.
Mediapart: Should there be concern about the fall in the birth rate?
HLB: No, it’s not concerning. In the short-term, it’s even rather positive. There will be less pressure on the number of children per [school] class, about the number of children per teacher, provided that the state does not close classes. And then, a child is expensive, so households will have a little more money for consumption or savings.
It is a complete fantasy. There is no ‘great replacement’, it doesn’t exist.
On the other hand, in 20-25 years’ time, the less populous generations will be of an age for employment, and here this fall in the birth rate will pose a problem for funding pensions. But we have the time to see this coming, especially when a reform of the pension scheme is carried out every four or five years!
So I think it’s a mistake to be worried. Especially because the calculation, as always, is made on a basis of zero immigration, whereas immigration corrects, or will correct, this fall in the birth rate.
Mediapart: These demographic issues are also, historically, a theme of predilection for the far-right. Why is that so?
HLB: It’s a curious evolution. In the beginning [in France], the question of the birth rate was, rather, republican. For example, there is a large pro-birth association [to encourage a high birth rate] founded in 1891, called the National Alliance for the Growth of the French Population. Among its founders you have Émile Zola. You also have Jacques Bertillon, who was a defender of [Alfred] Dreyfus. This approach was considered more as patriotic, from a fear of Germany.
That changed in the 1930s, and then above all under Pétain [head of the collaborationist government during the WWII German occupation of France] with the motto “Work, family, homeland”. The birth rate then became a theme of the Right and even the far-right. As of that period, it was a means of saying that one must produce children and not accept immigrants.
Mediapart: Today, the far-right closely links the issue of the birth rate with the issue of immigration. Marine Le Pen speaks of a “immigrational submersion”, while her far-right rival Éric Zemmour talks about “the Great Replacement”.
HLB: It is a complete fantasy. There is no ‘great replacement’, it doesn’t exist. The stumbling block for the ‘great replacement’[theory] is the mix among couples. Racism is the hatred of mixing origins, it is one of the most profound markers of the far-right. As soon as you talk a little with the people from [Éric Zemmour’s far-right party] Reconquête, they absolutely refute the figures. They refute the modelling; they refute the statistics.
Mediapart: In Italy and in Hungary, when the far-right has gained power, it generally involves itself with the issue of the fall in the birth rate.
HLB: That’s right. For example, [Hungarian Prime Minister, Victor] Orbán has a major policy of the encouragement of births, with a return of women within the household. One can see that it doesn’t work. In general, the envisaged measures have very little effect. In that sense, the French far-right is out of date on the issue. In Italy, [prime minister] Georgia Meloni is, in the end, more realist. She understood that the only thing that works is to call upon immigration.
Mediapart: Is the fall in birth rates specific to Europe?
HLB: Not at all. In 2021, China was at 1.6 children per woman. Singapore is at one child per woman, Japan is at 1.25 and Taiwan is at 1.11.
In 2023, [the rate in] South Korea was at 0.78 children per woman. So you have also a convergence in the east of Asia with these very weak fertility rates.
It is perhaps the best example of the lack of effectiveness of policies to encourage birth numbers. In 2017, while the policy of one-child families was still in place, China was at 1.8 children per woman. Since then, this policy has disappeared; when the opportunity is provided to have more children, it is exactly the opposite that has happened.
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- The original French transcript of this interview can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse