Modernization Before Industrialization: Cultural Roots of the Demographic Transition in France

Guillaume Blanc (1)

1 Brown University

This research identifies the origins of the early demographic transition in eighteenth century France. Before the French Revolution and more than a hundred years before the rest of Europe, this event remains one of the 'big questions of history' in part because of limited data availability. I document an important process of dechristianization with novel data on religious beliefs over time and space. Using standard econometric methods and machine learning with census data, I find large, significant, and robust results suggesting that secularization accounts for the bulk of the decline in fertility. Finally, I draw on a novel dataset crowdsourced from publicly available genealogies to study individuals in the eighteenth century and to establish a causal interpretation, by controlling for time-varying unobservables, studying the effect of treatment before and after secularization in a differences-in-differences framework, and exploiting the choice of second generation migrants in order to control for unobserved institutional factors.

Mots clés: modernization; development; fertility; secularization

Domaines: Economies et finances; Histoire; Démographie; Religions

Guillaume Blanc. Modernization Before Industrialization: Cultural Roots of the Demographic Transition in France. 2020. ⟨hal-02318180v3⟩