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 first document an important process of dechristianization with never-used-before 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 at the time and to establish a causal interpretation, by controlling for time-varying unobservables with fixed effects, studying the effect of treatment before and after secularization with differences-in-differences, and exploiting the choice of second generation migrants to control for unobserved institutional factors. These findings reveal that changes in preferences and the transition away from tradition may shape development.

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-02318180v5⟩