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-before-used data on religious beliefs across 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 in order to study individuals at the time and to establish a causal interpretation. I control for time-varying unobservables with fixed effects, study the effect of religiosity before and after secularization with difference-in-differences, and exploit the choices of second-generation migrants to account 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-02318180v7⟩