En announcing, Tuesday January 16, a “demographic rearmament”, the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, is part of a long tradition. Contemporary pronatalist discourses were born in the aftermath of the defeat by Prussia in 1870, attributed to the relative stagnation of the birth rate (beginning in the mid-18th century).e century, a hundred years before most of our neighbors).
This concern for political and military power finds, in a certain way, mercantilist traditions. It also marks an ideological turning point, to the extent that, vis-à-vis the Church, the dominant republican discourse was rather Malthusian, calling for self-control, to prefer the quality of children (their education) to their quantity. The elites then readily stigmatized large, miserable families, seen as the result of unbridled sexuality, improvidence, even debauchery.
Reviving the birth rate is not, at first glance, a concern of political leaders. It takes root in multiple associations with diverse ideas. The National Alliance for the Increase of the French Population, created in 1896 by the statistician Jacques Bertillon, is well anchored in the republican elites. Others, like the Popular League of Fathers and Mothers of Large Families, founded in 1908 by Captain Simon Maire, recruited among employees and the petty bourgeoisie through conferences throughout France. It was capable of organizing major demonstrations such as the one which, in 1911, contributed to the creation of a parliamentary group “for the protection of birth rates and large families”.
The request for assistance was in fact part of their motivations, at a time when the Republic excluded the Church from a number of social responsibilities with the separation law of 1905. On July 14, 1913, a law was thus unanimously passed assistance to large families in need.
France did not wait for Vichy
The slaughter of the Great War can only reinforce the attention paid to these questions. It gives rise to the creation of new associations of various tendencies, some of which are pacifist. The next stage led to the federation of these associations, including Catholics, thanks to the interpersonal skills of Auguste Isaac, a Catholic patron from Lyon, deputy and minister of commerce in 1920, whose initially pronatalist and often nationalist orientation, the moralistic concern and the defense of the traditional family model will dominate the field for two decades.
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