TRANCE'S POPULATION PROBLEM
By B. R. GILLIE
NOTHING makes a Frenchman dislike the English more than the assumption that in the next war his country should provide the infantry while the English fight on the sea, in the air and in the factory. He is acutely aware that the very stuff of France is threatened, its flesh and blood.
There were 43,000 more deaths than births in France in the first half of 1938. The suggestion that this irreplaceable material should be used as cannon-fodder while the Anglo- Saxon makes shells strikes him as indecent.
In the last War 1,325,000 Frenchmen were killed as com- pared with 744,000 soldiers from Great Britain. Since the total population of France is smaller and more stable (so that the age groups are more equally proportioned) this meant that 8.8 per cent. of the men of the United Kingdom between 20 and 45 were killed, but 18.2 per cent. of the Frenchmen of the same age. This proportion was only surpassed in the case of Hungary with 18.7 per cent., whereas that for Germany was 15.5 per cent. In comparison with England the losses of the agricultural population were probably proportionately still heavier, for the industrial workman was rarer and could therefore be less easily spared from the factory. English visitors to France will do well to count the names on the village War memorials and ask what is the population of the parish. They will then understand why the country popula- tion is inclined to support M. Bonnet and the Munich agreement.
The population of present French territory in Europe has increased in the last forty years from 40,360,000 to 41,900,000 in spite of the losses of the War. At least one in ten of the population, however, is of foreign origin, for whereas the number of foreigners was a million in 1896, and of naturalised citizens 200,000, there were in 1936 two and a half million foreigners living in France and the number of those naturalised since the War is over 800,000. In all about 1,900,000 persons seem to have been naturalised under the French Republic. It is evident, therefore, that the number of Frenchmen of the old stock must be rather less today than it was forty years ago.
The French birth-rate has been falling for longer, but much more slowly, than that of England and Wales. The English birth-rate has come down from 24.1 per thousand in 1913 to 14.9 in 1937, while the French birth-rate has fallen from 19.1 to 14.7, and was during 1935 and 1936 higher than the British. The French birth-rate is now at the level to which the German birth-rate fell in 1933, before Herr Hitler's measures began to take effect and raised it to 19 per thousand. No French Government measures could bring such quick results, because France, having had an almost stable population for two generations, has not an immense reserve of women in the prime of life like Germany— and to some extent England. A larger proportion of her adults are over 5o, and this, not bigger infantile mortality as is often supposed, is the main reason why French mortality is 3o much higher-15 per thousand as compared with 12.4 per thousand in Britain and 11.7 per thousand in Germany. It is France's adults rather than her babies that are dying off, partly from old age and partly owing to greater disease incidence (notably tuberculosis) for which bad housing bears a heavy responsibility.
France's population problem has become more acute than Britain's at this stage because of heavier losses in the War, because of a relatively low birth-rate over a longer period, and because with a stable population, industrialisation has been pushed forward since the War, filling the towns at the expense of the countryside. With the exception of Spain, every one of France's neighbours has a very much denser population than hers. This does not involve danger along the Belgian and German frontiers, where departments with relatively high birth-rates have received immigrants— not because the local stock is failing but to meet the demands of intensified economic activity.
In the centre and the south the situation is quite different. The population of the Gers has dropped from 314,845 in 1846 to 192,410 (2o,000 foreigners) in 1936, that of the Lot from 280,000 in 186o to 162,000, that of the Basses Alpes (on the Italian frontier) from 165,000 in 1789 to 85,000, including 6,000 foreigners, that of the Vaucluse, with its rich belt of country in the Rhone valley, from 268,225 in 1861 to 242,000 with 16,000 foreigneri, that of the Yonne between Fontainebleau and Burgundy from 386,000 in 1855 to 261,000 with ro,000 foreigners in 1936. The Var is increasing its population owing to the naval dockyards at Toulon and La Seyne, and the flourishing pleasure resorts along the coast, but inland farms are being abandoned and villages are falling into decay. To some extent this only involves a transfer of activity from desolate areas to more remunerative ones. Protestant parishes in the traditional Huguenot fastnesses of the south are being merged in one another for lack of population, whereas the number of French Protestant congregations in Paris has grown from three to over two dozen since the beginning of the last century. But on the whole this transfer of population means a drying up of the sources of national fertility in every sense, in fact a defeat for French civilisation which used to be broad- based on the countryside and the market town.
The various epidemics of vine diseases, notably phylloxera in the 'seventies, must be counted amongst the most im- portant events in modern French history, for their effect was to give a great impetus to the flight from the countryside throughout the south. The capital of the Lot department, Cahors (whose population has fallen from 18,000 to under 12,000 in thirty years), now lies amongst grass-grown terraced hills once covered with vines. , It is, of course, only the less valuable vineyards which have not been replanted, but the disastrous effect of the crisis caused by the disease was to drive the labourer with a small patch of his own land and no financial reserves into the town. This left the richer peasant and his wife to fend for themselves. It meant a hard life for them but very often a remunerative one. An acre of good asparagus land in the Vaucluse was bringing in about £125 a year in 1929. The disappearance of the hired man also involved the disappearance of his wife and daughters, who used to work in the house for the wealthier peasant's wife. This state o things has meant either that the peasants' daughters have decided that they would prefer more ease even with less money in the town or that the peasant's wife could not spare the time from making the earth fruitful in order to be fruitful herself. This has been accompanied over much of the French countryside by the growth of a materialist outlook, which lacks the ethical idealism of the older anticlericals. It is in the towns that French religious life has been showing remarkable vitality recently.
One of the most depressing examples of the failure of lay republicanism to maintain the flame of life in the countryside is the Yonne. This department contains at Sens, Auxerre and Vezelay some of the finest churches in France, but the inhabitants, who are well off and enjoy unusually good schooling • facilities, have deserted them without acquiring any other faith which inspires them to maintain a family. The school population has dropped even faster than the total population from 63,000 in 1873 to 27,50o in 1925, and then rose by 2,000 through the arrival of foreign labourers.
The increase of urban wages and leisure under the Front Populaire, combined with industrialisation in provincial centres in connexion with rearmament intensified the desire to leave the land as well as the demand for labour. Cheap housing schemes—the most urgent requirement for the raising of the birth-rate in the towns—were put out of the question by the attitude of the building trade union, which at the time of the exhibition had made the cost of construction about twice what it was in England.
In the country the most urgent problem would seem to be to keep the labourer on the land, if he is still there, and replace him if he has left for the town. (In Brittany, hitherto a population reserve, he is beginning to abandon the country- side.) There has not hitherto been anything in the nature of a recolonisation policy for the depopulated districts. There comes a moment when the slow withdrawal of population from a village becomes a rush owing to the practical diffi- culties of cultivating any longer amongst abandoned fields and living amongst deserted houses. If small credits could be advanced to immigrants so that they could be settled per- manently in villages threatened with this catastrophe the effect might be to keep French families on the land by giving them labour facilities both for work in the fields and in the house. Hitherto the acquirement of land by immigrants seems to hate been left to their own initiative. They have in fact usually been regarded by the French as an auxiliary force for unpleasant types of work, liable to be sent back to their countries of origin in an economic crisis, and not as a per- manent source of national strength.
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