N ° 2009 - 16 Marital fertility and wealth in transition era France , 1750 - 1850

The spectacularly early decline of French fertility is one of the great puzzles of economic history. There are no convincing explanations for why France entered a fertility transition over a century before anywhere else in the world. This analysis links highly detailed individual level fertility life histories to wealth at death data for four rural villages in transition-era France, 1750-1850. The results show that it was the richest groups who reduced their family size first and that they used ‘spacing’ strategies to achieve this. In cross section, measures of the environment for social mobility are strongly associated with the fertility decline. The evidence presented here demonstrates that socioeconomic status mattered during the early French fertility decline. This study is a first step towards reestablishing the French experience as paramount in our understanding of Europe’s demographic transition. ha ls hs -0 05 66 84 3, v er si on 1 17 F eb 2 01 1 Section 1: Introduction Economic explanations for the European fertility transition, such as demographic transition theory (Notestein 1945), micro economic theory (Becker 1960, 1991) and more recently unified growth theory (Galor 2004) have treated the early French fertility decline as ‘noise’, the extreme tail end of a normal distribution. This is the intellectual equivalent of treating Britain as the exception in explaining the Industrial Revolution. At the time fertility fell (apx. 1800), France was by far the largest country in Europe, excluding Russia, with a population of almost 30 million people representing 27.7% of the total population of Western Europe (calculated from Maddison 2003). This analysis links highly detailed individual level fertility life histories to wealth at death data for four rural villages in transitionera France. The period of analysis is approximately 1750-1850 (based on those who died 1810-70). The study presented here is the first to analyze the wealth-fertility relationship during the period of the French fertility decline. The quality of the data collected allows for an in-depth investigation of the wealth-fertility relationship between different demographic regimes, the mechanics behind these patterns and also allows the testing of various hypotheses for why fertility declined in France.