The fertility decline in the industrial area of Charleroi during the second half of the 19th century: did sedentaries and migrants have a different behaviour?

Industrial cities are a particularly dynamic element of nineteenth century Walloon demography. The new slightly hybrid urban model, grown from small rural communities but which never looked like classical cities, was characterised by a very quick demographic growth, resulting from a high number of births and a relatively low mortality together with a relatively high in-migration (Eggerickx, 1998). Birth rates in industrial cities had a net and decisive decline during the last quarter of the century. From 1872-1875 their decline was uncontrollable.1 The general fertility index (If) and the marital fertility index (Ig) also experienced an important decrease between the censuses of 1866 and 1880 (Eggerickx, 1995; Oris, 1995). Figure 1 shows the evolution of the crude birth rate from 1856 to 1910 for several communes of the industrial area of Charleroi. During the first three quarters of the century, birth rates remained high between 35 and 45 per thousand, but around 1872-1875 they brutally and irreversibly diminished. From 1873 to 1886, birth rates in all these communes decreased in average about 30 per cent. This descent stopped from 1886 until 1900 and restarted with greater speed at the beginning of the twentieth century. This chronology and more specifically the moment at which birth rates started to fall, around 1872-1875, was common for nearly all communes. This irreversible decrease of birth rates and fertility in the industrial basin of Charleroi can be situated within the historical context of the great economic depression of 18731892. THIERRY EGGERICKX Research Associate (FNRS), GéDAP, U.C.Louvain