“France, beyond the graves, seeks the cradles; will you remain deaf to its prayer?”implored Paul Deschanel, future President of the Republic, in 1919, after the carnage of the First World War. More than a century later, in January, Emmanuel Macron also began a pro-natalist refrain, advocating, in a curiously martial expression, a “demographic rearmament”.
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The fight, this time, is not taking place in the trenches, but in the alcoves: the French, who in the 2000s were on a par with Ireland in terms of birth rate, are having fewer and fewer babies. In 2010, 832,799 children were born in France (excluding Mayotte), according to INSEE. In 2023, there were only 678,000 births, the lowest level since the Second World War. The fall in the birth rate, over thirteen years, is constant and significant and has tended to accelerate after the pandemic. The fertility indicator, which measures the number of children per woman, fell from 2.03 in 2010 to 1.68. Below, therefore, the fateful threshold of 2.1 needed to ensure generational renewal.
The “demographic rearmament” So would it be a political matter? France, of course, has a long history of family policies based on socio-fiscal measures. These were first significantly tightened in 1998, with the introduction of resource-based family allowances, then in 2015, when they were modulated according to income. At the same time, the tax advantages linked to the presence of children in the home were reduced.
A world threatened by wars
Has this prompted the French to reduce the size of their families? Not so sure, replies Julien Damon, former research director at the National Family Allowance Fund, professor at HEC and author of an essay on the subject. “The consensus of demographic and economic studies is that the link between family policies and fertility is very tenuous.”he observes. This is evidenced by the general decline in fertility throughout the world, regardless of the family policies pursued by governments.
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In South Korea, for example, spending on childbearing rose from 0.2% to 0.6% of gross domestic product between 2000 and 2020, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. To no avail: fertility, at 0.78 children per woman, remains one of the lowest in the world.
Nurseries, daycare centers, qualified staff…
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