The article argued that between 1340 and 1720, the population of France was basically stagnant.    Except for certain periods of catastrophe and the aftermath of catastrophe, France's population hovered between 17 and 19 million.   (At the beginning of the 1990s  it was over 56 million.)  Disease, famine, warfare and taxation canceled out increase through births.    France had attained -- or was trapped on -- an ecological plateau that it would only transcend in the 18th century.

The article inspired me to discuss population cycles in history early in this course.

In the 20th century we think that the population just goes up.   If you take a long enough view of human history, or just look at the 19th and 20th centuries, that's accurate.    But if you look closer at the pre-modern experience, there are some big ups and downs.

Some "ups:"
 

• The period of Roman domination of Europe, up to about the 2nd century A.D.
• The High Middle Ages in Europe (1100 to 1300)

Some "downs:"

• Bronze Age Britain seems to have been "overpopulated and "overexploited" (given their technology) before 1500 B.C., and experienced a contraction of population after 1500 B.C.
• The Mediterranean world after the 2nd c. A.D. experienced a population drop up to the 7th c.

Ladurie argued that the Early Modern period was neither boom nor bust, but a period of stagnation.

I believe he was exaggerating a bit for effect, and there were certainly sub-cycles between 1340 and 1720.
 

1.   The late 14th and early 15th centuries were a period of decline.   According to Ladurie's figures,

• In 1340, France had about 17m people.
• The Black Death (bubonic plague) may have killed 1/3 to 1/4 of these.
• In the next few decades the population continued to drop, bottoming out in the 1440s at about 9m.
2.   The later 15th century saw a fairly slow increase. It was  a period of low population and high wages, comparatively.   Perhaps a good time for the peasantry who were not land-hungry and could bargain for their valuable labor.

3.   The 16th century saw rapid increase.   By 1550 were there again 17m in France (Ladurie)?   Others might disagree.  Whatever the true figure, there was again pressure on resources.

4.   Ladurie believes that after 1550 growth was once again checked and by the 18th century the population was no greater than 19-20 million.   Flinn, a later writer, believes that the population in 1700 was less than it was in 1300!

What is the human story behind this situation?

During the EM period, people often died in periodic crises that few of us in Canada can visualize.    These were great enough to cancel out growth, and were more destructive than in the High Middle Ages.

Famines

People were very vulnerable to what seems to have been an uncertain climate.   The reliance on grain endangered them.   They ate bread morning, noon, and night, and grain crops can be wiped out quickly by drought or storm at the wrong times.

One example were the three bad years out of five in Scotland in the 1620s.   After the third crop failure, in 1623, the town of Dunfermline buried 442 people.    In 1620, there had only been 28 burials.

This was a regional crisis -- southern England got off scot(!)-free.   But all of Europe could be affected, as in the 1690s.

Disease

There was a variety of cyclical diseases, including smallpox and typhus, and non-cyclical tuberculosis which became a constant killer in the 18th c.

The worst was bubonic plague.   There was never a "pandemic"  after the 14th century, but local mortality, especially in urban populations, could be quite high.

War

I am not talking about death in battle.   Being a soldier was dangerous.   However, the major population effects of war were through the casualties among the civilian population.

Michael Flinn cites the case of Danish Schleswig and Holstein in 1659, when the Polish army invaded, confiscated all food supplies, and spread typhus (unintentionally) among the now-starving population.  The average parish in the hardest hit area lost 80-100% of its population.   Some may have been refugees.   In any case, the population did not recover for 110 years.

This is hardly a unique incident, unfortunately.   A friendly army spread diseases through France in 1627-8 which may have killed a million people.

Taxation

Taxation, especially to support warfare, could be almost as destructive.   It was so savage and arbitrary that it contributed to the weakening and death of the poor by depriving them of the necessities of life, such as seed-corn (next year's seed).

Think of Ethiopia in the 1980s.
 

Can we, then, speak of a "normal" death rate?   Sudden death was all too familiar, but also unpredictable.

Even with these catastrophes, most people seem to have been more concerned to limit population than to increase it.  There was no big effort to compensate for the common infant mortality.    Women did not have children particularly early (an obvious way to boost the birth rate) nor on average did they have lots of children.  (More details on this in lecture.)

In peasant communities, women did not marry until they had acquired property or access to land.   For most, this meant putting off having children for 10 years longer than biology dictated -- they spent the time working and saving.   There were regulations and fines for those who had illegitimate children, and the numbers of these were quite low.

Once married, couples did their best to produce just the number of children that would maintain their prosperity.

Children of better-off parents were more likely to survive than the offspring of the poor.   This made downward mobility very likely -- some of the descendants of the rich would be forced to take the places of poor people who had no children of their own.

One group among the poor was more fertile than others:  workers in domestic industries like the cloth trade.   They did not have to wait to marry if there was work available, and in many trades quite young children could be put to work to help out the family.    On the other hand, such people were vulnerable to economic downturns.   Their success in raising children was not assured.

This is a quick and dirty foray into population history in the EM period.   I hope it gives you a taste of how life was different.
I think it especially worth taking note of the fact that even a high level of mortality did not guarantee that children would have opportunities to step into.   Rigidities in the economy meant that people were (in most cases) unwilling to marry early or have too many children.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Michael W. Flinn, The European Demographic System, 1500-1820
J.R. Hale, War and Society in Renaissance Europe 1450-1620
John Hatcher, Plague, Population and the English Economy, 1348-1530
David Herlihy, "Three Patterns of Social Mobility in Medieval Society," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (1973)
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, "History That Stands Still" in The Mind and Method of the Historian
E.A. Wrigley, Population and History
 

Copyright (C) 1999, Steven Muhlberger.