The country’s declining fertility is an underrated cause of the 20th century’s misfortunes.
Originally published January 2022.
Britain’s population will soon be in natural decline, so that over the course of the 2020s we’ll see 60,000 more deaths than births. We knew that this point was coming, but the ONS had previously estimated it occurring sometime in the following decade. Unlike the end of the world, forever being postponed, decline keeps on being brought forward.
From now on, all the increase in numbers is entirely down to immigration and, for the first time in modern history, Britain’s natural population is shrinking in peacetime. Births outpacing deaths is just one of those features associated with that brief window of modernity from the age of railways to the age of emails.
Britain is not alone. Seventeen European countries already see more deaths than births, a social transformation resulting from millions of individual decisions taken many decades ago, but which are only now having an effect.
“Some trends are hard to explain except as impersonal social forces and yet still have huge consequences: the biggest example of the past few centuries is the unexplained collapse of French fertility from the 17th century”
Being a massive sexual inadequate who likes to read about Julius Caesar and Napoleon in my spare time, I normally have some sympathy for the great man theory of history. Yet some trends are hard to explain except as impersonal social forces and yet still have huge consequences: the biggest example of the past few centuries is the unexplained collapse of French fertility from the 17th century. Although not the action of any individual ruler, or law, or even one particular cause, this played a decisive role in leading us down the road to the First World War, Communism, Nazism and everything else that went wrong in the last 120 years.
During the Middle Ages, France’s population was around five times that of England; indeed it was called the China of Europe, in reference to its densely populated countryside, teeming with half-starved peasants just itching to go on some demented crusade or murder the aristocrats.
Today Rouen is home to just over 100,000 people, with a larger surrounding population, and while it has a mostly beautiful city centre and a metro, it doesn’t feel like the centre of the world. Yet at the time of its capture by rampaging English hooligans under Henry V, the Norman capital had 70,000 people, twice the population of London; in fact, some parts of Normandy have fewer people today than in the 14th century.
