Strength in Numbers: Population, Reproduction, and Power in Eighteenth-Century France (review)

In tracing the rise of demography as an administrative science in Enlightenment and Revolutionary France, Blum demonstrates that debates about population helped to undermine the traditional authorities of Church and Crown. Her evidence includes the writings of prominent philosophes and less familiar authors whose ideas shaped the public discussion of demography. Although her methodological approach is not interdisciplinary, her analysis will interest scholars in various disciplines. The history of natalism relates to marriage, sexuality, gender, and divorce. It also accounts for the vogue of exoticism and incest in French novels and the legal reforms instituted by revolutionary leaders. Blum offers two arguments to explain the appeal of demography. First, population projects substituted quantifiable criteria for transcendental principle in the theory and practice of government. Second, the goal of increasing population provided moral consensus in an era of social upheaval and spiritual uncertainty.

Starting in the late seventeenth century, France was gripped by a "depopulation anxiety," which spawned a populationist campaign that continued through the Revolution of 1789 (10). In his best-selling novel of 1721, Les Lettres persanes, Montesquieu popularized the issue by exploring connections between fertility and religion, government, and climate. Montesquieu's novel is inconclusive, but it established population as a gauge of human happiness and governmental success.

In Chapter three, Blum traces how this criterion informed the Enlightenment campaign against celibacy. These attacks forged an ideology of reproduction as a natural right and civic duty that challenged Catholic teachings. To defend monachism, the Church deployed its own version of natalism by identifying secular celibacy, linked to libertinage and debauchery, as the true problem. Despite the discord between philosophes and theologians on many issues, their common commitment to procreation inspired the cult of family values at the end of the century.

Chapters four and five clarify the role of demography in debates about reforming the institution of marriage through legalized divorce and polygamy, respectively. Natalism fueled the pro-divorce campaign with the assumption that happier marriages were more fertile. These arguments continued to persuade despite mounting evidence that France's population was expanding not contracting. Real numbers mattered less than their manipulation in the service of diverse agendas. For example, interest in the sex ratio spurred an abundant literature promoting polygamy as a lost right of man and an "infallible recipe for population growth" (77). The Encyclopédistes used polygamy to explore the institution of marriage, criticize the church, and promote reproduction. These debates converged with government census projects to collect demographic data.

Chapter six charts Jean Jacques Rousseau's shifting views of gender and marriage throughout his oeuvre. Blum demonstrates that Rousseau's inconsistency succeeded in attracting everybody from women happy to be relieved of their conjugal debt to men eager to shirk their paternal responsibility. The most enduring part of Rousseau's legacy, however, was his model of gender difference, which elevated family and reproduction to patriotic duty. A generation of young men would attempt to implement Rousseau's theories in fashioning a republican society.

In her last and longest chapter, Blum follows populationism through the convoluted politics of Revolutionary France. Although much of this legislation is familiar, Blum's account of the stakes in each battle is not. The policy of procreation that revolutionary leaders championed eventually oriented Napoleonic law codes toward a conservative ideology of female subordination and separate spheres that dominated the nineteenth century.