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

Carol Blum's Strength in Numbers traces the obsession with population decline in eighteenth-century France. As Blum demonstrates with a wealth of documentation, the misconception that France was losing population took hold in the last years of the reign of Louis XIV, was popularized by Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (1721), and served as the basis for widespread critique of the monarchy and the Catholic Church throughout the French Enlightenment. After 1789 the natalist cause was incorporated into the new republic's laws, only to be replaced in the final years of the century by fears of a population explosion.

The centrality of depopulation anxiety in eighteenth-century political discourse and in the work of many of the era's most important writers has not gone unnoticed by previous commentators. The originality of Blum's exploration of this topic lies in the sheer number and breadth of examples that she cites, extracting essential information from obscure sources while examining in detail the influence of better-known authors. She also analyzes to great effect the role assigned to women in the natalists' various schemes to promote procreation, pointing out, for example, that while polygamy was quite seriously investigated as an answer to the population problem in France, polyandry, or multiple husbands, was soundly denounced on both moral and scrupulously scientific grounds. Blum devotes a full chapter to polygamy, alongside chapters on the two major themes of the natalist movement, the attack on celibacy and the promotion of divorce. She frames these three central chapters with a before and after: first, the birth of the natalist movement from Montesquieu's wildly popular novel; and, in conclusion, the attempted realization of natalist policies by the architects of the First Republic, in whose confused approach to the issue Blum sees reflected the paradoxes of Rousseau's writings on male sexuality and the nature of women.

In chapter 1, "The Value of Kings," Blum examines the beginnings of the "fertile error" of population anxiety, as Jean-Claude Perrot baptized the phenomenon. Louis XIV, whose own birth was considered a miracle, coming as it did after twenty years of fruitless effort, consolidated his power in part by insisting on his divine right to rule. Such divine sanction meant that he was not only morally but also metaphysically responsible for the continued healthy increase in his country's population. Thirty years into his reign, Louis XIV was blamed for an almost abandoned countryside. Numerous wars, the Edict of Nantes, and overtaxation were the practical causes attributed to the decline by those few who dared to criticize the government's policies, notably, Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban and Pierre Le Pesant de Boisguilbert. It was due to the works of these two men that anxiety about depopulation became a cultural given among the educated of the period. Vauban and Boisguilbert's theories influenced arguments over the role of luxury in the French economy, debates on the slave trade, the theories of the physiocrats, and, most importantly, the eleven letters that Montesquieu devoted to the subject in his Lettres persanes.

Montesquieu's novel inspired a vast natalist literature devoted to reform projects, and as Blum's overview of this obscure literature is the central contribution of her work, she pauses in chapter 2 to consider in detail the "depopulation letters" (111-22). The exchange begins with a question from one of the Persian travelers to the other: Why is the world so thinly populated at the present time? Like Rica's question, Usbek's response takes for granted that depopulation is occurring. His answer also neatly covers the essential aspects of the debate in 1720s France: the importance of evaluating population, the responsibility of government, the negative influence of religion (the Catholic Church through the wasteful practice of celibacy, Islam by exhausting...