Karl-Theodor von Inama-Sternegg on Levasseur’s La population française (1890)

Karl-Theodor von Inama-Sternegg’s review assesses the first volume of Émile Levasseur’s history of the French population, published in 1889. Its central concern is how historical demography can reconstruct population totals before reliable censuses, and what those reconstructions reveal about France’s changing European position. Admiration for Levasseur’s combination of economic history and statistical criticism accompanies pointed objections to individual estimates and to comparisons that obscure the declining excess of births over deaths. The review treats the volume as a substantial achievement whose fuller demographic interpretation awaits its continuation.

Inama-Sternegg begins with a French paradox: an unusually sustained scholarly interest in population numbers coexisted, until recently, with public indifference toward slow national population growth. He traces the scholarly tradition through Bodin, Froumenteau, eighteenth-century investigators, and historians associated with the École des chartes. France offers exceptionally rewarding sources, but the political stakes are equally important. The reviewer connects its medieval and early modern demographic preponderance with successive periods of international ascendancy. Nineteenth-century growth reverses that relative advantage: France has fallen behind Austria-Hungary and Germany, and continued disparities could eventually place it last among the European great powers. This is a conditional projection, not an inevitable outcome.

The principal methodological problem is the fragmentary character of evidence before the nineteenth century. Levasseur’s task of establishing France’s population before 1789 consequently requires an accompanying history of economic life:

Denn bei der fragmentarischen Art der direkten Nachrichten über den älteren Bevölkerungsstand sind selbst blosse Vermutungen nur auf der Grundlage der Kenntniss der materiellen Existenzbedingungen der Bevölkerung aufzustellen; vor dem 19. Jahrhundert existiert auch für Frankreich keine hinlänglich sichere Grundlage der Demographie; an der Hand der Wirthschaftsgeschichte aber lässt sich eine gewisse Reihe von Schätzungen und eine Art von logischer Aufeinanderfolge derselben aufstellen, welche ihnen doch innere Wahrscheinlichkeit verleiht.

English translation: For, given the fragmentary nature of direct reports concerning earlier population levels, even mere conjectures can be formulated only on the basis of knowledge of the population’s material conditions of existence; before the nineteenth century, even France lacks a sufficiently secure foundation for demography; with economic history as a guide, however, one can establish a certain series of estimates and a kind of logical succession among them that nevertheless gives them intrinsic plausibility.

Economic history thus supplies a framework for evaluating estimates, rather than replacing missing observations with certainty. Inama-Sternegg follows Levasseur from ancient Gaul through Roman prosperity and the devastation of the Germanic conquests to Carolingian estate records. The decisive question is how far particular evidence can support national extrapolation. The estate survey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés suggests a population of scarcely 5½ million within modern French boundaries if its density were generalized. Levasseur rejects this as too low because a great estate presents exceptional conditions. The reviewer refuses to let that objection justify an unsupported alternative:

Levasseur hält diese Ziffer für viel zu gering, da die Verhältnisse einer grossen Domäne exceptionell seien und für den allgemeinen Bevölkerungsstand ungünstig angenommen werden müssten; wir halten sie nichtsdestoweniger für besser begründet als die ohne jeden Beweis vorgeschlagene Erhöhung der Zahl auf 8—9 Millionen.

English translation: Levasseur considers this figure far too low, since conditions on a large estate are exceptional and must be assumed to be unfavorable in relation to the general population level; we nevertheless consider it better grounded than the increase to 8–9 million proposed without any proof.

This disagreement establishes the review’s critical standard: a questionable extrapolation can remain preferable to a more plausible-looking number without evidentiary support. A similar reservation concerns the estimate of twenty million inhabitants derived from Froumenteau for 1581, which Inama-Sternegg considers scarcely defensible.

The historical account otherwise emphasizes interrupted recovery. Attachment to the soil, revived industry, and urban prosperity supported medieval growth despite warfare and famine. A fourteenth-century hearth register supplies the basis for estimating twenty to twenty-two million inhabitants before the Hundred Years’ War and plague devastated the country. Later recovery was checked by the religious wars, while order, toleration, and economic development under Henry IV and subsequent statesmen encouraged renewed expansion. War and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes brought further losses under Louis XIV. The eighteenth century restored growth, but already displayed the slow population movement that the reviewer regards as characteristic of modern France.

His most consequential criticism distinguishes aggregate population growth from its demographic components. Levasseur’s comparison of whole centuries makes eighteenth-century growth slightly weaker than nineteenth-century growth. Inama-Sternegg considers this less significant than the underlying changes in births and deaths. The cited eighteenth-century birth rates stand well above nineteenth-century figures; mortality also declined, but the excess of births over deaths nevertheless fell from roughly five or six per thousand to between 1.7 and 2.7. Similar aggregate growth rates therefore conceal substantially different demographic relationships.

The review qualifies this objection by respecting the volume’s scope. Its comparative demography principally presents census results; population movement, its relation to population totals and moral statistics, and the formulation of population laws are reserved for a second volume:

Erst wenn dieser synthetische Theil vorliegen wird, werden sich auch die Früchte der wissenschaftlichen Arbeit, welche Levasseur an die Analyse der Erscheinungen der Bevölkerung Frankreichs gewendet hat, vollkommen ermessen lassen.

English translation: Only when this synthetic part is available will it also be possible fully to assess the fruits of the scholarly work that Levasseur has devoted to analyzing the phenomena of France’s population.

Inama-Sternegg nevertheless judges the existing volume the most careful and exhaustive account of French population development. He briefly commends its introductory treatment of statistical tasks, methods, and history for combining accessibility with scientific substance. The review’s enduring conceptual distinction is between reconstructing population totals and explaining demographic change: it praises Levasseur’s historical reconstruction while insisting on evidentiary restraint and a fuller analysis of births, deaths, and their changing balance.