No author currently appears to be concerned

Indeed, it is surprising to see the very monolithic explanation that most demographers bring to population growth, mainly attributed to the effects of medical and industrial progress. The fact that it grew from 1700, a period of more than a century before these two factors emerged, should have intrigued specialists. It is clear that other factors are involved.

Industrial progress can only change the standard of living once it has entered the bulk of the population. Changes in average living standards were minimal at the beginning of the 18th century. It was during the 19th century that manufactures grew. The Megemont brothers hat factory, for example, had only about thirty workers in 1860. Then, thanks to the rapid development of the railways, it could consider expanding, and employed 300 hatters in 1892.

Many other activities are in the same case. It was in fact only in the 20th century that different sections of the population gained the benefits of progress, and even more so with the period of abundance that followed World War II. Comfort, heating, electrification, gogo lighting, obstetric and infant care supplies are common throughout the Thirty Glories. There is indeed a dramatic recovery in the growth curve.

To this certainly add psychological factors. The loss of life on the battlefields, and later in the concentration camps, could stimulate parents to return their people to the homeland. The dempographic acceleration was already articulated in 1942, when the baby boom was brought up. Penicillin, put on the market the same year, certainly played an important role in this acceleration, as did medical progress in cardiovascular disease and cancer. Hope has ceased to grow, until a very recent period.

But what happened in the 18th century? None of these factors had yet emerged, yet the demographers put the phenomenon in the same package. They seem to commit the error that all historians fear: to project the system of values of the present into the past. Today, society swims in opulence, everyone is attached to the different forms of progress that have changed everyday life, or that fascinate minds in search of ever more happiness. As a result, progress is used to explain phenomena dating back to a period when it did not yet exist…