The INSEE figures follow one another and are similar. For more than two years, the number of births recorded each month in France – 52,701 last June – has been lower than that of the same month a year earlier. In a well-documented essay with a lively style, The Battles of Birth Rates, To be published on August 30 by Editions de l’Aube, the former director of research at the National Family Allowance Fund Julien Damon, a lecturer at Sciences Po and HEC, analyzes this recent drop in French fertility and details several avenues, often original, to try to remedy it.
L’Express: Has France entered an inevitable demographic decline?
Julien Damon: This alarmist discourse must be qualified. First, even if French fertility has been falling since the beginning of the 2010s, we are still – cock-a-doodle-doo – one of the Western countries where it has deteriorated the least. Not just in the European Union. We are crushing the Americans, who, fifteen years ago, were ahead of us. At the Olympic Games of Western fertility, we are on the podium. Then, the undeniably low level that we are recording today, of the order of 1.7 children per woman in the conjunctural index, we already experienced it at the beginning of the 1990s.
It is true that the current trend is worrying in the sense that the decline has been continuous for more than ten years and even seems to be accelerating. In 2023, the annual number of births fell below 700,000, compared to more than 800,000 a decade earlier, the lowest level since the preludes of the baby boom. However, in my opinion, it would be wrong to fall into catastrophism. This is a decline, not a collapse.
How can this decline be explained?
There are two unsatisfactory answers to this question. The first is to say that there is no single factor – socio-economic, medical, environmental, religious, etc. – that alone explains this decline. Which is true. But, as it is difficult to attribute a specific impact on fertility to each cause, some abruptly, through ideology, invoke a single reason. An example: the reduction of tax benefits linked to the presence of children and the modulation of family allowances decided under François Hollande are often held up as culprits. However, there is no correlation between what was decided under Hollande, in 2015, in terms of family policy and the decline in fertility, which had begun four or five years earlier. Whatever one thinks of the former President of the Republic, this is a false accusation.
The second answer, which is no more satisfactory, is to consider that, faced with this vague set of factors, from which no irrefutable lessons can be drawn over the long term, it would be useless to implement public policies. Here too, this is a mistake. The links between family policy expenditure and the level of births exist, even if the consensus of academic work underlines that they are tenuous. Provisions can have an effect of their own.
In January 2024, Emmanuel Marcon called for the country’s “demographic rearmament” through two flagship measures: the fight against infertility and the reform of parental leave. What can we expect from this?
The President of the Republic has indeed put two cartridges in the barrel of his “rearmament”. I fear, alas, that they will have only a minimal impact on the target. The fight against infertility requires an announced reinforcement of preventive examinations and the reduction of waiting times to access PMA, medically assisted procreation. Helping more people who cannot have children to have them is a perfectly acceptable idea. But the birth rate thus increased will not upset the fertility rates in view of the small numbers concerned.
The reform of parental leave is an old story. Shorter but better paid, the birth leave that is to succeed it is supposed to allow young couples to better reconcile family life and professional life. Here again, this measure does not constitute a weapon of mass fertility. That said, it is on the right track, because it can provide the beginnings of a solution for some parents who are so concerned about this critical age – from 0 to 3 years old. More broadly, early childhood care must be strengthened in France. This is the area of family policies that has the greatest potential impact in terms of fertility.
When Ifop surveyed French people in 2023 who had given up on having one or more children, the first reason given was disagreement or the absence of a spouse, followed by the availability and cost of childcare. Difficulties related to employment, housing, and climate considerations are more secondary. According to economists and demographers, it is childcare assistance that supports fertility, in that it allows parents, and particularly mothers, to balance work and family life.
In the early 1980s, the relationship between fertility and female activity was negative. Now, it is positive. It is in countries where women work that they have children, as long as they can juggle the two. Investing in a public early childhood service is most likely the path to explore. The major pitfall is that these jobs are not very attractive today: salaries are low and working conditions are difficult. Municipalities are now, in the eyes of the law, the “organizing authorities for early childhood”. A new step should be taken, as close as possible to needs, and they should be given mandatory authority to offer services, in conjunction with family allowance funds.
You also advocate the allocation of family allowances from the first child. Why?
French family policy is based on a premise that has not changed since the Second World War: the first child comes naturally, the second is not so complicated, it is from the third that the family unit changes profoundly. Hence the leap, in the current socio-fiscal system, from the third child. This model, based on the progressiveness of allowances and tax reductions, has had its day: the great upheaval in the lives of couples today results above all from the arrival of the first child.
Except in the overseas territories, France is one of the few rich countries not to worry about it. The first birth is taken into account in terms of taxation, or RSA, while family allowances ignore it. My proposal would be to standardize the latter, based on the child unit and no longer based on its rank in the sibling group. The idea would be to have an allowance of a monthly amount of around 70 euros per child, to gain in simplicity and fairness. The operation would not change anything for families with two children, but would constitute a loss for large families. However, today, to start the dynamic, the first child, like the following ones, must become a clearly defined target of the family benefits system.
Some aging countries, like Germany, have chosen immigration. You hardly believe in this in the current French context…
The migration issue must be subject to a cold analysis, far from the controversies surrounding the “creolization” of the population or its “great replacement”. On a factual level, there is no doubt that the contribution of immigrants to the birth rate – the number of births – is increasing in France. But their contribution to the fertility rate is not as obvious, because their behavior adjusts, over time, to that of women born in France. Furthermore, the specific effect of nationality can be discussed in light of the social level of immigrant populations. Finally, in view of our highly inflammatory national debate on the issue, this path is politically impossible. Arithmetic comes up against unpopularity.
On a lighter note, you mention another subject in your book: that of the age gap in couples…
This is a path that I call heterodox, it’s true. But we can happily approach serious subjects. What about here? Given the income disparities between women and men, it is often less financially penalizing to arbitrate so that the mother invests more in family life, while the father changes nothing, or even gets more involved in the office. When the child arrives, 1 mother in 2 interrupts or reduces her professional activity. This is only the case for 1 father in 9.
But this gap, which weighs when discussing a family organization with children, also has its origins in a dimension that must not be overlooked: in heterosexual couples, the man is, on average, two years older than the woman. Women’s declared preferences still tend to favor an older male partner, and men’s preferences tend toward younger partners. This observation, which is a personal matter, obviously does not require intervention by public authorities or businesses. But, if we start from the statistically established principle that improving professional and domestic equality has some impact on fertility, women must be urged to find partners younger than themselves. Ladies, when it comes to negotiating who does what, you will be better equipped!
In the same iconoclastic vein, you explain that family allowance funds should do everything to encourage meetings between single people…
It’s obvious! The CAF already funds family mediation in the event of separation. Why wouldn’t they fund marriage counseling for single individuals, with or without children, who want to (re)start an adventure as a couple? As any good demography treatise reminds us, meetings and the formation of couples are the basis of fertility.
Two possibilities: create a large public dating service, in addition to or replacing the well-known websites – Meetic, Tinder and the like. Or, in a more liberal approach, offer checks or vouchers allowing access to these digital tools. For fans of old-fashioned flirting, the public authorities could also support bars, restaurants and gyms that organize meeting times. And why not a CAF ball?
The idea obviously makes people laugh. But, if single parenthood is a painful subject, which the State is required to tackle head on, reconstitution can become a happy theme, to be encouraged. We could even integrate it into a broader perspective, which is a consensus: the fight against isolation. We often forget it, but large families in the sense of INSEE are no longer traditional families: they are reconstituted families.
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