Modernization Before Industrialization: Cultural Roots of the Demographic Transition in France
Résumé
This research identifies the origins of the early demographic transition in eighteenth century France. Before the French Revolution and more than a hundred years before the rest of Europe, this event remains one of the 'big questions of history' in part because of limited data availability. I first document an important process of dechristianization with never-used-before data on religious beliefs over time and space. Using standard econometric methods and machine learning with census data, I find large, significant, and robust results suggesting that secularization accounts for the bulk of the decline in fertility. Finally, I draw on a novel dataset crowdsourced from publicly available genealogies to study individuals at the time and to establish a causal interpretation, by controlling for time-varying unobservables with fixed effects, studying the effect of treatment before and after secularization with differences-in-differences, and exploiting the choice of second generation migrants to control for unobserved institutional factors. These findings reveal that changes in preferences and the transition away from tradition may shape development.
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