Decrease in French Population

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 438, 21 August 1928, Page 13

Decrease in French Population

Fa Hitig-Off Ro uses Fea rs

DISAPPEARING RACE? While tlie pessimists ot the Paris Press are declaring that the tenth generation after the World War will no longer be French, and that the territory will be divided between the descendants of German immigrants in the North, and Italian in the South, social economists are emphasising the fact that even if along about A.D. 2200 the French people, as now constituted, do cease to exist, there would still be a French people, owing to tinpower of French thought and culture to make French all people living under their influence. Moreover, it is asked, were the French, ethnically speaking, to-day the same as had inhabited France in the Middle Ages or even as late as the Revolution? The foregoing forebodings and comments are inspired by the 1927 report on the population made by the Minister of Labour, which shows that there are now nearly a million less Frenchmen in France than there were in the year before the war; that in the .South and the North the birthrate has remained normal, while in the centre it has fallen off. Statistics for 1927 show that in ill--90 departments there were 40.960,000 persons, of whom about 22,000, 0n*' were of alien origin dating from the third generation to the present, while in 1913 there were 41,476,000 persons, of whom fewer than 10,000,000 were of foreign origin. It is said that the disparity might even be greater had not the figure for 1913 been obtained by adding that of 1911 for the 88 departments anil the total for Alsace and Lorraine in 1910. From 1920 onward the total population of the 90 departments shows a gradual falling off eiyirelv due to the birth-rate, the excess of which over deaths in 1926 was 188 pel 10,000 inhabitants, and ISI in 1927, or. in the latter year, 65,042 for the wholecountry. This figure, however, is said to be rendered practically nil. for it is measurably cut down by the continued increase in infant mortality