Contre le malthusianisme. À propos de "Des Français pour la France"

French fertility rates have been falling for a century, which is why the country was already facing a serious ageing of its population as early as 1900. In addition, the 1930s were marked by an even sharper decline in fertility, leading the famous Princeton demographers to forecast, just before the war, an absolute fall in the population.
It was against this background, just before the baby boom that nobody really expected, that the pediatrician Robert Debré and the demographer Alfred Sauvy launched their appeal for “French people for France” which criticized the adverse effects of the failure of the population to replace itself, leading first to ageing and then to absolute decline.
The date is 1946. Robert Debré and Alfred Sauvy were then agitating openly for a policy to repopulate France based on measures intended to increase fertility and to integrate the immigrants. Michel Louis Lévy discusses here their analysis and proposals.