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“More sex please, we’re French,” declared, in effect, France’s president Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday, demanding that his compatriots counteract a catastrophically collapsing birth rate. France’s fertility is at its lowest level since the end of World War Two — perhaps ironically, since the French consider themselves the world’s greatest lovers.
Macron has announced a “demographic rearmament” for the country including free fertility checks for young people and a new paid maternity and paternity allowance. New parents, including fathers, will be able to take three months off and be paid half their salary up to €1,900 which could cumulate to a baby bonus of €11,400 per family. Will it really make much difference?
This being the état bénévole par excellence there is already an alphabet soup of allowances associated with parenthood — the “prestation d’accueil du jeune enfant” (Paje), a “prestation partagée d’éducation de l’enfant” (PreParE) and an “allocation journalière de présence parentale” (AJPP). There’s no child benefit in France for a first child, but a second draws up to €184 monthly and three can bring up to €277 more, depending on one’s income.
Yet these allocations do not seem to have stimulated much fertility. As the number of women of reproductive age has fallen only slightly in recent years, the decrease in births is explained mainly by a decline in the desire for children, and the means to avoid them, though contraception or abstinence. After a small uptick in 2021, due to a recovery in births delayed by the first wave of Covid in 2020 (the most disruptive), fertility has resumed its downward trend here. With an exceptional annual decrease from 1.79 children per woman in 2022 to 1.68 in 2023, fertility reached a historical low not seen since the end of the baby boom. A replacement birth rate is considered to be 2.1.
The decline in births combined with increased life expectancy is a toxic cocktail for a social welfare system based on the replacement of old workers by young ones. In November 2021, INSEE (the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies) published population projections for France up to 2070, based on demographic trends. Under this scenario, the population of France continues to increase to a peak of 69.3 million in 2044, then falls to 68.1 million in 2070.
The French have become curiously sexually abstinent
French rulers have worried about the birth rate since the seventeenth century. The failed efforts of Louis XIV’s government to intervene in family strategies is a reminder of the politicization of questions of marriage, celibacy and fertility in Old Regime France. It is hard to see Macron doing better, persuading his compatriots to multiply. This is, rather, French political theater in its purest form because the revised state incentives announced by Macron to tackle tumbling fertility are in reality underwhelming.
The forty-six-year-old president is lucky he has a tame media who don’t ridicule the his childlessness as he exhorts his compatriots to fornicate for France. His wife, Brigitte, already had three children when she divorced to marry her former drama pupil, twenty-four years her junior. He has two step-children older than he is. There have been no children in his marriage nor can there be. Brigitte is currently aged seventy-one. Nor is his openly gay prime minister Gabriel Attal likely to come credibly to his aid on this issue.
The collapsed birth rate is vaguely attributed to social trends and financial pressure but it is certainly also because the French have become curiously sexually abstinent. Lockdown appears to have suppressed, not stimulated, the procreative instinct. I wrote about this in the magazine: boomer sexual freedom has been followed by a new era of prudishness in which youth appear to have swapped actual sex for porn sites and naked selfies. Their lack of sexual activity seems to be continuing into marriage.
Over the past twelve months, 43 percent of France’s youth had not had sex. France has embraced sexting, porno and even naturism, united with a kind of sexlessness. “It’s a peculiar reality, not unique to France but strange for a country so renowned for its carnal fixations yet now gripped by pornification as a substitute,” I noted. Sociologists and journalists are reveling in this. Le Monde says: “Boys are filled with anxiety, fear of shame and humiliation, the pressure of virility.”
It’s not just boys or the young who seem terrified of sex, though. The new sexual politics and two years locked down have “stopped the fingers at the moment of unhooking the bra,” as they say here. Before Covid hit, French people claimed to be having sex six times per month, down from nine in 2007. They were not only having less sex, they told pollsters, but enjoying it less too. The French birth rate would undoubtedly be even lower were it not for the contribution of the Muslim community whose birth rate is slightly above the replacement level — although no official figures are available as it is illegal to collect such data.
Many French people seem threatened by the Muslim birth rate but as Macron has pointed out, they’re not doing much about it and I doubt the president’s recent exhortations will make much difference. Perhaps the president can provide aphrodisiacs.
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.
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