Introduction

Summary

Between the two world wars, the decrease in European fertility became a major concern of politicians, intellectuals, and others who viewed it as both cause and symptom of a general “decline of the West.” The frightening specter of overpopulation raised by Malthus over a century before had lost its menace as European economic, political, military, and cultural hegemony seemed threatened by lowering birth rates, and European racial integrity also appeared at risk. It was a situation which finds parallels today.

Fear of denatalism – the decline of birth rate – fueled interest in demography, the new science of population. Political leaders and social scientists wanted to know not only the size of national populations, but also the rate of growth (or shrinkage) in the present and future. More (and more intimate) data were demanded of individual Europeans, and statistical institutes were created or enlarged to better gather and process these data.

The founding of national statistics institutes, however, served to assess the nature and scope of the problem, not to provide remedies. Remedies were suggested instead by politicians and clerics, by demographers and physicians, and by various self-appointed authorities who called for policies to combat fertility decline, policies ranging from paternalistic measures to encourage childbearing by easing the burdens of stay-at-home mothering to police measures aimed at the repression of birth control and abortion.

Fertility decline – and so also alarm over the phenomenon – had the longest history in France. Nonetheless, the first broadly conceived population policy came from Italy, a relative newcomer to denatalism. Italy owed this precociousness to the establishment of a Fascist dictatorship: Mussolini's vision of a new Fascist civilization was expansive and required demographic growth as well as political and ideological indoctrination.