Migrations et fécondité selon Arsène Dumont

Abstract

Arsene Dumont (1849-1902) is best known as the person who invented the expression "social capillarity", which he used to describe the mobility resulting from social promotion efforts, with an important demographie effect of this effort being, in his opinion, to lead numerous households to limit the size of their family. But Dumont also did a lot of work, although much less well-known, on migration and its effects on the fertility of migrants and non-migrants in the late XIXth century. The present paper summarises these analyses which deal with emigration of the French (which he is against), conditions of immigrant assimilation in France and, above ail, internai migration. With regard to this latter point, Arsene Dumont suggests singling out two types of rural emigration which have opposite effects on fertility in the migrants' place of origin. The emigration "occurring at the top" - emigration of the "intelligentsia", the "rich", etc., pushed by a "need for excitement"- is, according to him, more damaging to fertility than that of the poor who emigrate by "necessity". This "topwise" emigration generally has the effect of delaying marriage among migrants and decreasing their fertility, while encouraging illegitimate births. But furthermore, by means of the imitation effects which it causes and which, precisely, Dumont examines, it contributes to increasing the fertility of rural populations from which the migrants originated.