Producing Citizens, Reproducing the ‘French Race’: Immigration, Demography, and Pronatalism in Early Twentieth‐Century France

Abstract

This essay examines how, in the context of depopulation and mass immigration, members of the French pronatalist movement advanced a policy favouring immigrants from Italy, Spain, and Poland. Because the 'demographic crisis' created a shortage of citizens as well as workers, pronatalists held that foreign workers must also be assimilable, and able to produce French offspring. While the racial difference of colonial subjects was deemed immutable, pronatalists called for the immigration of white foreigners whose less 'modern' condition promoted fecundity, traditionalism, and gender dimorphism. Evidence is drawn from demographic studies, the press of France's largest pronatalist movement, and a pronatalist advisory committee created by the Ministry of Health in 1920.