It seems far-fetched to use global population as a relative indicator of France's "decline", where the global population exploded after the industrial revolution.
"By feeding rapidly growing populations, [it] permitted a handful of European nations to assert dominion over most of the world between 1750 and 1950."
"Because potatoes were so productive, the effective result, in terms of calories, was to double Europe’s food supply."
"Routine famine almost disappeared in potato country, a 2,000-mile band that stretched from Ireland in the west to Russia’s Ural Mountains in the east."
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-potato-change...
There are diminishing returns on industrialising.
But in the short term, it is a lot of sacrifice, especially for the woman who has to give birth and raise all those babies. And of course, it is a lot of work to instill values such that the family stays close, and luck such as being located in a location that is experiencing an economic boom.
True, but that’s not a benefit to the people making the decision to have more children. It’s a beneficial second order effect that won’t negate the cost to the parent.
The fertility rate in Britain was still higher in the 1880s than it was in France back in 1800. Economically Britain was 20-50 years ahead of France but demographically France was almost a hundred years ahead.
e.g. see https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033137/fertility-rate-f... and https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033074/fertility-rate-u...
The population explosion that's discussed in the article (the population dividend of the demographic transition) just never happened in France - which is the whole point of why its relative standing dropped so much over the past two centuries compared to other hitherto much smaller countries such as England and Germany.
One could even say that the power shifts due to the industrial revolution were detrimental for the influence of France by favoring other nations and populations to a greater degree.
The Industrial Revolution made European conquest possible.
Potatoes unlocked lots of land in the northern part. And the other unsung botany, too.
And the ability to send surplus men (and women) to an empty (because of disease) continent instead of having them warring against each other like pre-Columbian Europe and East Asia (looking at Sengoku) is also decisive...
[0] Remember one reason why Britain was able to fight Napoleon even when the entire continent was conquered was because of industries.
"In terms of soldiers the French numerical advantage was offset by British subsidies that paid for a large proportion of the Austrian and Russian soldiers, peaking at about 450,000 in 1813."
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_in_the_Napole...
And control of the global trade networks. The same reason why the seemingly insignificant Netherlands (population and area wise) were able to maintain its position as a global superpower throughout most of the 17th century before being replaced by Britain. Of course it's a bit baffling that that happened after England and Holland ceased being rivals because a Dutch army invaded Britain, overthrew it's government and put their Stadholder on the English Throne..
In fact, looking at the timing, one could almost make the argument that the Industrial Revolution was the effect of colonization and exploitation of the rest of the world and not the cause.
The major corporate movement didn't even start until the 17th century.
Spain and Portugal did it first, long before Industrial revolution (which Spain had much much later and only halfway, and Portugal never had at all). They did it because they could: finishing reconquest of their territories from Arabs in the late XV century, they only saw foreign expansion as continuation of the same trend: Christendom acquires more land from the infidels, with divine assistance, they saw it as their natural life role and mission and same thing they kept doing for 700 years before, just on land.
Then, Netherlands, UK and later France acquired some territories - Netherlands for the purpose of trade (was before Industrial revolution and industry wasn't involved), UK because of religious issues - to push out people of "wrong" religions, like Puritans, as far away as possible, and France, well, because they saw it was going fashionable and they sort of felt compelled to do the same not properly realising why (resulting in the most ridiculous and useless empire imaginable).
Finally, Germany did it when they got so belatedly reunified after 1870 - they simply happened to grab some colonies from France because they won the Franco-Prussian war. Also never figured what to do with those.
In every case, only with the latter part of British colonialism, industry played some role (when colonies were used as source for industrial raw materials e.g. cotton from U.S. South), or market to sell them (India). Military capabilities brought forward by industrialisation, never had a role properly.
Jamestown, for example, was not founded by the government of England but instead by an investment company in search of riches. The Puritans as well; the government didn't put them on a boat, they bought a charter from the Virginia Company.
British colonies were somehow able to attract massive amounts of settlers and eventually became self sustainable. The Dutch, French and others could never achieve that and mainly relied on the fur trade with the Native populations.
For example, Virginia, the most populous colony at the time, had about 58k people in 1700 but over 530,000 by 1780.
The colonies as a whole grew by about 245,000 people in the 17th century and 2,550,000 in the subsequent 80 years, before the American Revolution. I should mention, however, that these numbers include the number of enslaved persons, about 575,000 people in 1780. That's a growth from around 6% of the total population in 1700 to over 1/5 of the total population of the colonies and around 40% of the population of Virginia in 1780.
It's not that much of a mystery how the British colonies became financially successful; most of it was due to location and slavery. It's the same reason that, while the French and Dutch were not as much of an economic success in their North American colonial holdings, they (and the Brits) were a huge financial success in the Caribbean. By importing people enslaved in Africa to work sugar plantations and not worrying about the death rates, the investors and colonial powers were able to make a substantial profit.
edit - obviously there are a lot more layers to that.
If they settled in some country rules of which they'd find obliged to obey - either because it was Christian, or because it was too strong to ignore with their forces - they couldn't claim land and instead, will become immigrants, then of course it's not colonisation.
That's arguable. I mean they didn't have the steam engine, but besides that the Dutch economically was relatively industrialized according by most other metrics (high urbanization, high amount of energy usage (wind, peat, water), relatively very high labor productivity etc.)
Trade allowed the Netherlands to acquire huge amounts of capital but unlike some other countries (e.g. Spain) they didn't waste it and instead invested into dramatically increasing the productivity of their economy .
Compare to the British colonies and dominions: brought British culture and legal system (even to territories where local population always dominated), developed them economically, and yes, robbed them too, making good profit.
French system, for comparison, was an utter failure. Only benefit it provided was a good network of anchorages and coal bunkers for the French Navy.
For example Ming China was the first gunpowder empire and was militarily competitive with if not superior to the European countries of the time. Qing China was caught resting on its laurels after it had accomplished the millennia-long Chinese goal of subduing all neighboring regions. In the case of China's defeat by European powers it was a combination of European ascendency and Chinese military stagnation at the time.
It was capitalism and accompanying political restructuring (from feudalism) that released and focused that demographic, intellectual, and technical 'potential'. Would a tiny "aristocratic" minority be able to scale up empire without making emerging (secular, technical including finance) social classes partners in the fruits of empire?
(Convince yourself: Consider demographic and socio-economic trends in China 1990 to 2010. Was it population growth or the socio-political change that catapulted its economic power?)
However Europe still lagged both economically and population wise behind Asia at the time and industrialization hadn't really started.
An example involving France, and which had long lasting consequences: in 1830 France invaded and conquered Algeria. Looking at those with modern eyes one might think it should have been a massive war with an untenable outcome because France has a population of 68 million and Algeria has a population of 46 million... but in 1830 France had a population of about 33 million and had industrialised while Algeria had a population of only 3 million and still had an agrarian economy so the dynamic was completely different (although it still wasn't a walk in the park for the French).
But it's important to state that it wasn't Europeans, but western Europeans who colonized. Here in Romania we never colonized anyone but were colonized by western Europeans and Asians: Austrians, Russians, Turks, &c.
Of course, empires with more dense populations have more ability to dominate others, at least thanks to the variety of skills and the sheer mass of the population. There’s a reason why politicians work to increase population: It increases levied taxes. The system wouldn’t be balanced with stable population.
But even if we equate population with domination, is dominating the world what we want?
As for the “but they’ll pay your retirements!” argument, well, retirement-by-next-generation-paying is a pyramid scheme and the elderly should have thought of it before they set it up.
Half the reason we got out of the Malthusian trap is that we finally got enough people that specialisation and economies of scale start to pay off.
Wanting to reduce the global population is like saying you want to eliminate economies of scale, which would make life harder for those who remain, not easier.
The food production grew because of the invention of synthetic fertilizer, not because the more people we have, the cheaper the food can be.
Because population is key for the level of influence a country can have. A high population doesn't guarantee it, but a low population will likely sideline the country when important topics come up.