The Demographic Catastrophe

Beyond individual tragedies lay demographic disaster. France lost not just 1.4 million men but millions of potential births. The "hollow years"—cohorts never born because their potential fathers died—created cascading effects lasting generations. By 1939, France faced Germany with 1.5 million fewer men of military age due to World War I demographic losses.

Marriage patterns transformed completely. The gender imbalance—excess of 1.5 million women over men in marriageable age cohorts—condemned many women to spinsterhood. Competition for surviving men intensified. Traditional courtship patterns collapsed as women pursued men more actively. The "surplus women" problem created social anxieties about moral decay and national vitality.

Those who married often chose differently than prewar. Age gaps increased as young women married older men or widowers. Class barriers weakened as bourgeois women with decimated dowries married working-class men. War widows who remarried faced social opprobrium but economic necessity. These disrupted patterns created unstable families more prone to divorce.

Birth rates, already declining before 1914, collapsed entirely. The 1915 cohort was 50% smaller than 1913. Even postwar, birth rates remained depressed. Couples, traumatized and economically pressured, had fewer children. The government, panicked about depopulation, banned contraception and abortion while providing birth premiums. Yet French families, scarred by loss, preferred smaller sizes to minimize future grief.

Rural depopulation accelerated as widows and orphans abandoned farms for cities offering employment and anonymity. Entire villages, already depleted by military losses, emptied completely. Ancient communities dissolved as survivors sought new lives away from landscapes haunted by absence. The French countryside, backbone of national identity, hemorrhaged population that would never return.