ABSTRACT
The century between 1750 and 1850 formed a time of demographic 'explosion' in France. Figures throughout the eighteenth century are open to debate but Vauban's estimate for the early years gave a total of 19,000,000 within the national boundaries of the time and Henry has revised the results to c. 22,000,000 for the territory of modern France. 1 Toward the end of the ancien régime 960,000 extra souls were brought into the French realm by the annexation of Lorraine and Corsica. In the new century the national population rose from 27,300,000 in 1801, when the first official census was conducted, to 33,540,000 in 1836, which coincided quite well with the agricultural enquiry of the Statistique. To achieve a numerical increase of such dimensions had taken the full span of the eighteenth century and was to take no less than 75 years after 1836, with the national total reaching 39,610,000 on the eve of World War I.
