Population Politics in Twentieth-Century Europe: Fascist Dictatorships and Liberal Democracies

Population Politics in Twentieth-Century Europe Fascist dictatorships and liberal democracies Maria Sophia Quine 1996 Contents Series editors’ preface vii Acknowledgements viii Introduction: Fears of ‘over-population’ and ‘depopulation’ in the nineteenth century 1 1 From Malthus to Mussolini: Fascist Italy’s ‘battle for births’ 17 2 Fathers of the nation: French pronatalism during the Third Republic 52 3 Nazi population policy: pronatalism and antinatalism during the Third Reich 89 4 Conclusion: the politics of race and population in the twentieth century 129 Bibliography 140 Other sources 149 Index 151 v Introduction Fears of ‘over-population’ and ‘depopulation’ in the nineteenth century For much of the eighteenth century, statesmen saw population growth as a precondition for economic progress. The mercantilist belief that an abundance of cheap labour was a source of national wealth and security encouraged governments to adopt pronatalist policies. The prevailing view was that a plentiful supply of workers stimulated manufactures, generated demand for goods and promoted trade. And states needed soldiers and sailors to man navies and armies for war. Physiocrats and philosophes alike presumed that an expanding population created the commercial prosperity and industrial productivity on which people’s health and happiness depended. By the eve of the nineteenth century, however, attitudes towards demographic increment had changed dramatically. An unprecedented rise in fertility after 1750 provoked widespread alarm over the threat of over-population. Renowned thinkers like Montes-quieu, Benjamin Franklin, James Stewart, Arthur Young and Joseph Townsend all feared that a rapid increase in the birthrate would lower standards of living. This anxiety also haunted the mind of T. R.Malthus, who published his completed Essay on the Principle of Population in 1803. A mathematician by training, Malthus was one of the founders of demography, a new science based on the collection of vital statistics whose aim was to uncover population trends and to predict their outcome. Contributing to contemporary debates in political economy, Malthus argued that excessive population growth impoverished nations. Malthus (1766–1834) lived through the beginnings of the process of economic and social change which transformed Britain from a largely agrarian society into the first industrialized nation. He witnessed the early stages of industrialization when England underwent an ‘agricultural revolution’ characterized by the spread of improved farming and grazing techniques. The enclosure of wastelands and 1 2 Introduction improved husbandry increased the productivity of land and labour. The rise of a money economy and the commercialization of agriculture caused a phenomenal growth in food supply which was accompanied by a boom in births. England’s population went from 5.576 million to 8.664 million in the years from 1741 to 1801 (McLaren 1984:9). Although Malthus was unaware of the extent of the population explosion which took place in the second half of the eighteenth century, he believed that the labouring poor were reproducing at a rate which far exceeded the country’s ability to sustain them. The economic resources of even a wealthy nation like England, which produced food and commodities in abundance, did not increase quickly enough and were not distributed equitably enough to support a surplus population. In his Essay, Malthus departed from such predecessors as Adam Smith and David Hume when he asserted that the inherent inequalities of the new market system dictated that labour be undervalued and some be kept in poverty, so no humble working man could afford to feed a large family on a slim wage packet. Therefore, a steadily rising population resulted in ‘a want of the means of subsistence’ which ‘impeded the progress of mankind towards happiness’ (Malthus 1982:5 and 106). Malthus based this pessimistic belief in the peril of over- population on the premise that ‘there was no bound’ to the prolific nature of human beings. He presumed that individuals had no innate ability to contain their biologically ordained sexual drive and reproductive urges. ‘Man’, he believed, was a creature of the flesh ruled by an irremediable instinct to reproduce the species. Unless war, epidemic or famine occurred, people would procreate so copiously that they would endanger first their livelihood and then their own survival. To avoid catastrophe, population, he argued, ‘must always be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence’ (Malthus 1982:2 and 5–6). He identified the existence of certain ‘preventive checks’ on the ‘reckless over-breeding’ which created widespread poverty and misery among the ‘lower orders of society, which in any nation form the most numerous class’ (Malthus 1982:126). Chief among these was a distinct European pattern of late marriage which he welcomed as an ideal method of limiting the size of families. He posited that without a constraint like the postponement of marriage a population would multiply in constant geometric proportions, thereby doubling itself every twenty-five years. Malthus also postulated that economic resources always increased in quantity only at a much slower arithmetic rate. Thus, the steady growth in the amount of food produced could never keep pace Introduction 3 with ever escalating demographic demand. A crisis of over- population would inevitably occur after a sustained rise in the birthrate. Malthus presented his gloomy prediction as an absolute ‘principle of population’ and even an iron ‘law of nature’ which destined ‘man’ to suffer from an unavoidable disequilibrium between food and population (Malthus 1982:151). Malthus had some faith in the ability of people to control their sexual behaviour if not their biological nature. Society should not, he upheld, enable individuals to have as many children as they pleased and thereby ‘multiply too fast’ (Malthus 1982:152). The inevitable trend towards over-population could only be reversed if more people could be convinced to show some prudential control over natural procreative urges which caused ‘conjugal love’ to sink into ‘mere animal desire’ (Malthus 1982:156). Malthus championed the idea that human beings’ innate search for ‘gratification’ to the point of ‘repletion’ should be tempered by reason and morality. He became the apostle of a new creed which asked followers to recognize the ‘evils’ of unbridled sexual desires and to ‘civilize’ themselves by using ‘moral restraint’ to contain their passions (Malthus 1982:153– 4). As his detractors often pointed out, Malthus was a Protestant parson whose religious convictions influenced his scientific approach to the apparent problem of reckless overbreeding. Though an advocate of birth control, he remained opposed to abortion, as well as to all forms of contraception. While he believed that sex was a pleasure conceived by the ‘Creator’ as an encouragement for human beings to replenish themselves plentifully, he also argued that ‘excessive’ physical love, even within marriage, was sinful. The indulgence of every sexual whim, however natural, made men indolent and lethargic, less concerned to increase the means of subsistence by their industry and labour (Malthus 1982:156–7). Despite, or perhaps because of, his moralizing bent, Malthus’ disciples abounded in the early nineteenth century. Many agreed with the notion that a prudent limitation of births was a prerequisite for continued material and spiritual progress. Belief in the instinctual drive of human beings to reproduce too plentifully and the fatal tendency of the population to outgrow the means of subsistence became the official orthodoxy. In the first edition of The Origin of Species which appeared in 1859, Charles Darwin predicated his discovery of the process of ‘natural selection’ on Malthus’ definition of the physiology and sexuality of human beings. He wrote that a ‘struggle for existence inevitably follows from the high rate at which all organic beings tend to increase’. 4 Introduction Darwin, therefore, took Malthus’ ‘principle of population’ to be the very mechanism which caused evolutionary change. As populations tend to increase at a ‘geometric’ rate, he wrote, the pressures brought about by this growth are so great that ‘more individuals are produced than can possibly survive’. The struggle that inevitably ensues provides a stimulus to biological adaptations in human beings by which certain ‘favourable modifications’ are preserved and other ‘injurious variations’ are eliminated. In The Descent of Man, published twelve years later, Darwin followed the logic of Malthus when he asserted that human beings shared certain traits with other animals lower down the evolutionary scale. His boundless sexual appetites made ‘man’ a predatory and bestial creature, one controlled by his own nature (Young 1969:109–41; Bowler 1976:631–50). Advocacy of Malthus’ doctrine of ‘moral restraint’ became an acceptable expression of early Victorian anxiety about sexuality and reproduction. A feminist of sorts, John Stuart Mill blamed men’s vile ‘animal functions’ for the subjugation of women. Sentencing women to sexual servitude for life, the marriage contract permitted husbands to assert their ‘conjugal rights’ over wives. Within his own private life, Mill aspired to become a civilized ‘man of reason’ by repressing uncontrollable bodily desires and biological functions. He described his own childless marriage as an ideal domestic arrangement, a transcendent sexless partnership

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