Weight o f Numbers

71

Preserving the balance There is a constant tendency towards equilibrium between the patterns of birth and deaths. Under the ancien regime the two coefficients were both at around the same figure: 40 per 1000. What life added, death took away. The parish registers of the small commune of La Chapelle-Fougeret127 (today part of the suburbs of Rennes) recorded 50 baptisms in 1609. Reckoning on the basis of 40 births per 1000 habitants and therefore multiplying the number of baptisms by 25, it is possible to suggest that the population of this large village was around 1250. The English economist William Petty reconstructed the population on the basis of deaths in his Political Arithmetick (1690), multiplying the figure by 30 (which was actually an under-estimate of the death rate).128 In the short term, credit and debit kept pace, so that when one side gained, the other reacted. In 1451 we are told that plague carried off 21,000 people in Cologne; over the next few years, 4000 marriages were celebrated. 129 Even if these figures are exaggerated, as everything would seem to indicate, the com pensation is obvious. In 1581, 790 people - ten times more than in normal times - died at Salzewedel, a small place in the old Brandenburg Marches. Marriages fell from 30 to 10. But in the following year, despite the reduced population, 30 marriages were celebrated, followed by numerous compensatory births.130 Im mediately after a plague that was said to have halved the population of Verona in 1637 (but the chroniclers exaggerate freely), the soldiers of the garrison, almost all French - many of whom had escaped the plague - married the widows, and life gained the upper hand again.131 Throughout Germany, which had suffered grievously from the disasters of the Thirty Years War, there was a demographic revival once the bad times were over. This was the phenomenon of compensation in a country quarter or half destroyed by the horrors of war. An Italian traveller visiting Germany shortly after 1648, at a time when the European population as a whole was stationary or in decline, remarked that there were few men of an age to bear arms, but an abnormally high number of children .13 2 When the balance was not restored quickly enough the authorities inter vened: Venice, normally so jealously closed, passed a liberal decree on 30 October 1348, just after the terrible Black Death, granting complete citizenship (de intus et de extra) to every individual who would come and settle there with his family and possessions within the period of a year. It must be added that the towns, as a general rule, only survived thanks to new blood from outside. But ordinarily people came of their own accord. Increases and declines therefore alternated in the short term, regularly com pensating each other. This is invariably demonstrated (until the eighteenth century) by the zigzag curves representing births and deaths anywhere in the West - whether in Venice or Beauvais. Those most vulnerable - young children, who were always at risk, or anyone with precarious means of support - would