Project: Completion of a monograph on the French fertility transition ("Marianne au foyer. Révolution politique et transition démographique en France, 1789-1799") for which the basic research was conducted in the fall of 1998 at the Institut National d'Etudes Démographiques, Paris, for publication in its journal Population, and to prepare a brief English-language version of those findings ("Contraception Goes Domestic: France, 1789-1799") for presentation at the Tenth International Congress on the Enlightenment to be held in Dublin in July 1999. The French "demographic transition," or introduction of large-scale deliberate birth control into marriage, dates from the revolutionary decade 1789-1799. Before then contraceptive sex, known from time immemorial, was extramarital as a rule throughout Europe, with marriage exclusively for breeding children. But just as the means to limit childbirth in marriage were not new in 1789, neither were the motives. What was new was the widespread audacity to violate the age-old taboo against curbing marital fertility. This the French did almost universally several generations before the rest of Europe followed suit beginning around 1875.

French historians have all deplored the French lead in conjugal fertility limitation, though with quiet pride over French priority in this aspect of modernization. Such pride has helped blind them to the fact that France was not alone or even clearly out front in blazing this new domestic trail. The rebel British colonies that formed the United States of America underwent an equivalent fertility transition at the time of their own political revolution, waged in the same spirit of human emancipation and bold innovation as the French Revolution of 1789. Another blinder on French research has been the historiographical orthodoxy that shaped the basic reconstruction of the fertility decline during the 1960s and 1970s, when such "deep history" was seen as incommensurable with mere political events. Ironically, the doctrinaire headquarters for separating surface from depths in history was the review Annales, yet its cofounder Marc Bloch, an inveterate corporatist pointed the way methodologically to discovering the common origins of the demographic transition in America and France. To schematize Bloch's approach: if some large-scale development occurred in about the same way and at about the same time in more than one place, its cause will more than likely be at once common and peculiar to those cases. Put to this comparative test, the going explanations for the French fertility transition all fail. Take the decline of religion: the English were then as freethinking as the French, whereas the Americans were in the throes of a religions revival. Conversely, the going explanation for the American transition fits the French case at least as well: that women, fired by the revolutionary rhetoric against patriarchal authority and for individual rights, but excluded from the public sphere, compensated at home by asserting control of their own fertility in sufficient numbers to touch off the transition. Thus the revolutionary ideological ferment of the age emerges as the apparent cause of the first two demographic transitions. These transitions, however, were the starting point of a progressive gender depolarization that is still underway. So the question arises whether that ferment was not itself an early effect of a deep sea change in human sexuality with consequences still slowly unfolding. This question, with which both studies close, will lead in due course to further, psychohistorical research.