The more I read this, the less I get his point on the religious influence.
> It is unclear why the Catholic Church’s influence waned so quickly and why France was the first country to secularize.
But then, if he doesn’t know enough about what’s happening in France during that period, how can he pin down the demographic decline as caused by the Catholic Church’s decline ? What if it was a completely different reason that he couldn’t find in his very limited set of documents ?
> The decline of Catholicism, and fertility, in eighteenth-century France turned it from a demographic powerhouse – the China of Europe – to merely a first-rank European power among several
Why wouldn’t it the other way round, with the core causes of the French decline also triggering less religiousness ?
This article has a lot of data, but the base logical argument feels off, like starting from a conclusion and sticking correlated statistics to it without ever coming up with definitive causality.
> It is unclear why the Catholic Church’s influence waned so quickly and why France was the first country to secularize.
But then, if he doesn’t know enough about what’s happening in France during that period, how can he pin down the demographic decline as caused by the Catholic Church’s decline ? What if it was a completely different reason that he couldn’t find in his very limited set of documents ?
> The decline of Catholicism, and fertility, in eighteenth-century France turned it from a demographic powerhouse – the China of Europe – to merely a first-rank European power among several
Why wouldn’t it the other way round, with the core causes of the French decline also triggering less religiousness ?
This article has a lot of data, but the base logical argument feels off, like starting from a conclusion and sticking correlated statistics to it without ever coming up with definitive causality.