Landry, Adolphe

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LANDRY, ADOLPHE

(1874–1956)

Adolphe Landry was a French man of letters, economist, demographer, and statesman. He was educated in the Ecole Normale Superieure, but as a young man he was attracted by socialist ideas and abandoned plans for a literary career in preference for studies in the social sciences. Soon he was writing and publishing papers on a wide range of economic, historical, legal, and sociological subjects. In 1907, Landry was appointed to a chair at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. In 1910, he was elected to Parliament as a deputy from his native Corsica, and during his long political career he occupied several ministerial posts.

Landry's special interest in population was first signaled by two articles that appeared in 1909. One was on the population ideas of the eighteenth-century French economist and intellectual leader of the Physiocrats, François Quesnay; Landry's later writings also were inspired by the study of the history of economic thought. The other article presented his first formulation of demographic evolution as a sequence consisting of three stages–a primitive regime, characterized by high (uncontrolled) fertility and high mortality; an intermediate regime, such as in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century France and Britain, in which the higher standards of living that had been attained began to be protected by restriction of fertility (primarily through later marriage); and finally the contemporary regime, in which control of fertility becomes a generalized practice through contraception and abortion.

The most important contribution made by Landry to population theory was a full development of these ideas in the book La révolution démographique that appeared in 1934 (preceded by an eponymous article published in 1933, which later also appeared in English). "La révolution démographique"–the Demographic Revolution–denotes essentially the same process that, under the influence of the English-language literature and parallel theoretical development of the concept in the United States by demographers such as Warren Thompson, Frank Notestein, and Kingsley Davis, is primarily known as the demographic transition. Stylized presentations of the demographic transition routinely pictured the process as leading from a high-level equilibrium of birth and death rates to a low-level one: a path from a quasi-stationary state to a stationary state, with a period of more or less rapid and sustained population growth in between. In contrast, Landry's more flamboyant label signaled that he perceived the dynamics as one leading to long-term population disequilibrium. He expected birth rates to fall below death rates, first in the West and eventually spreading to the rest of the globe.

Landry was deeply concerned with what he saw as the predictable consequences of impending depopulation in France (the country farthest along toward that prospect): decadence resembling that of Venice or even extinction of civilization, exemplified by Greece and the Roman Empire. His concern was manifested in some four decades of political activism aimed at halting or reversing the process. From 1912 on, Landry took a leading role in the Alliance nationale contre la dépopulation and, in the interwar years, initiated a variety of legislative measures intended to improve the economic status of families with children so as to stimulate fertility. These efforts culminated in the Code de la famille, adopted by Parliament barely a month before the outbreak of World War II. Landry was also influential in the design of postwar French social policy, shaping social legislation with a strong pronatalist orientation; he attributed the resurgence of the birth rate in France to the effects of these policies.

Landry's 1945 book, Traité de démographie, written in collaboration with younger French demographers, was a then-unparalleled and up-to-date single-volume summation of the methods of demographic analysis, but it also presented a substantive description of population processes and population issues. Continuing his prominent prewar role in international scientific activities in the field of population, in 1947 Landry was elected to serve as the first president of the reconstituted International Union for the Scientific Study of Population.

bibliography

selected works by adolphe landry.

Landry, Adolphe. 1909. "Les idées de Quesnay sur la population." Revue d'histoire des doctrines économiques et sociales 2.

——. 1909. "Les trois théories de la population." Revue Scientia.

——. 1929. "Le maximum et l'optimum de la population." Revue Scientia April.

——. 1934. La révolution démographique. Paris: Sirey.

——. 1936. "Quelques aperçus concernant la dépopulation dans l'Antiquité gréco-romaine." Revue Historique January—February.

——. 1941. La démographie française. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.

——. 1987. "Demographic Revolution." Population and Development Review, 13(4): 731–740; originally published in 1933 as "La révolution démographique." In Economic Essays in Honour of Gustav Cassel. London: George Allen and Unwin.

Landry, Adolphe, H. Bunle, P. Depoid, M. Huber, and A. Sauvy. 1945. Traité de démographie. Paris: Payot.