France is running out of babies.
That statement sounds more sensational than it is. In 2025, France recorded 645,000 births and 651,000 deaths. For the first time since the end of the Second World War, more people died in France than were born there. The country's fertility rate fell to just 1.56 children per woman, the lowest level since the end of the First World War. Births have fallen 24 percent since 2010. Meanwhile, 22 percent of the French population is now 65 or older. [insee.fr], [reuters.com]
The obvious questions are economic.
Who will fill the jobs? Who will pay the taxes? How will a smaller working population support a growing population of retirees?
These are real problems. An aging population threatens to increase spending on pensions and elderly care while simultaneously reducing the relative size of the workforce supporting those systems. [reuters.com], [theguardian.com]
There are also possible solutions. People can retire later. Taxes can rise. Benefits can change. Automation and artificial intelligence may allow fewer workers to produce more. And workers can come from somewhere else.
Indeed, despite having more deaths than births in 2025, France's population still grew slightly, to an estimated 69.1 million people, as net migration more than compensated for its negative natural population change. [insee.fr], [reuters.com]
Look exclusively at the economics, then, and declining fertility presents a difficult but perhaps manageable problem of institutional design.
But people aren't simply units of labor.
They carry cultures.
And that raises a much more uncomfortable question.
If a population gradually stops reproducing itself, what exactly is at risk of disappearing?
The problem beyond pensions
Imagine that France solves its demographic problem economically.
Its population stabilizes. Workers continue arriving from abroad. Productivity increases. Taxes are collected. Pensions remain solvent. The French state functions perfectly well.
Problem solved?
Perhaps.
But perhaps we have only solved one problem while introducing a completely different question.
Populations carry languages, religions, customs, historical memories, assumptions about morality, understandings of family and authority, heroes and villains, and stories about who "we" are.
Those differences need not make immigration harmful, nor do they mean that immigrants cannot become French. They do mean that replacing a missing worker is conceptually different from replacing a missing member of a culture.
That distinction is sometimes difficult to discuss because questions of ancestry, nationality, religion and culture become entangled remarkably quickly.
They should be separated.
A person's ancestry does not tell us everything about his culture. An immigrant can assimilate. His children can speak French, participate in French institutions and regard French history as their history. Conversely, a person descended from French ancestors can reject much of the culture those ancestors inhabited.
The interesting question, therefore, isn't simply who lives in France.
It's what makes France French.
And that question quickly becomes surprisingly difficult.
The Ship of Theseus has a birth-rate problem
The ancient Ship of Theseus puzzle asks us to imagine a ship whose aging wooden planks are replaced one at a time.
Replace one plank and obviously it remains the same ship.
Replace another.
Still the same ship.
But suppose the process continues until every original plank has disappeared.
Is it still the Ship of Theseus?
Cultures present a similar problem.
France today is obviously not the France of a thousand years ago. Its institutions have changed. Its political system has changed repeatedly. Its relationship with religion has changed enormously. Its understanding of citizenship has changed. Its moral assumptions have changed.
And yet we recognize continuity.
The France of Louis XIV, the France of the Revolution, Napoleonic France and today's secular French Republic contradict one another on profoundly important questions, yet we nevertheless place them inside a continuous story called France.
Clearly, cultural change does not automatically mean cultural death.
But does that mean any amount of change can be called continuity?
That seems equally unsatisfactory.
If it did, cultures could never really disappear. The descendants of the Aztecs still inhabit Mexico, but few of us would therefore claim that Aztec civilization remains alive and well, having merely become Catholic, Spanish-speaking and governed by completely different institutions.
At some point, change can become something more than evolution.
One ship has become another.
The trouble is identifying when.
Are all the planks equally important?
Perhaps cultures are composed of different kinds of planks.
Language. Religion. Ancestry. Political institutions. Family structures. Moral assumptions. Art and literature. Historical memory. Traditions. National heroes. Shared enemies.
And, importantly, the civilization's own understanding of where it came from.
Some of these clearly can change without destroying continuity. Political institutions are an obvious example. France survived kings, emperors and republics.
Perhaps some planks are more load-bearing than others.
Religion is an intriguing candidate.
A major religious transformation can change much more than what buildings people enter on particular days of the week. Religion can address the nature of moral authority, man's relationship to the divine, family, death, time, law, obligation and the ultimate purpose of human existence.
That is why the transition from pagan antiquity to Christian Europe seems different in kind from changing a tax code or replacing a monarchy with a republic.
The Gauls inhabited the territory we now call France. But we do not ordinarily describe modern French civilization as Gallic civilization with two thousand years of updates. Christianity formed part of something recognizably different.
Likewise, modern Scandinavians descend in substantial part from the peoples who inhabited Viking Age Scandinavia, yet contemporary Norway is not simply Viking civilization with smartphones.
Religious transformation can coincide with civilizational transformation.
But here the argument runs into trouble.
Contemporary France challenges the theory
Modern France is itself an awkward counterexample.
If religion is one of culture's uniquely load-bearing planks, what should we make of the enormous distance between historically Catholic France and today's secular republic?
Christianity has not disappeared from France, but the relationship between French identity and Catholic faith is radically different from what it once was.
And yet France remains France.
This gives us an uncomfortable thought experiment.
Imagine France a century from now.
Suppose it remains French-speaking. Its citizens remain proud of French literature, architecture and cuisine. They teach the Revolution and Napoleon as their own history. Notre-Dame remains their monument. They identify themselves emphatically as French.
But suppose France has also become 60 percent Muslim and substantially more religiously observant.
Is it still culturally French?
My instinct is no, or at least that something sufficiently fundamental would have changed that we ought to consider whether "French" still describes the same culture.
But instinct isn't proof.
Perhaps a Muslim-majority France could absorb Islam into French civilization just as earlier peoples of Gaul once absorbed Christianity and produced something new that subsequently became recognizably French.
Or perhaps that analogy proves the opposite point. The Christian inhabitants who emerged from antiquity weren't merely pagan Gauls practicing a new religion. Something new had, in fact, come into existence.
The distinction may depend partly upon how the future population understands the past.
Consider Charles Martel.
Simply knowing who Charles Martel was tells us comparatively little about cultural continuity. Far more interesting is whether a future society regards him as one of "our" historical figures or one of "theirs."
Cultures do not only remember history.
They take sides within it.
Heroes, villains, victories and catastrophes help tell a people who they believe themselves to be.
Perhaps cultural continuity therefore has less to do with preserving every inherited belief than with maintaining a recognizable chain of inheritance: those people were us; their history became our history; we changed what we inherited, but we inherited it nonetheless.
That still leaves us without an obvious boundary.
Perhaps that's the point.
Demography isn't destiny, either
There is another complication.
National fertility statistics disguise enormous differences within populations.
Not everyone in a low-fertility society necessarily approaches children, family or religion in the same way. Some subcultures may attach considerably greater importance to childbearing than others.
Over generations, that matters.
If one subculture consistently produces more children than another, its relative share of subsequent generations can increase. But even that arithmetic cannot simply be extrapolated indefinitely. Children do not inherit their parents' beliefs mechanically. People leave religions, embrace religions, marry outside their communities and absorb the surrounding culture.
Likewise, immigrants and their descendants do not remain culturally frozen at the moment their ancestors crossed a border.
Assimilation exists.
So does cultural change.
And importantly, influence moves in both directions.
The future France will be created neither solely by the descendants of today's French population nor solely by those who migrate into it, but through generations of interaction among both.
That makes predictions of cultural destiny extraordinarily hazardous.
What, then, are falling birth rates threatening?
Certainly economic arrangements.
Almost certainly political arrangements.
Possibly national power.
But perhaps they also force us to confront a question modern economic language handles rather poorly:
Does the continuation of a culture itself have value?
If all we value is the material welfare of individuals, the question may have little importance. A prosperous population of 50 million is not obviously inferior to a prosperous population of 70 million.
But human beings don't only value themselves.
They preserve languages they know will never dominate world commerce. They maintain religious traditions inherited from people dead for centuries. They restore old buildings, teach national histories, preserve recipes, sing old songs and tell children stories about people they never met.
We regularly behave as though inheritance matters.
If so, falling fertility cannot be understood entirely through charts showing workers per retiree.
It also asks whether the people inheriting a civilization will recognize what they receive, whether they will alter it, and eventually whether the resulting culture will still meaningfully be the same thing.
France may adapt to its demographic problems. Immigration may form part of that adaptation. Automation may form another. Fertility itself may eventually recover.
But none of those possibilities answers the deeper question.
How many planks can we replace?
And which planks can be replaced?
I don't know that there is a precise answer.
But in a century in which birth rates are falling across much of the developed world while populations become older and migration increasingly shapes national demographics, the question of what makes a people the same people may become every bit as important as the question of how many people there are.
Perhaps the Ship of Theseus has had a demographic problem all along.
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