MARRIAGES

Let us take another look at the marriage rate (see Chapter 4, ‘The marriage rate’). It would seem that it is now lower in relation to the total population than it was in 1840. But, as Louis Roussel observes in his Le Manage dans la société française contemporaine:

For the contemporary period, demographers use a more sophisticated method that relates the number of marriages to the total number of those of marriageable age rather than to the total population. Contrary to what the crude rates would suggest, there has been until very recent years an increase in the marriage rate in our own age, and the same phenomenon has been observed in every European country.

The trend has recently been reversed, however. Up to and including 1972, the rate increased, peaking at 416,500 for France and then falling to 355,000 (13,000 fewer than in 1977) in 1978, 340,000 in 1979 and 335,000 in 1980. As the population has increased, the rate is the lowest since the end of the Second World War, or 6.2 marriages per thousand inhabitants. The downward trend is still too recent for us to be able to say whether it is temporary (an economic crisis causing people to defer marriage) or due to a changing attitude towards marriage on the part of young people.