Reconstructing the French Population at the Parish Level before the Revolution

Alexis Litvine, University of Cambridge
Isabelle Seguy, INED
Doriane Hare, CNRS
Arthur Starzec, INED/UCL
Guillaume Proffit, University of Cambridge

This article describes a new dataset of French vital records for the late eighteenth century compiled by the authors using previous work by Eric Brian and completed with new archival material. We also describe a new methodology to link these pre-revolutionary administrative units to the communes created after the Revolution. This allows us to create an estimate of the French population before the Revolution based on both vital record counts and population figures from a later period. In this paper, we describe our methodology and present our first results.

Keywords: Population projections, forecasts, and estimations, Spatial Demography, Historical Demography

See extended abstract.