Order Daniel Greenfield’s new book, Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left: HERE.
France had more deaths than births last year. The nation of over 68 million, had only 645,000 births last year and 651,000 deaths. The decline could have been predicted last year when the country had more people who were born in 1946 than babies who were born in 2024.
Compare that to 1947 when 862,955 babies were born to a nation of only 40 million.
With a rate of 1.56 babies per woman (down from 1.67 in 2023), France, like many first world nations, is engaged in the grim business of voluntary cultural extinction. But unlike Japan or South Korea, that extinction will be anything but a gentle passing into the night because France’s rate is lower than it seems.
France’s ‘laicite’ secularism means that the kind of demographic data we take for granted isn’t available, but France’s statistics do track births by foreign born and native born parents. The number of babies born to parents who were themselves born in France fell from 554,419 in 2014 to 414,843 in 2024. Meanwhile the number of babies born to foreign born parents has been steadily rising. This is only a partial snapshot because much of the foreign population in France is young enough to be part of the third or even fourth generation of immigrants.
While around a third of babies are indeed being born to immigrant parents, a historical landmark that was reached in 2023, many of the ‘French-born’ parents are actually themselves the children of immigrant parents.
Around a third of France’s population under the age of 60 has immigrant origins.
As France’s National Institute for Demographic Studies notes, “whereas prior to the 1950s immigrants to France came from European countries where Catholicism was the majority religion, since that time most immigrants have come from countries where Islam is the main—and in many cases official—religion.“
The relatively low French birth rate of 1.56 is far lower when you consider that while North African Muslim countries like Morocco (2.23), Algeria (2.77), and (Tunisia 1.83), which were the sources of much of the original Muslim settler population, have relatively lighter birth rates that are still significantly higher than the French average, that is being supplemented by mass migration from more dangerous, because they contain sizable Al Qaeda elements, but also more fertile places like Afghanistan, where the birth rate is 4.8, or Mali with a birth rate of 5.61.
57% of women from Algeria and 56% of women from Mali had a baby within four years of their entry into France. That’s the real rate of demographic change and the country’s extinction rate.
“Migration flows are now the main driver of demographic growth in France,” France’s National Institute for Demographic Studies warned.
In 2024, 343,000 residence permits were handed out. That number approaches the number of births to French-born parents.
And what of the native French population?
There were around a quarter of a million abortions in 2024. That makes the ratio of abortions to births somewhere between 1 out of 3 and 1 out of 2 with the arc trending toward one abortion for every two births.
There were only 247,000 marriages in France in 2024. Only 43% of births occurred among married couples with almost 57% of births taking place outside marriage. There is no way to know exactly who is getting married, but we do know that church weddings are a distinct minority with Catholic weddings declining to 40,000. So where would the babies come from?
In December 2023, less than 10,000 marriages took place in France. Contrast that with over 34,000 marriages in France in December 1946.
The post-war French were resilient. There were far fewer of them in 1946 than in 2026, yet despite the war and the occupation and the threat of nuclear war, they got about the business of not just rebuilding the buildings that had been bombed out during the war, but rebuilding their people, marriage by marriage, and family by family, leading to a 30% population increase.
But today’s French, like so many other civilized peoples, have given up on the whole messy business of getting married, raising families (at least in numbers below replacement rate) and continuing on as a people. They chose extinction and it would have come even if they hadn’t opened their gates and their borders to the invasions from the Middle East and North Africa.
South Korea and Japan show all too clearly that decline and extinction will happen even without the infusion of massive numbers of hostile migrants, but the combination of hostile migration and population collapse ensure not only extinction, but a violent oppressive end to a nation.
France is being overrun and colonized by the same Islamic ideology that threw Armenian women from cliffs, raided entire English villages for slaves, burned entire families alive in their homes in Israel, massacred the Hindu population of Kashmir, and are busy destroying Christian villages in Nigeria.
More than half of young Muslims were polled in France as choosing Islamic ‘Sharia’ law over French law. That law includes the supremacy of Islamic rule, the enslavement of non-Muslims, the rape of non-Muslim women and girls, and the ultimate conquest of France and Europe.
The French authorities have spent generations pretending that it’s not happening. Just as they are pretending that their society is not headed for extinction. But the numbers don’t lie.
The end of France can be read in every annual table of statistics issued by its numberless bureaucracy. The decline of births and marriages, the rise of abortions and immigrants, are the death knell of a civilization. No babies and no borders means that a country also has no future left to look forward to. And while France is staring at the cliff, Americans are not that far behind.
France’s birth rate has fallen to 1.56 babies. America’s birth rate is down to 1.6.
















