Indeed historians and demographers have long noted the sluggish performance of the land of joie de vivre. France's population rose by only 39% over the 19th century while all Europe's more than doubled, the country’s share of the European total (including the British Isles and European Russia) falling from over 15% to under a tenth, with French annual growth averaging only 0.33% against a European 0.78% (0.71% leaving out Russia).

The immediate cause is a halving of fertility (by the usual measure, children born per woman completing her childbearing span, at the age-specific rates prevailing at the time) resulting from a still more severe drop in marital fertility (children born per woman within marriage, likewise assuming contemporary age-specific rates), but the ultimate reason remains unclear. The marriage rate itself remained fairly normal at around 8 per thousand, and female age at marriage even fell from a fairly high early 18th-century average in excess of 26 to a spritelier 24 years by 1900. People were marrying and surviving at ages conducive to robust growth, but they just weren’t having the children to go with it.

Mortality remained at moderate levels, expectation of life closely following Britain’s and rising from around 39 years over most of the century to 47 at its end (against a world average of barely 31), a vast improvement over the terrible 28 years or so of the mid-18th century. But marital fertility plunged from the time of the Revolution, general fertility following at a more leisurely rate a decade or so later owing to a temporary rise in marriage in the 1790s. The crude birth rate halved from 38 per thousand c.1780 to 19 per thousand by 1913, barely above the death rate which fell from 34 to a healthier 18. One explanation has been seen in the Revolution's preference for partble inheritance in place of eldest-son-takes-all primogeniture, leading couples to limit births to prevent minute subdivision of holdings. That would matter in a still predominantly rural population where 19th-century urbanisation rose from 18% to just 40%, only half England's level. Wrigley sees fertility as having replaced nuptiality (fewer children per marriage, rather than fewer or later marriages) as the family limitation mechanism.

A recent comparative treatment is Timothy W Guinnane, The historical fertility transition: a guide for economists, in Journal of Economic Literature 49:3 (2011): see also David R Weir, New estimates of nuptiality and marital fertility in France, 1740–1911, Population Studies 48:2 (1994), and EA Wrigley, The fall of marital fertility in nineteenth-century France: exemplar or exception? European Journal of Population 1:1 (1985). Jean Bourgeois-Pichat, Note sur l'evolution general de la population francaise depuis le XVIII siecle, Population 7:2 (1952) remains a valuable source of long-run movements, though some of the data (notably for the 18th century) have been revised by subsequent studies.

The demographic grow of the revolution era was due to many factor. One of them was the migration of rural population to urban area in order to find better condition of living.

This movement was important in country like UK or Germany due to the fact that much of the land was own by important landowner who use peasant as a workforce. The peasant working the land ,dont own it and were more encline to migrate to the city.

But There is a special case for France : You see France Bourgeoisie class was never involve in rural area and develop in the urban center. The land was own by the nobility. Nobility land's who after the revolution was spilt between the peasant. So when the industrial revolution happen , much of the peasant own their land for several generation and we're less encline to leave. This also explain why few French leave France during the European Migration of the XIX century who saw thousands of Irish , Spanish , Italian migrating from Europe.