The Decline of France and Its Relationship to Christian Faith
From the Center of the World to a Mountain of Debt
There was a time when the French king was envied by every king in Europe, when European nobles conversed in French and copied the art and fashion of Versailles. Back then France, with the strongest army in Europe and colonies around the world, was a thoroughly Catholic country known as "the eldest daughter of the Church."
France today is a country whose national debt reached 116% of GDP in 2025, whose annual deficit hits 5% of GDP even after collecting enormous taxes, and where only 29% of people are Catholic, making it one of the least religious countries in Europe.
This pattern of being strong while faith was strong and faltering after leaving the faith is no coincidence. When faith disappears, there are fewer children, communities collapse, and rights come before duties, and a state that fills that empty space with money eventually cannot hold out. Recent research shows that this process began in France more than 100 years earlier than in any other country and has now spread into a crisis for all of Europe.
Chapter 1 — An Age When Faith Held Up Society
In Europe, Christianity was not a personal hobby; it was society itself. The church taught children, fed the poor, and cared for the sick and the elderly, and monasteries were places of prayer as well as schools, hospitals, and libraries. Churches and communities of faith did a large share of what the state now does with taxes.
The tithe, one of the sources of that funding, was a burden on peasants and caused plenty of disputes, but the money circulated within the visible community of the parish and its church. Because neighbors who knew who was sick or hungry cared for them directly, they could help many people at far less cost than today's welfare, which passes through huge bureaucracies.
Chapter 2 — Louis XIV, the Peak of Faith and National Power
In the age of Louis XIV, who reigned from 1661 to 1715, France, where Catholicism was at the center of royal power and social order, became the strongest country in Europe through four strengths.
First, thanks to a Catholic family culture of having many children, it had the largest population in Europe, with plenty of people to farm, pay taxes, and serve in the army. Second, luxury goods from the textile, glass, tapestry, and arms industries built up by finance minister Colbert sold like hotcakes in the courts of Europe. Third, Caribbean sugar and coffee brought enormous wealth, though much of it was built on slave labor and colonial exploitation. Fourth, the French language, literature, architecture, and fashion captivated Europe's ruling classes.
Chapter 3 — The Price of Driving Out People of Deep Faith
When Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had tolerated Protestantism, in 1685, hundreds of thousands of French Protestants known as Huguenots left for the Netherlands, England, and Prussia. Among these people, who learned to read in order to read the Bible and regarded diligence and thrift as part of their faith, there were unusually many skilled craftsmen, merchants, and financiers, and the skills of watchmaking, silk, and silversmithing crossed the border with them and built up the industries of rival countries.
What makes a nation strong and prosperous is not a religion imposed from above but a living faith in the heart, and a country that loses people with such faith becomes weaker to the same degree.
Chapter 4 — The Retreat of Faith Began Before the Revolution
France's secularization began well before the Revolution of 1789. As Enlightenment ideas spread in the 18th century, hostility toward the church grew, and high-ranking clergy lost respect by clinging to privilege and property. Meanwhile, according to economist Guillaume Blanc, the share of wills written without religious expressions shot up from 10% in 1710 to 80% in 1780. In just 70 years, people who did not seek God even in the face of death became the majority.
In the same period, the French began having fewer children. Blanc concluded that this decline in fertility began more than 100 years earlier than in any other country and that its cause was secularization. Fertility usually falls when people grow richer, more urban, and more educated, but France at the time was relatively poor, mostly rural, and largely illiterate, and in fact literacy, population density, and urbanization had little effect on when fertility began to fall.
Chapter 5 — The Revolution, and the State That Took the Church's Place
In the late 18th century, France could not deal with debts swollen by wars, especially its support for the American War of Independence, because the nobles and high clergy paid almost no taxes. In the end, the Estates-General that Louis XVI convened in 1789 turned into the great Revolution.
The Revolution abolished the tithe and confiscated church property, drove out or executed priests who refused to swear the oath of loyalty, and even created a state ritual called the "Cult of Reason." More than a century of struggle between church and state ended in 1905, when the law separating church and state fixed in law the French form of secularism known as "laïcité." From then on, education, relief for the poor, and care for the sick and the elderly passed from the voluntary hands of neighbors to the taxes of the state.
Chapter 6 — A Country With Fewer Children Lost Its Wars
France lost to Britain in the Seven Years' War (1756–1763), losing most of its colonies in North America and India, and lost its supremacy step by step through Napoleon's fall, defeat by Prussia in 1870, occupation in World War II, and the independence of its colonies.
Underneath all this was population. Throughout the 19th century, while the populations of Britain and Germany exploded, France stood still, and Europe's most populous nation was overtaken by Germany around the time of the Franco-Prussian War, falling behind in soldiers and industrial labor. Blanc estimated that if France had followed the same population path as Britain, it would now have 250 million people, but France's current population is under 70 million. The Seven Years' War broke out at the very time faith was rapidly disappearing from wills; secularization pulled down the birth rate, the stalled population weakened national power, and this led to defeat.
Chapter 7 — The Glorious Thirty, Sustained by "Leftover Faith"
The generation that led the "Glorious Thirty" (1945–1975), the period of rapid growth after World War II, were still mostly people who had been baptized, went to church, and grew up in Catholic families. In 1960, France's fertility rate rose to 2.85 children per woman, among the highest in Western Europe, and large families with more than ten siblings were common.
This era lived on the "savings" left behind by faith, and the huge welfare state was built at exactly this time on the assumption that many children would grow up and pay taxes. The problem burst open as those savings ran out.
Chapter 8 — Five Reasons a Nation Falters When It Abandons Faith
① Fewer children are born
Faith leads people to treasure marriage and family and to see children as a blessing. In a comparative study of 18 European countries, religious affiliation, church attendance, and self-reported religiosity all moved in the same direction as the desired and actual number of children, and a long-term Dutch study found that church attendance strongly predicted later childbearing.
France, which long had one of the highest birth rates in Europe, has now seen its total fertility rate fall from 1.61 in 2024 to 1.56 in 2025, the lowest since just after World War I. Births in 2025 were 24% fewer than in 2010, and in the same year deaths outnumbered births for the first time since World War II.
② Pensions collapse
When there are fewer children, there are fewer people to pay taxes and more elderly people drawing pensions. In France, people aged 65 and over now make up 22% of the population, almost the same as those under 20, and the actual fertility rate of 1.56 is far below the 1.8 that the Pensions Advisory Council assumed when calculating the system's finances, so the calculation is off from its very starting point.
③ The state does with money what neighbors used to do
As the state takes over all the care once handled by volunteering, offerings, and neighborly kindness, the French government in 2025 spent 57.2% of GDP and collected 43.6% in taxes, and still had to borrow. The cost of the state filling the gap left by collapsed communities is far higher than people think.
④ A culture of duty becomes a culture of rights
As Max Weber said in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, people who regarded diligence and thrift as religious duties laid the foundation of Western capitalism. But when faith disappears, "What should I receive?" comes before "What should I do?", and benefits once granted become hard to cut. President Macron carried out a reform in 2023 raising the retirement age from 62 to 64, but after fierce backlash, Prime Minister Lecornu postponed it until after the 2027 presidential election to keep the government from collapsing, and Macron's signature achievement was set aside by his own side.
⑤ When shared values vanish, agreement becomes impossible
When the common standard of "what is right" that a shared faith once provided disappears, everyone insists only on their own share and politics becomes a brawl. In its worst political crisis in decades, France has seen one minority government after another push deficit-cutting budgets, and since the 2024 general election, budget fights alone have brought down the government three times.
Chapter 9 — The Price All of Europe Paid: The Russia-Ukraine War
All of Europe followed the road France took first, and the price appeared in Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Responsibility for the war lies with Russia, which decided to invade. But why Europe could not prevent the war, and why Russia judged that Europe would not stand up to it, is tied to the face of a Europe that has left its faith.
① A society with no children to protect has no one to fight
With few children there are few young people to join the army, and it is even harder to send an only child to the battlefield. When the faith that taught "sacrifice for something greater than myself" disappeared, society began to avoid sacrifice itself. Germany, which suspended conscription in 2011, is about 80,000 troops short of its existing target, which it has never once reached. When a new law in effect from 2026 required all 18-year-old men to fill out a military service questionnaire, more than 45,000 students walked out of class and took to the streets.
② Defense money was turned into welfare money
The defense cuts made after the Cold War on the grounds that "there will be no more war," the so-called "peace dividend," flowed into welfare. Defense spending by European NATO members fell from 3.8% of GDP in 1980 to a record low of 1.42% in 2014, while European social welfare spending more than doubled between 1991 and 2023, exceeding half of all government spending. Even in 2014, when Russia seized Crimea, the only countries meeting the 2% defense spending guideline were Greece, Estonia, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
③ For comfort's sake, Europe leaned on its enemy
In 2021, the European Union relied on Russia for about 45% of its imported gas and nearly 40% of its total gas use, and Germany in particular doubled its Russian gas imports in ten years while cutting nuclear and coal power. The enormous sums sent to Russia every year became Russia's military power. This was the result of losing the teaching to practice restraint and think of the future.
④ Russia saw Europe as "a weak society that abandoned its faith"
In his September 2022 speech annexing occupied territories, Putin defined the West as an enemy and accused it of fundamentally rejecting religion, morality, and family values. Russia is no model of faith either, and this was propaganda to justify aggression. But it shows that Russia judged Europe to be a weak society unable to bear sacrifice, and that an opponent who seems to have no will to fight is easy to attack.
⑤ Ukraine paid the price first
According to a report jointly issued by the World Bank, the United Nations, the European Union, and the Ukrainian government, Ukraine's direct damage by the end of 2025 reached 195.1 billion dollars, mainly in housing, transport, and energy, and the roughly 588 billion dollars needed for reconstruction over the next ten years is almost three times Ukraine's GDP. This does not even include the countless dead and wounded or the suffering of millions who left their homes, and Europe too received a bill far bigger than the peace dividend: painful choices between welfare and defense, and an energy crisis.
⑥ A contrasting country: Poland
Poland, where secularization is speeding up but faith is still relatively strong by European standards, more than doubled its defense spending once the war broke out, from 2.2% of GDP in 2022 to 4.8% in 2026, the highest level in NATO. Foreign Minister Sikorski, pointing to a history of repeated Russian invasions, declared that Poland would never again become a Russian colony. A country that had kept its faith and national memory knew what it had to protect, while the large countries of Western Europe that had left their faith thought first of what they could enjoy rather than what they had to protect.
Chapter 10 — Answering the Objections
Objection 1: "Northern Europe is more secular than France and yet prosperous, and Italy is Catholic but has more debt."
Denmark still has a state church, Sweden officially separated church and state only in 2000 and Norway only in 2012, and many citizens are still registered with the church and pay church tax. Northern Europe's honesty, diligence, thrift, and high trust, rooted in "belonging without believing," grew out of the Lutheran tradition, which is different in character from France, which pushed the church out by law in 1905. Moreover, as fertility plunges in Northern Europe too, a Finnish study found that the rapid decline in church membership is one cause of the recent drop in fertility, and that couples who share the same religion have more children than those who do not. Italy's debt likewise exploded in the 1970s and 80s, when divorce and abortion were legalized and church attendance plummeted.
Objection 2: "Fertility is falling even in countries with strong religious traditions, like Italy, Spain, Poland, and Korea. The cause is housing and education costs."
In Spain, Italy, and Poland, church attendance has plummeted recently, and the departure of young Poles from the faith is among the fastest in Europe. More than half of South Koreans have no religion, so it is hard to call Korea a religious country in the first place. At the individual level it is even clearer. In Spain, the fertility decline appeared only among Catholic women who did not practice their faith, and in Britain, France, and the Netherlands, the share of childless women fell among practicing believers and rose among women with no religion. The link between religiosity and childbearing was stronger in richer countries. If housing and education costs are conditions everyone faces, then what makes the difference within those conditions is faith.
Objection 3: "France lost its supremacy before secularization."
As we have seen, secularization began decades before the Revolution, and the Seven Years' War broke out in the middle of it, so the order actually fits exactly.
Objection 4: "Protestant regions prospered not because of a work ethic but because more people could read."
The very study this objection relies on, by Becker and Woessmann, explains that Protestant literacy rose because of Luther's demand that every Christian read the Bible for themselves, and that Protestantism led both to greater economic prosperity and to better education. The path has merely changed from "work ethic" to "faith to literacy, and literacy to economic growth"; the starting point is still faith.
Objection 5: "Just because things happened together doesn't make one the cause."
That is why scholars tested it separately. Blanc used genealogical records to compare changes in the fertility of the same individuals before and after, and even examined the choices of second-generation migrants, filtering out preexisting differences between regions and institutions. Becker and Woessmann used the fact that the Reformation spread outward from Wittenberg in concentric circles, using distance from Wittenberg as a natural experiment. Studies designed to isolate cause point in the same direction.
In Closing — A Tree With Its Roots Cut
In the France where faith was alive, there were many children, communities cared for one another, and people learned duty and restraint. When faith left, France became the first country in Europe to have fewer children and fell behind its rivals, and the state that took over the church's work held out on taxes and debt until it reached today, with more elderly, fewer children, and no one willing to give way.
All of Europe followed the road France took first: the young people who would fight disappeared, the money to defend the nation flowed into welfare, and for comfort's sake Europe entrusted its energy to its enemy. Russia judged such a Europe to be weak, and the price of that misjudgment and invasion came back as the ruins of Ukraine and countless lives.
Faith is like the roots of a tree. Even when the roots are cut, the tree stands green for a while on the nutrients left in its trunk and branches, but when they run out, it finally falls. The Glorious Thirty was a time sustained by those leftover nutrients.
Of course, the crisis of France and Europe cannot be explained by faith alone; war, economic policy, and political institutions also played a part. But the force that worked longest and deepest at the bottom of it all was the retreat of faith. That does not mean the answer is to go back to the age of Louis XIV. As the revocation of the Edict of Nantes shows, a religion forced by the state actually ruins a nation. What is needed is a faith that comes alive again in people's hearts, and the families, communities, and sense of responsibility that such faith creates. Whether France and Europe, which once commanded the world, can rise again depends on whether they can revive those roots.
