Demography, that supposedly neutral science of human statistics, is only ever one step away from politics. Especially so in France, where the national discourse over the past two months has summoned historical memory and hinted at political futures in disturbing admixture.

On the 16^th of January, Emmanuel Macron gave a much-anticipated live press conference at l’Élysée, the presidential palace in Paris. It had the quality of an American “State of the Union” address, a stocktaking of the national condition. For over two hours, he presented a review of his first term in office, while outlining his government’s priorities for the current quinquennat, the five-year period of French presidential terms.

Across the wide-ranging speech, Macron spoke of measures to address the climate crisis, planned reforms for the national school system, the role of French leadership in Europe, France’s position on the “Israel-Hamas war” as the genocide in Gaza has mostly been framed in France, and a myriad of other domestic issues. An indisputable master of political communication, he is adept at crafting a centrist discourse that comes across as eminently reasonable: making modest gestures to both the left and the right while projecting a largely non-threatening middle ground of consensus. Macron incarnates the French idea of the juste milieu, or the “sound middle”. It is the ideological equivalent of Goldilocks’ porridge: not too hot, not too cold. Just right.

However, on this occasion, Macron’s language and political imagery took a noticeable tilt toward the right. One particular theme provoked a storm of controversy in the days following the speech. To combat declining birth rates, Macron announced that his government would provide expanded parental leave, and assist with access to IVF programs. Yet it was what he dubbed this program that turned heads across the country: a réarmement démographique, or “demographic rearming”.

The expression quickly became fodder for much commentary and satire. What exactly was it supposed to signify?

French women asked whether this national “rearming” meant that their uteruses should from hereon be considered weapons at the disposal of the state. Other commentators suggested that it was bit rich for Macron to ask others to do the heavy-lifting in this area, considering that he and his wife have so far contributed zero babies to the national balance sheet (and given their respective ages, are unlikely to do so any time soon).

France, like most other countries, is currently experiencing a profound cost-of-living crisis. In such a context, the appeal for increased reproductive activity was bound to be linked to the financial squeeze felt by French households. More babies mean more mouths to feed, larger dwellings, and all the sundry costs that come with raising children. One cartoonist made the connection explicitly: “If you give me housing, I will make you a child!”

Yet there was a much darker undertone to Macron’s carefully chosen phrase. In employing this kind of language, Macron appeared to be intentionally pandering to supporters of the Far Right Rassemblement National. Formerly known as the Front National, this neo-Vichyite party founded by the controversial Jean-Marie Le Pen, and subsequently led by his daughter, Marine Le Pen has menaced French politics for several decades, slowly gaining support for its xenophobic policies.

For the French Far Right, pro-natalism has long been an obsession. The fantasy of a racially pure, socially conservative “French natality” has been periodically revived throughout the past century, conceived in opposition to two perceived threats: post-1960s feminist liberation and postcolonial immigration. The obsession with women’s reproductive rights is shared with ideological brethren in the United States, even if French anti-abortion activists are more likely to be purely Catholic, as compared with the Evangelical-Catholic alliance in the USA.

Shortly after Macron’s speech, France’s National Assembly approved a bill to protect abortion rights, which was later ratified by the Senate, making France the first country to enshrine this right in its constitution. Was Macron’s discourse a diversionary tactic a means of obfuscating this legislative agenda?

For French conservatives, the profound fear that metropolitan France would be swamped by migrants from France’s former Arab and African colonies accompanied the end of empire in the postwar years.

The discipline of demography was a handmaiden to this anxiety. As historian Eugenia Palieraki has brilliantly shown, when the French demographer Alfred Sauvy coined the concept of the “Third World” in 1952, he did so as a pro-colonialist, fearing that France would lose its empire to the rising tide of anti-colonial revolution. Sauvy’s conception of the third world was built on the metaphor of a demographic “pressure cooker”: he feared that rising birth rates, especially in North Africa, would inexorably push the populations of France’s splintering empire to migrate across the Mediterranean in search of better lives.

This anxiety has never truly gone away, but has been updated in recent decades and shapeshifted to a variety of forms.

In his 2014 essay Le suicide français, the Far-Right journalist Éric Zemmour argued that rising immigration (along with a host of other social ills, like feminism, LGBTQI rights, the European Union, consumerism and academic leftism) was responsible for the slow “death” of the French nation in the period since May ’68. The polemic that ensued helped to raise Zemmour’s profile and launch his political career. In the most recent presidential elections of 2022, which returned Macron to a second term in office, Zemmour stood as a candidate openly espousing a French variant of the global conspiracy theory known as the Great Replacement, holding that the “white race” is threatened to be overtaken by populations from the Global South.

In the literary realm, Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel Soumission imagined a France in the near future in which an Islamist government had come to power. While Houellebecq claimed that his novel was not an attempt to comment on immigration, the notion of a specifically Islamic demography underscores the novel’s themes. For instance, in this imagined future Islamic France, women who leave the workforce and stay at home, embracing a maternal identity, receive a special subsidy.

This fictional scenario hints at the psychic roots of the nationalist demographic phobia that animates the new European Far Right: in the convergence of (white) women’s-liberation with Muslim-immigration. Or, in other words, a decline in the “right” type of reproduction alongside a worrying rise in the “wrong” type of reproduction.

Which brings us back to Macron. By implicitly reframing French demography as a challenge for the “right type” of French citizens to breed, while limiting “clandestine” immigration (another of Macron’s themes in his presidential address), Macron was engaging in dog-whistling of a most dangerous variety. In every concession to the language of neo-Fascism, and every normalisation of xenophobia, Macron runs the risk of sealing his own demise, and making the eventual victory of the French Far Right a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Image: Brigitte and Emmanuel Macron in 2018, Wikimedia Commons