Industrialization, Proletarianization, and Marriage: a Reconsideration

Abstract

This article examines demographic patterns in the Lille region of north ern France in an effort to test two hypotheses which explain nineteenth-century population growth by linking industrialization with high fertility via early mar riage : the old, increasingly discarded view attributing early marriage to a collapse of working-class morality and the working-class family, and the more sophisticated, and recently more fashionable, interpretation emphasizing in dustrialization as a liberating influence which made early marriage possible. As this article shows, neither hypothesis can account for demographic patterns in the mid-nineteenth-century Lille region. The article concludes that industrialization and proletarianization did not necessarily generate early marriage, and suggests that in some circumstances, industrialization could promote late marriage and high marital fertility.