The number of deaths outpaced the number of births in France for the first time since the Second World War and ten years before the official French national statistics bureau had projected.
Data published by the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) on Tuesday revealed that there were 651,000 deaths in 2025, an increase of 1.5 per cent over last year. The official statistician attributed this increase to a particularly deadly winter flu at the start of the year.
However, this trend is likely to continue, with 2026 marking the first year in which members of the baby boom generation will have reached the age of 80 in France, the head of the demographic and social studies unit at INSEE, Sylvie Le Minez, said per Le Figaro.
Meanwhile, there was a 2.1 per cent decline in births, with 645,000 babies being born in 2025. This marked the lowest level since 1942 and represented a 24 per cent drop since the last high in 2010.
It means that for the first time since World War II, France experienced a negative natural population growth at -6,000. This came ten years ahead of previous projections from the INSEE, which estimated that the so-called demographic winter would arrive by 2035.
Despite the decline, the total population of France continued to rise to 69.1 million people, compared to 68.6 million in 2024. Like other stagnating European nations, the increase in the population of around 500,000 was almost entirely attributable to mass migration.
As of the latest figures released by INSEE, the foreign-born population of France hit a fresh record in 2024 of 7.7 million out of a total 68 million, meaning that over one in ten people in the country were born elsewhere.
This natural population decline comes despite President Macron’s “ demographic rearmament ” scheme that he pitched at the start of 2024 to increase birth rates in France. Critics have noted that none of the central pillars of the plan have been enacted two years later as the French government was plunged into political chaos by Macron’s cyincal tactics to prevent the populist National Rally of Marine Le Pen from coming to power.
According to the INSEE report, the French fertility rate continued to decline last year, falling to just 1.56 children per woman, compared to 1.61 in 2024 and well below the 2.1 children per woman needed for population replacement.
“You have to go back to the end of the First World War to find a total fertility rate this low,” the public statistician noted.
As with other Western nations experiencing demographic collapse, a critical factor has been the move by many women to delay having children into their 30s, when they are often physically able to have as many children as they would have been able to in their 20s. Indeed, the average age of a first time mother continued to rise in 2025, hitting 31.2 years old. Just two decades prior, the average was below 30.
The INSEE’s Sylvie Le Minez said that the birth rate “continues to decrease for the most fertile women, aged 25 to 34, and remains stable for women aged 35 and over, whose fertility had increased in the past.”
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