Effets de fratrie et mobilité sociale intergéné rationnelle dans la belgique urbaine et rurale au xixe siècle

Abstract

Studied since more than a century, the issue of the relationships between fertility and social mobility is a quite complicate one. Individuals and families are concerned, building their life trajectories during periods of major structural changes like the demographic transition and economic modernization. This paper analyses data from one of the cradle of the industrial revolution on the European continent, East Belgium in the 19th century. The quantity of surviving children grew, and consequently the sib sizes. However, siblings could have been a penalty or a benefit, depending of the context. The definition of quality, or social status, is also dependant of the context, since has to be different in the countryside or in the urban-industrial environment. Finally, measuring the relationships between the size and the composition of the sibling groups and the social level reached by the children in their adult age requires the choice of peculiar statistical methods. At the end, the most important result is that while lateral or sibling effects are limited and unclear, during a time of tremendous changes in demography and economy the simple transmission of social position from parents to children remained the most powerful component of the social reproduction processes.