Married Fecundity and Its Bearing on the Survival of the Aristocracy

Analysis of the fecundity of marriages of the male members of families mentioned in the Almanach of Gotha for the period 1890-1909 and the children born to them down to 1926 shows the productivity and fertility in royal and mediatized families to be markedly superior to that of other groups. Taken as a whole it would seem that the fertility of the aristocracy exceeds that of the contemporary French, English, American, and Prussian middle classes. The fecundity of marriages between persons of like rank is much higher than that of others. Royal and mediatized marriages have an adequate productivity index of four children or more per marriage; all other aristocratic marriages fall below the minimum. A study of age distribution indicates that the only group in which regression is pronounced is that of the English dukes. Extinction data show that French and English ducal families are dying out much more rapidly than those belonging to the mediatized group. Extinction is slower in the higher ranks of the aristocracy and is more rapid in the case of the nobility of recent date than of the older landed nobility living in the country. The gradual extinction of the aristocracy is of social importance only on the supposition that the aristocracy represents selection of the fittest, and if extinction of the legitimate male line coincided with the biological extinction of the family, which may continue through female and illegitimate descendants

Adultery · Aristocracy (class) · Biology · Extinction (optical mineralogy) · Fecundity · Fertility · Genealogy · Geography · Nobility · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · Demography · German Economic Analysis & Policies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Social Policy and Reform Studies

• The ecology of mating systems in hypergynous dowry societies

  Open Access•Mildred Dickemann•Social Science Information•1979

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