Adolphe Landry

Michel Auguste Adolphe Landry was a French demographer and politician. He was deputy and then senator for Corsica between 1910 and 1955. He was Minister of the Navy from 1920 to 1921, Minister of Public Education for two days in June 1924 and Minister of Labor and Social Security from 1931 to 1932. He was the author of several books on economics and demographics. He saw that countries like France had moved from an age of high birth rates and high mortality, with the size of the population determined by the amount of food available, through a transition period to an age of low birth rates and long lives. The population might actually shrink unless the government took steps to encourage larger families.