>>17798730 (OP)The French birthrate was low to begin with and the Ottomans even at their peak had some qualities that seem to be very typical for middle eastern despoties. The Byzantines kinda did that, the Mamluks did that, lots of other middle eastern countries did that. And by that I mean forcing low level violence to be the commonplace of their system to artificially keep the population low because large populations are harder to govern. Just think about this in this way, Turkey just after WW1 had like 10-14 million people living in it or something. It was forcefully turned into a nation state, a far more stable construct, current population of Turkey is like 80 million. Surely there were some advanced in agriculture etc. happening at the time, but the miniscule population of the country in the imperial times are an obvious sign of massive, centuries long mismanagement. That's why they brushed it off while the French couldn't.
There are also some other problems for the French. For instance women always marry up. If they can't marry up they don't marry, if they don't marry they rarely have kids. Well imagine losing significant portion of the male population in that case, with many others being permanently damaged in a way that makes them low status(whether it's because they can't get a job due to psychological trauma or are simply physically crippled). Who are these women meant to marry? Even though French were pretty secular, expectation of monogamy was still somewhat strongly rooted, well, where's the men for monogamy? Turkey didn't have this problem.
