[mkl]

> France was basically the China of Europe at that point: it was almost as populated as the rest of Europe combined.

That doesn't seem to be correct. From Wikipedia: "During the Middle Ages, more than one-quarter of Europe's total population was French;[8] by the seventeenth century, this had decreased slightly to one-fifth. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, other European countries, such as Germany and Russia, had caught up with France and overtaken it in number of people." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_France