The General Confederation of Labour (French: Confédération générale du travail, CGT) is a national trade union center, the first of the five major French confederations of trade unions.
It is the largest in terms of votes (32.1% at the 2002 professional election, 34.0% in the 2008 election), and second largest in terms of membership numbers.
Its membership decreased to 650,000 members in 1995–96 (it had more than doubled when François Mitterrand was elected President in 1981), before increasing today to between 700,000 and 720,000 members, slightly less than the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT).
According to the historian M. Dreyfus, the direction of the CGT is slowly evolving, since the 1990s, during which it cut all organic links with the French Communist Party (PCF), in favour of a more moderate stance. The CGT is concentrating its attention, in particular since the 1995 general strikes, to trade-unionism in the private sector. The CGT was most recently in the news for briefly delaying Stage 3 of the Tour de France on July 7, 2008.
The demography of France is monitored by the Institut national d'études démographiques (INED) and the Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques (INSEE). On 1 January 2011, 65,821,885 people lived in the French Republic. 63,136,180 of these lived in metropolitan France, whereas 2,685,705 lived in the French overseas departments and territories.
France was historically the largest nation of Europe. During the Middle Ages, more than one quarter of Europe's total population was French; during the 17th century, it was still one fifth of Europe's total population. At the beginning of the 20th century, France's population was low compared with that of its neighbors and with its previous history. However, the country's population sharply increased with the baby boom following World War II.
The national birth rate, after continuing to drop for a time, began to rebound in the 1990s and currently the country's fertility rate is close to the replacement level. According to an INSEE 2006 study, "The natural increase is close to 300,000 persons, a level that has not been reached in more than thirty years." Among the 802,000 newborns in metropolitan France in 2010, 80.1% had two French parents, 13.3% had one French parent, and 6.6% had two foreign-born parents.