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People tend to forget that WW II started only 21 years after WW I ended, a time span that is not even one full generation. France’s losses in WW I were staggering and they couldn’t replenish their fighting forces in only 21 years.

French casualties in WW I
by Henry Copeland
September 22, 2003
World War I cost France 1,357,800 dead, 4,266,000 wounded (of whom 1.5 million were permanently maimed) and 537,000 made prisoner or missing — exactly 73% of the 8,410,000 men mobilized, according to William Shirer in The Collapse of the Third Republic. Some context: France had 40 million citizens at the start of the war; six in ten men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight died or were permanently maimed.

There simply weren’t enough young, marriage-age men left in France after WW I to regenerate the population. Mark Steyn wrote about this in “America, Alone.” The ennui resulting from the two great wars resulted in Western Europe fertility rate in the late 20th century falling below replacement, ushering in the moslem hordes.