INSEE published Thursday, December 19, reference population data for French municipalities as of January 1, 2022. If the French population continues to grow, it has slowed down in recent years.
Are there more or fewer residents in your town than there were a few years ago? INSEE made public its latest census data on the French population on Thursday, December 19. As of January 1, 2022, 67,761,000 inhabitants live in France, excluding Mayotte. A population which has certainly increased by 0.35% since 2016 (+233,000 inhabitants) but whose growth is slowing compared to the period 2011-2016 (+286,000 inhabitants or +0.44%).
How to explain this slowdown? The weaker contribution of the natural balance (the difference between the number of births and the number of deaths) may provide the beginning of an answer. The number of births has been falling since 2010, the last high point, while the number of deaths has been increasing in recent years in France.
5 metropolitan regions see their population stagnate
Deaths now clearly exceed births for a large diagonal going from the north-east to the south-west of the country, underlines INSEE. Result: the contribution of the natural balance (+0.18% between 2016 and 2022) is half as significant as between 2011 and 2016 (+0.37%).
INSEE specifies that this drop in the contribution to the natural balance is “compensated by the apparent migratory balance (the difference between the number of people who entered the territory and those who left during the period) only in the south of the country. country”.
However, it is difficult to generalize this trend to the whole country as there are so many disparities. Thus, if the population stagnates in several metropolitan regions (Hauts-de-France, Grand Est, Normandy, Burgundy-Franche-Comté, Centre-Val de Loire), it is increasing in other areas.
The Atlantic and Mediterranean coastlines, as well as metropolises such as Montpellier, Toulouse, Bordeaux and Nantes, recorded demographic growth during this same period.
Sharp decline in the population of Paris
Of the 34,918 French municipalities excluding Mayotte, 42 currently exceed the threshold of 100,000 inhabitants and alone bring together a little more than 10 million inhabitants. Of the 10 most populous cities, only one will see its population decrease between 2016 and 2022: Paris, which recorded its second largest population decline in percentage (-0.59%).
Here are the most populated cities in France in order of importance: Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, Nice, Nantes, Montpellier, Strasbourg, Bordeaux and Lille.
“Within urban areas, the population grows at the rate of 0.42% on average per year, whatever its density, but the causes are different,” explains INSEE, referring to the “strong natural surplus” in large urban centers and conversely the apparent migratory balance in intermediate density urban areas.
Find out here if the population of your municipality has increased, stagnated or decreased since 2016:
Another lesson: population growth, identical depending on the urban or rural nature of the municipalities over the period 2011-2016, is now twice as high in urban areas as in rural areas.
Contrasting developments in France and overseas. If in Guadeloupe and Martinique the population is decreasing (respectively -0.45% and -0.7%), Reunion and Guyana are recording demographic growth (+0.55% and +1.14%). “The decline in the population in Martinique and Guadeloupe is due to the apparent negative migratory balance, departures from the two islands exceeding arrivals,” explains INSEE, however.
Théophile Magoria and Hugues Garnier
