Why 1/3rd of France is Almost Empty

[Music] france is one of europe's and one of the world's most significant countries home to 68 million people france is the third most populous nation in europe while the french economy is the seventh largest in the world nearly identical in size to india a country with 20 times the population the french language and french culture are widely known throughout the world while the french military is the eighth best funded in the world with bases all across the planet france is a major global great power and has been for centuries now which is why it's so surprising that nearly a third of the country here is basically just an empty void and partially because of that france has been diminishing in influence for centuries and continues to do so for decades people have famously identified metropolitan france in europe as looking like a hexagon which is why the country is so often referred to as simply lexagon and due to this unique shape it's incredibly easy to look at france through the lens of geometry when discussing regions statistics demography and history for instance if you take a map of france and you draw a diagonal line from the port city of l'ove on the english channel over to straight through the center of marseille on the mediterranean you'll cut the country roughly in half and yet sixty percent of the french live to the east of this line while only forty percent live to the west of it a fact that can be seen significantly more clearly when you switch out the map for a population density map but what's far more interesting than that line are these lines in between them is a stretch of france nearly 1 000 kilometers long and about 400 kilometers wide on average nearly one-third of france's entire territory that's about the same size as belarus within this large zone the population density of people is only about 30 persons per square kilometer about the same as the us state of west virginia which has led to french demographers referring to the area as france's empty diagonal and while in reality that's hardly empty compared with the rest of france and europe it is a strange anomaly throughout the entirety of france on average the population density is more like 120 people per square kilometer four times more than the density of people living within the diagonal to give even more perspective neighboring germany has a population density of 232 per square kilometer while england has more like 270 and is therefore nine times as densely populated as france's diagonal france is politically divided between 18 regions that are further split up into departments and then into communes somewhat similar to how america divides itself into states and counties the least populated department in france is loser with just a total of 76 000 inhabitants for all its nearly 5 200 square kilometers that is comparable in size to the state of palestine which is home to more than 5 million people while the entire population of lausaire could all fit comfortably into wembley stadium in london with 24 000 seats left over to spare and of course loser is directly in the center of the empty diagonal the most sparsely populated region of france where loser is hardly an exception all of these departments running through the center of france are substantially less populated than those on either side of it to the west and the east so what's been causing this anomaly and the core of one of europe's largest countries to be happening well for one thing it's been important to understand some of the prior demographic history of france which i promise is actually fascinating the french philosopher agust compt once said the demography is destiny and for centuries france's demography guaranteed much of the nation's successes and influence for most of history france was by far the most populous country on the european continent during the medieval period more than one out of every four people in europe were french and even by the 17th century it was still one out of every five during the french revolutionary and napoleonic wars france was still the most populous nation in europe and they had a higher population than even the entirety of russia and nearly double the population of the united kingdom in fact at the time of napoleon france was the fourth most populous country in the entire world lagging only behind china india and japan such a huge population compared with all of her neighbors helps to explain france's dominance in european affairs throughout the medieval renaissance and early industrial periods but beginning in the 19th century this demographic dominance over all of her neighbors began to shift away dramatically the birth rate in france began to diminish in the late 18th century far before they began to do so in every other european country and then during the revolutionary and napoleonic wars nearly 2 million french citizens were killed which led to france's low population growth throughout the rest of the 19th century for many years in france across the 1800s the number of deaths in the country exceeded the number of births and then during the first world war france lost 10 of its entire active male population in just four years 1.3 million french were killed during the war and along with even more births being forgone by millions of potential fathers being away at war the french population dropped by more than 3 million and of course the areas that were hit the hardest by this population drop was the rural french countryside because at the same time that these trends were happening france was also rapidly urbanizing and the population was becoming highly centralized around just a few key population centers marseille leon liu and most importantly of all paris the ever-growing city beginning in the 17th century paris began to grow larger and larger as hundreds of thousands of peasants from the french countryside continuously moved there in search of better opportunities at the beginning of the 20th century 40 of the french population were still living in the rural countryside but over decades of intense societal pressures coming from millions of deaths from war millions of men being away at war decreasing fertility rates and ever-increasing rates of urbanization just 85 years later in 1985 that rate of french residing in the countryside had plummeted down to only eight percent and by then nearly one out of every five french were living in just the paris metropolitan area alone but while urbanization and war certainly had massive effects on the population of the french countryside not all areas were affected evenly the mountainous areas of the french alps for example while technically having a slightly dipping population have a thriving tourism industry and the majority of the french wine country while also very rural also continues to have a thriving industry and tourism appeal that has kept the areas decently well populated but there are larger geographic issues at play here as well that help to explain the lack of people in the empty diagonal when looking back at the map you'll see that the empty diagonal spans one landlocked end of france by its border with belgium to another landlocked end by its border with spain and while not every coastal area in france is highly populated and makes sense than many of them would be as 40 of the entire global human population lives within just 100 kilometers of a coastline so by drawing these lines across the french interior you're essentially drawing a line from one area that would be statistically less populated to another area that would also be statistically less populated in fact if you ignore international borders entirely the empty diagonals population trend continues and even expands its width across the pyrenees into spain a country dealing with its own demographic issues in the form of low birth rates but there's still more to it than just not being near the coast the areas that the diagonal cover are largely agricultural land and throughout the world as agriculture has become more automated and industrialized less workers in the industry are needed in fact 40 years ago about 1.6 million people in france worked in agriculture whereas now it's roughly only four hundred thousand or four times less people fewer jobs and fewer opportunities to make a living inevitably mean that people eventually move on and regardless of the country low population density itself can become a sort of self-repeating feedback loop as well areas with lower population often have minimal commercial activity and as the already small population ages there's nothing keeping the younger generations in the area so they leave not just for work but also for all the amenities that other more thriving areas can bring and while the french government has expressed concerns over the issue and even funded research into how to fix it there remains no real answer while france's geography makes this issue seem relatively unique to france it really isn't demographic shifts from the countryside to the cities is a global phenomenon and so too is the fact that more people generally tend to live closer to the coastlines where there's just more economic activity therefore it shouldn't really be too surprising after all that wow people actually do be living in cities now if you want to start analyzing your own worldwide geographic and demographic trends you're gonna need a pretty solid grasp on things like geometry and statistics but just like you might be i've generally always been pretty terrible at math and stem subjects so i didn't really understand either of those things either until a few years ago when i started taking courses on brilliant brilliant is an online stem learning platform that i've been endorsing for years now because of how extremely simple and fun it is to use for example if you want to use just a little bit of your free time to start building up your programming skills you should definitely check out brilliant's course on computer science fundamentals you're not going to have to suffer through any long lectures or big blocks of text it'll just teach you the basics of programming through hands-on interactive lessons and games like this one and even if you already know everything about computer science there are tons of other courses for you as well you can take their course on neural networks or even quantum computing or you can start at the basics like i did with our courses on everyday math geometry fundamentals or statistics fundamentals or plenty of others overall brilliant has dozens of courses that cover a wide variety of fascinating and cutting edge stem subjects so the odds are good that there's something there for you it's a great way to get a little smarter every single day and best of all you can join their community of 8 million other learners with 20 off of an annual subscription by being one of the first 200 people to click this button that's here on screen right now or by heading over to brilliant.org real life lore using the link that's down below in the description and as always thank you so much for watching

Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 5,021,034

Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know, france, empty diagonal, french diagonal

Id: hTgwv6Ic3fA

Length: 11min 1sec (661 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 22 2022