More than one in two municipalities in France has fewer than 500 inhabitants
Of the 36,529 municipalities in Metropolitan France, more than one in two had fewer than 500 inhabitants on 1st January 2013. In seven departments, this figure rose to eight or nine out of ten municipalities. The number of these small municipalities has decreased in the last fifty years, mainly because some of them have now crossed the 500-inhabitant population threshold. They now account for 7% of the population of Metropolitan France, against 11% in 1968.