Editing Communes of France (section)

=== Population of a typical commune ===
The [[median]] population of metropolitan France's communes at the 1999 census was 380 inhabitants. Again this is a very small number, and here France stands absolutely apart in Europe, with the lowest communes' median population of all the European countries (communes in [[Switzerland]] or [[Rhineland-Palatinate]] may cover a smaller area, as mentioned above, but they are more populated). This small median population of French communes can be compared with Italy, where the median population of communes in 2001 was 2,343 inhabitants, [[Belgium]] (11,265 inhabitants), or even Spain (564 inhabitants).

The median population given here should not hide the fact that there are pronounced differences in size between French communes. As mentioned in the introduction, a commune can be a city of 2 million inhabitants such as Paris, a town of 10,000 inhabitants, or just a hamlet of 10 inhabitants. What the median population tells us is that the vast majority of the French communes only have a few hundred inhabitants, but there are also a small number of communes with much higher populations.

In metropolitan France 57 percent of the 36,683 communes<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.insee.fr/fr/themes/tableau.asp?reg_id=99&ref_id=t_0203R |title=Circonscriptions administrative au 1er janvier 2015: comparaisons régionales |trans-title=Administrative constituencies of 1 January 2015: regional comparisons |language=fr |publisher=[[Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques|INSEE]] |access-date=5 July 2015 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140430033500/http://www.insee.fr/fr/themes/tableau.asp?reg_id=99&ref_id=t_0203R |archive-date=30 April 2014}}</ref> have fewer than 500 inhabitants and, with 4,638,000 inhabitants, these smaller communes constitute just 7.7 percent of the total population. In other words, just 8 percent of the French population live in 57 percent of its communes, whilst 92 percent are concentrated in the remaining 43 percent.