Do French people move? Conventional wisdom holds that they’re deeply rooted in home towns and loathe to move.

The French Territorial Observatory recently put out a well-designed summary of demographic and migratory patterns.
I was struck by a chart that shows regional migration, with a breakdown by age, based on French census figures and other data collected by the French statistical agency INSEE:
frenchdemograph
The legend is in French but is easily explained:
  • Regions in blue have a negative migration rate: people are moving from them. Regions in brown have a positive migration rate: people are moving to them.
  • Shading provides additional information according to behavior by age. The darkest zones show migratory behavior for all age groups. The lightest zones demonstrate migration for people age 30 and above. Intermediate zones show positive migration for people under 60 (including those under 30).
  • The big story: French people move from the north and east to the south and west.
  • The nuances: Paris and Alsace keep young people as students and young workers. But there seems to be a draw for these people, when they become young parents, to move elsewhere. The Rhône-Alpes region has a particular claim to draw working people, not retirees.
  • The surprise: I’ve always been told that Brittany was a place people moved from. (Take a stroll around the Montparnasse train station in Paris, and you’ll find banks from Brittany and crepe restaurants.) But like the west generally, it now draws people to it.