French spatial inequalities in an historical perspective

This Ph. D. thesis has a dual purpose. First, it presents the methods used to build two new historical databases relating to départements. The first database provides the departmental lifetables for the period 1901-2014. The second database provides the departmental distributions of income over the period 1960-2014. Second, this thesis presents the first works resulting from the joint use of these two databases and other statistics: they concern both the dynamics of spatial inequalities and some specific historical events. Thus, the analysis of the spatial distribution of the population since the middle of the 19th century allows to understand the dynamics induced by the rural exodus, but also by the new trends of today’s migrations. The analysis of mortality inequalities over the last 200 years shows that inequalities have fallen dramatically since the end of the 19th century, while the geography of excessmortality has changed. Finally, the analysis of spatial income inequalities reveals a continuous decline since the 1920s. This decline occurred only since 1950 if spatial inequalities are observed using asynthetic indicator of welfare, combining both mortality inequalities and income inequalities. The thesis ends with the analysis of internal migrations during the Second World War: these migrations were massive, and clearly oriented towards the free zone. These results testify both to the impact of this event on French demography, and to the quest for freedom of the French of that time, little hampered by the demarcation line.