To understand the diversity of a State

The Invention of France, work on the behavior and attitudes in the various French regions and operating on the principle of annotated maps whose precision reaches level, usually enough, department, published the paperback "Plural" in 1981 and is probably found today except on occasion and electronic book deserves its new edition The invention of France: Atlas anthropological and political. Certainly, at that time, Emmanuel Todd had not clearly developed his theory of family structures, but the sources of the book, the 1975 census and other older data with the statistics that were used to develop maps, provided end of the book, rare luxury, allow everyone to interpret these data possibly in the light of later discoveries. On the other hand, Hervé Le Bras and Emmanuel Todd, the two co-authors, do not increase too their theses of their ideological bias, even if they can sometimes show malice. Finally, if the 1975 census seems too old, its use captures more clearly the mentality of local features that have since been mitigated by the substantial migration, interregional and international, which have intervened in 35 years.

As in The Madman and the Proletarian, earlier work by Todd, the facts of linking seemingly having no connection (bulk, birth control, alcohol, the percentage of households with more than two generations, the vote center-right or the extreme left, the frequency of suicide, more or less early literacy, life expectancy at birth), mutually illuminate surprisingly, while cutting the subjects taught and agreed areas of study (population, economy, progress, deviance ...) prevented us, at school and at the University of perceiving social and historical facts so unitary. She lost to those who had any illusion of a French unit other than fantasy and makes it clear that intuition alone (for those that have them) can seize regional mentalities.