Map: Which areas of France are worse for house burglaries?

There were 211,400 burglaries or attempted burglaries in France last year, new figures show, down from around 236,800 in 2019.

Nationally, there were 5.8 burglaries for every 1,000 homes, the figures from France’s statistics bureau Insee show.

Île-de-France and Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur were the regions worst hit.

Key findings show that there are more burglaries in:

• More densely-populated, urban areas (with some notable exceptions, see below)
• More affluent areas
• Areas with a high level of financial inequality (a significant gap between the richest and poorest)

The report also shows:

Most burglaries

The area with the most burglaries overall, outside of the Paris region, is Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, with 7.5 burglaries per 1,000 homes (compared to the 5.4 non-Paris national average), and 23,400 burglaries or attempts recorded in total in 2022.

The departments of Vaucluse (9.6 per 1,000) and Bouches-du-Rhône (11.4 per 1,000) were most affected. In contrast, Hautes-Alpes is one of the least-burgled departments in France (at just 2.1 per 1,000)

Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur is also the only region in which less-affluent areas are burgled more than the more-affluent, including Marseille and Avignon especially.

Areas with a greater gap between rich and poor saw four times more burglaries than average.

Least-affected areas

The departments with the lowest level of burglaries were:

• Haute-Corse: 1.2 per 1,000 properties
• Lozère: 1.3
• Corse-du-Sud: 1.4
• Cantal: 1.7
• Aveyron: 1.8
• Manche: 2.1
• Hautes-Alpes: 2.1
• Corrèze: 2.6
• Lot: 2.6

And while Normandy was the fourth-least affected region, at 3.6 burglaries per 1,000 homes, the urban-rural divide was notably not as marked here, Insee said.

The region had 4.3 burglaries per 1,000 homes in urban areas, versus 3.3 in the most rural areas. The department of Seine-Maritime was a notable exception (with urban communes more affected than rural ones) but Orne even showed the opposite trend, with rural areas more affected than urban ones.

Overall, the departments of Manche (2.1) and Calvados (2.8) were the least affected in the region, while Eure (4.7) and Orne (4.2) were the most affected.

Second home effect?

In areas with more second homes, burglary levels were lower, Insee said. This was notably the case in Occitanie.

It pointed out that while burglary levels in the cities were high (Toulouse, 9 per 1,000; and Montpellier, Nîmes, and Perpignan, at 7 per 1,000), in less-populated areas, including areas with “significant second home numbers…the level of burglaries is lower”.

The communes in Occitanie that did not record a single burglary in 2022 were those with the highest level of second homes (28%), it said.

Burglaries not back to pre-Covid levels

During the health crisis, in 2020, burglary numbers dropped everywhere. Burglary numbers began to rise again in 2022, but are mostly not back to pre-crisis levels, except in around 20 departments, mainly in the east of the country.

In Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, the area with the highest burglary rate outside of Paris, levels are still 9% lower than the peak level of 2017, and the complete drop-off in the lockdowns of 2020.

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