Nouzerines in the snow - with daughter on sledge!

The census taker has just left. We’ve filled in all the official forms and won’t be recounted for another five years. That’s because we’re in a commune of less than 10,000 inhabitants (in our case, a lot less!). Censuses in France take place on a rolling basis. All small communes are censused every 5 years, but not at the same time. Our commune, Nouzerines, is currently being dealt with, but Bussiere-St-Georges, the next door commune, waits until 2012. In contrast, larger communes (i.e. with populations of more than 10,000) are censused every 10 years, and again on a rolling basis. A certain percentage of each commune is accounted for each year.

This approach seems a sensible one to me. And it certainly provides more up-to-date figures for the various local government bodies to work from. The ‘snapshot every ten years’ system of other countries obviously takes longer to process and doesn’t take into account relatively rapid and temporary population movements, like the influx of Eastern Europeans in the last few years into Ireland. They are now leaving equally quickly and in large quantities due to the slump in the economy. They may not ever be picked up in official figures.

The forms weren’t too complicated and the census taker was helpful. I’d already been reading up some info in English on the French government website so I was quite prepared anyway. There was little to fill in for our eight-year-old, slightly more for our two teens and the most for Chris and I, but that was hardly onerous. Our forms will be interesting for someone to decipher with two of our family having dual nationalities, neither of them French!