La Nouvelle Carte politique de la France (The New Political Map of France) is a handbook on demography. Far from being a dogmatic textbook on the current state of the science of demography, it presents instead the foundations of the subject and offers an in-depth analysis that aims to show not only what is known but also what is unknown in the field. It examines the issues that have been resolved and the questions that remain open.
The author wishes to show that it is possible to study demography through its difficulties: its paradoxes, logical fallacies and debates. The book is presented in the form of ten lessons, which address the following issues:
– age limit and the law of mortality
– desired and actual number of children
– conflicting fertility rates
– fecundity and mortality as inherited factors
– environmental deception and map of customs
– the impossible ethnic variable
– marriage rate
– structure of alliances and chance
– life expectancy of health care, and life expectancy without disability
– density and fractals
– life cycles and family structures.

Hervé Le Bras is a senior research fellow at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He is the author of Éssais de géométrie sociale.