French Human Mortality Database
The French Human Mortality Database is a "satellite" of the Human Mortality Database (HMD), which currently holds 41 historical national lifetables. The ambition is to provide detailed data to anyone interested in the history of human longevity.
This project was carried out by Florian Bonnet (ENS-Paris Saclay, PSE visitor 2019-2020), under the supervision of Hippolyte d’Albis (PSE, CNRS) and Magali Barbieri (Berkeley, INED).
The French Human Mortality Database uses data that is validated and corrected, when required, and made comparable, as much as possible, for the period ranging from 1901 to 2015. This database will be updated yearly to reflect the most recent local data. To be as close as possible to the expectations of potential users, the final data are available for 3 different geographical levels, consistent with the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) used by Eurostat: departments (NUTS 3, 97 units), former regions (NUTS 2, 22 units) and current regions (NUTS 1, 13 units).
The protocol used to compute regional lifetables is published in Demographic Research (Bonnet, F. (2020). Computations of French lifetables by department, 1901–2014. Demographic Research, 42, 741-762). F. Bonnet thanks users of the French Human Mortality Database to cite this paper as reference
Go to the French Human Mortality Database
Browse the visualizing tool* associated to the FHMD
In the future, both digitization of original raw data and use of rigorous methodological protocols enable the creation of a set of demographic and economic databases. This set will initially cover mortality by age (French Human Mortality Database), fertility (French Human Fertility Database) and population by age at the local level since the beginning of the 20th century, as well as spatial disparities of income (French Income Database) and wealth (French Wealth Database).
* This tool for visualizing mortality data has been developed by Denys Dukhovnov, PhD student at the University of California at Berkeley