Self-sufficiency: where would you hold out best if the grid failed
A ranking of 34,894 French towns on what makes a place liveable when you can no longer rely on the outside: water, wood, soil, shops, a human fabric, and distance from crowds.
This ranking answers only half the question
And it is better to know that before reading it. The literature counts seven conditions for a self-sufficient place: water, food, sanitation, energy, knowledge, defence and social ties. Only three depend on the PLACE — water, soil, energy. The other four depend on you, your skills and your group. No municipal dataset will ever measure them, and pretending otherwise would be the first lie of a page claiming to inform a serious choice.
So this ranking says where the terrain helps. It does not say whether you will hold out.
Fifteen criteria, all public, and their coverage
Coverage is stated because it changes what a criterion actually weighs: an axis documented for 8% of towns, displayed like the others, suggests it ranks something when it ranks almost nothing. Here, none falls below 93%.
- éloignement des masses — 100% of towns
- relief local — 99.8% of towns
- tissu associatif — 94.7% of towns
- emploi sur place — 93.8% of towns
- surface agricole déclarée — 100% of towns
- commerces essentiels — 100% of towns
- jours ≥ 30 °C — 99.7% of towns
- nuits tropicales — 99.7% of towns
- arrêtés catnat — 100% of towns
- résidences secondaires — 99.9% of towns
- couvert forestier — 99.6% of towns
- eau à moins de 2 km — 99.9% of towns
- risque nucléaire — 100% of towns
- risque industriel — 100% of towns
- rupture de barrage — 100% of towns
They fall into four families. What the soil gives: declared farmland, forest cover, water nearby. What the place withstands: relief, days above 30 °C, tropical nights, natural-disaster declarations. What people do: local employment, community associations, essential shops, share of second homes. What comes from elsewhere: distance from large conurbations, and the three risks listed in the departmental register — nuclear, industrial, dam failure.
Where it lands
The leading towns are Châteauneuf-de-Randon (48), Laguiole (12), Nozeroy (39), Pierrefontaine-les-Varans (25).
Massif Central and the Jura mountains — the Aveyron first, then the Doubs and the Haute-Loire. This is not an intention. No setting targets those regions: they emerge from fifteen public criteria. They also tend to be the towns that quality-of-life rankings place in the middle — which is the sign that this ranking measures something else.
Measured before being published
A ranking that reshuffles the same towns into a similar order adds nothing. This one was therefore checked against the rankings already online before publication: 10% of towns in common at the top, against an internal threshold of 70% beyond which we do not publish. The same rule has ruled out other rankings before this one.
What this page does not say
That these towns are pleasant to live in. Self-sufficiency criteria and ordinary quality-of-life criteria — schools, healthcare, shops, commuting — do not overlap, and sometimes contradict each other. A place far from crowds is also a place far from an emergency department.
That a breakdown scenario is likely. This ranking answers a question readers asked, using public data. It does not turn it into a forecast.
What a specific plot is worth. All these measures are municipal. A well, an aspect, a slope, a neighbourhood: none of that is in a municipal average, and that is precisely what would decide.
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