France's crime map is blank for most of the country
France's SSMSI publishes burglary rates only where counts are large enough to be robust. Just 10,562 of 34,848 metropolitan communes carry a value — and where they do, the rate rises with price rather than falling with it.
Open the crime layer over rural France and most of the map is grey. That is not an oversight. The SSMSI suppresses figures where recorded counts are too small to be reliable, and its published incidents-per-1,000 series effectively begins at communes of about 5,000 residents. Across metropolitan France, 34,848 communes exist; only 10,562 carry a burglary value at all. The absence is the story — and it is easy to misread.
Where the data does exist, it tracks price upward
Group communes by their burglary rate and the pattern runs the wrong way for anyone expecting cheap to mean dangerous. The dearest band of communes carries the highest recorded burglary, the cheapest the lowest. Recorded burglary is partly a function of what there is to steal, and of who reports it. Nationally, among the 2,101 communes above 5,000 residents, the rate spans 1.04 to 25.55 per 1,000 dwellings.
The coverage gap in three numbers
Property data reaches far deeper than crime data: 31,105 communes carry a median price per square metre, against 10,562 with a burglary rate. The map has a price for almost every village but a safety number for fewer than a third.
A blank commune is not a safe one
A grey commune means the count was too small to publish, not that no crime occurred. For the smallest villages a single incident would swing a per-1,000 rate wildly, which is exactly why the source withholds it. Read the blank as unknown, not as safe. Where you need a signal for a small commune, lean on the departmental picture and on the price layer, which is denser — but do not mistake silence for an all-clear.