Households in France
Reading the graph
This double bar graph give two types of information.
The striped orange bars show the number of households enumerated in 2015 by number of members, from one (one-person households) to nine or more for the largest households. "Institutional" households (retirement homes, worker or student hostels, etc.) are excluded.
These 28.2 million households count 62.8 million individuals, represented on the bar graph by solid blue bars.
A majority of one- and two-person households, but a majority of individuals living in two- to four-person households
Almost 10 million households count only one person, which means that 10 million people live alone, so the two bars are the same height. A similar number of households comprise two people, making a total of 18.6 million people in two-person households, and so on. The larger the household size, the larger the difference between the number of households and the number of individuals concerned.
Hence, more than six households in ten (68%) are "small", with only one or two members, though the members of these small households form only a minority of the population (45.5%).
Conversely, only 460,000 households (1.6% of the total) have seven or more members, though 3 million people (4.7% of the population) live in a household of seven or more.
Sources
The data here are from the INSEE « Household Population » table based on the 2015 census of metropolitan France. The corresponding data may be found on the INSEE and INED websites.