Metropolitan France
According to INSEE, 65,018,000 people lived in metropolitan France as of January 2018, while 2,790,000 lived in overseas France, for a total of 67,808,000 inhabitants in the French Republic. Thus, metropolitan France accounts for 95.9% of the French Republic's population.
Communes of France
Thus, in Europe, only Switzerland has as high a density of communes as France, and even there an extensive merger movement has started in the last 10 years. To better grasp the staggering number of communes in France, two comparisons can be made: First, of the original 15 member states of the European Union there are approximately 75,000 communes; France alone, which comprises 16 percent of the population of the EU-15, had nearly half of its communes. Second, the United States, with a territory fourteen times larger than that of the French Republic, and nearly five times its population, had 35,937 incorporated municipalities and townships at the 2002 Census of Governments, fewer than that of the French Republic.