Readers of John Ronald Reuel, known as J. R. R., Tolkien will remember this. At the start of his book-summary, The Lord of the Rings, one of the key characters in the plot, Bilbo Baggins, celebrates his "undecent-first birthday", i.e. his 111th birthday. The hobbits, these little fellows with hairy feet invented by the brilliant professor of ancient languages at the University of Oxford, indeed live very long and in good health. Tolkien died in 1973, at the venerable age of 81.
Had he imagined it? Nowadays, centenarians are no longer so rare. At least in France. According to a recent INSEE report, our country has almost thirty times more than in the years 1960-1975! In 2023, 30,000 of these super-seniors live on national territory. The good surprise is that half of them still live at home, the other half being accommodated in specialized establishments. "Of 1,000 people aged 60 in 1980, 21 became centenarians in 2020, which places France in first place in Europe", underline the analysts of the public body.
Undeniably, the trend is here to stay. While the number of centenarians fell from 24,500 to 18,000 between 2015 and 2019, due to the bloodletting of the First World War (fewer babies were conceived between 1914 and 1918), they increased by 8% per year, on average, from 1975 to 2015. Better still, the surge has accelerated sharply over the past three years, with an average annual increase of 15%. This is the distant consequence of the explosion in births in the 1920s. Without the Covid-19 epidemic, INSEE notes, the progression would have been even more spectacular.
Another inequality: the level of education. "Among women aged 70 to 75 in 1990, 7% of higher education graduates reached the age of 100, compared to 3% of those without a diploma," reads the INSEE study. Same observation for men: graduates are twice as likely as others to climb to the top of the age pyramid (3% against 1.5%). Alas, this is not surprising: "Graduates generally have a higher standard of living, which promotes their access to care, and they have less often worked in physical occupations, which reduces their health problems. »
And tomorrow ? According to our statisticians, the probability of turning 100 should be 6% for women and 2% for men born in the 1940s. So that in 2040, according to "the central scenario", France should have 76,000 centenarians, 2.5 times more than today. Then, "among people born in 1970, depending on whether mortality declines more or less rapidly than in the past, between 6 and 20% of women and between 2 and 12% of men would become centenarians". In 2070, the number of these Methuselah would be 210,000, still according to the central scenario. A more optimistic projection even leads to the figure of 600,000. That would make them hobbits!
