Overview

• The CSA survey for Les Petits Frères des Pauvres, conducted in April 2025 and repeated every four years since 2017, finds 4% of France’s 18 million people over 60 meet no one or almost no one, up 42% since 2021 and roughly 150% since 2017.
• Beyond the most extreme cases, 2 million seniors are cut off from family and friends, 1.5 million rarely see children or grandchildren, and 1.1 million have almost no ties with friends.
• Neighborhood connections have eroded, with 2.7 million older people lacking more than a brief greeting with neighbors, and 3.2 million report having no children or grandchildren.
• Researchers cite converging drivers including population aging, widowhood and loss of peers, reduced mobility, financial hardship, diminished local services and transport, digital exclusion, and the lasting rupture of Covid-era habits.
• Consequences flagged include a suicide rate of 35.2 per 100,000 among 85–94-year-olds in 2022, a rise in “morts solitaires” counted by the association (33 cases in 2024 vs 21 in 2023 and 13 in 2022), and warnings that fragmented public measures and tight budgets require both stronger policy and citizen networks such as Monalisa.