7 Re-viewing Bertin’s main example

“How can you govern a country which has two hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese?”
— Charles de Gaulle

Background The famous Semiology of Graphics book (Bertin (2010)) includes analysis of a dataset on the structure of the French workforce by administrative region (département) in \(1954\).

Questions How were the workers distributed across the departments? Which sector of the workforce employed the most? Were there geographic patterns?

Sources The table in Bertin’s book for the data, areas of the departments from the Guerry package and Wikipedia, and the Institut Géographique National for the map.

Structure Numbers of workers in three sectors for each of the then 89 departments of France and Paris.