ABSTRACT
Research on historical earthquakes in France received a great boost from the installation of the nuclear program in the 1970s. When more than three-quarters of a nation’s electricity is nuclear generated, the need for a thorough review of the territory’s seismic history is more than obvious, even though on the whole the French experience of earthquakes has been moderate. This study evolved from a much larger multidisciplinary project aimed at documenting the historical seismicity of France during the last millennium. A huge corpus of published and archival documents was sifted for information on historical earthquakes and the result has been made available in the SisFrance database. 1 It contains information on 5,283 real earthquakes over the last ten centuries, described by 85,000 observation points and nearly 9,000 bibliographical references. No other hazard has benefited from such a remarkable effort of collective documentation. Following France, other countries have revisited their seismic history. 2 It is worth noting that this kind of work is almost nonexistent in the US. The recovery of knowledge about historical earthquake events is a useful instrument for the assessment and management of risk. If it is impossible to know for sure when an event will occur, we know at least that a past event can reoccur in the same place with similar characteristics. This is why the seismologists of the nuclear security industry are interested in historical analyses of earthquakes. 3
