Diagonale du vide, la

   A.k.a. Diagonale aride : a large swathe of land running across France from northeast (the Meuse plain) to southwest (the central Pyrenees), via the southern Massif Central, where, for most of the twentieth century population was falling and the economy in decline, due to rural exodus. Since the start of the twenty-first century, the population in this area, covering some twenty departments, has at last begun to increase again, as a result of longer life-expectancy and of repopulation by emigrants from the cities and other parts of Europe.