Heh, could be.
https://volcano.si.edu/volcano.cfm?vn=210020
OTOH:
Why 1/3rd of France is Almost Empty
March 22, 2022
RealLifeLore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTgwv6Ic3fA
Transcript
0:29 which is why it’s so surprising that nearly a third of the country here is basically just an empty void...
1:01 ...if you take a map of france and you draw a diagonal line from the port city of l’ove on the english channel over to straight through the center of marseille on the mediterranean you’ll cut the country roughly in half and yet sixty percent of the french live to the east of this line while only forty percent live to the west of it a fact that can be seen...
1:23 ...but what’s far more interesting than that line are these lines in between them is a stretch of france nearly 1 000 kilometers long and about 400 kilometers wide on average nearly one-third of france’s entire territory that’s about the same size as belarus within this large zone the population density of people is only about 30 persons per square kilometer...
3:39 ...for most of history france was by far the most populous country on the european continent during the medieval period more than one out of every four people in europe were french and even by the 17th century it was still one out of every five during the french revolutionary and napoleonic wars france was still the most populous nation in europe and they had a higher population than even the entirety of russia and nearly double the population of the united kingdom. in fact at the time of napoleon france was the fourth most populous country in the entire world lagging only behind china india and japan...
4:42 during the revolutionary and napoleonic wars nearly 2 million french citizens were killed...
4:58 ...during the first world war france lost 10 [percent] of its entire active male population. in just four years 1.3 million french were killed during the war
5:32 was also rapidly urbanizing and the population was becoming highly centralized around just a few key population centers...
I’ve wondered if it was some kind of no-man’s-land between northern and southern France. There was much trouble between them in the years, 1200-1250 roughly. (The North won.)
But yes, clearly the cities make all the difference.