Where to live peacefully? Certainly not in these cities… In France, a municipality is also the one that is best avoided.
Numbeoa site specializing in data on the cost of living or quality of life in cities around the world, has just updated its crime index for the year 2026. A city in France stands out for its insecurity… To establish this ranking, the site opts for a different approach and does not rely on official police data.
Indeed, the data analyzed and compiled by the platform comes from surveys carried out among visitors to the site and, for each question asked, a feeling rating (positive, neutral, negative) is assigned. The results are then converted to a scale of 0 to 100 to allow cities to be ranked. Numbeo also specifies that this “crime index” is continuously updated – it is recalculated twice a year by integrating the most recent data – and is established from data collected over the last 5 years to offer an overview which is intended to be more precise, as close as possible to the reality on the ground.
Thus, the podium of cities considered the most dangerous in the world is as follows: Caracas (Venezuela), Pretoria (South Africa) and, on the first step, the little-known city of Pietermaritzburg (also located in South Africa). To find the first French city – also the first in Europe – you have to go much lower in the ranking, to 36th position precisely. It is, without much surprise, Marseille. A city has had a sulphurous reputation for decades.
At a global level, the Marseille city displays a fairly high crime index of 66.7/100 and reflects the opinion of Internet users on their daily environment. Between drug trafficking, score-settling, shootings and other crimes, the city of Provence has a very bad reputation and we don’t see how it could restore its image any time soon.
But other cities in France are also mentioned! We thus find Grenoble in 55th position in the world, Montpellier in 64th place, Lyon in 76th and Nantes, regularly in the headlines in recent years, in 81st position. And the capital in all this? Paris is “only” in 87th place ahead of… Karachi, in Pakistan.
