Andre-Michel Guerry (1833) was the first to systematically collect and analyze social data on such things as crime, literacy and suicide with the view to determining social laws and the relations among these variables. He provided the first essentially multivariate and georeferenced spatial data on socially important questions, e.g., Is the rate of crime related to education or literacy? How does this vary over the departments of France? Are the rates of crime or suicide within departments stable over time?
gfrance is a SpatialPolygonsDataFrame object created with the sp package, containing the polygon boundaries of the map of France as it was in 1830, together with the Guerry data frame.
gfrance85 is a SpatialPolygonsDataFrame object created with the sp package, containing the polygon boundaries of the map of France as it was in 1830, together with the Guerry data frame. This version excludes Corsica, which is an outlier both in the map and in many analyses.
providing 
.