“Welcome to the real world” of poverty in France, the one encountered by the volunteer army of Secours Catholique/Caritas France, who supported 1.5 million poor people in 2016. A wealth of news from the “Report on Poverty 2017”, which has come out today and that lines up the figures and percentages of poverty in the country, with an extremely wide list of files and insights. The first section looks at the “features of the families and people met” by the 67,900 volunteers: 29.6% of them are single-parent families, 23% are single men, 17% are single women, 24.2% are couples with children, and 6% are childless couples. The average age of people who ask for help is 40 years for men and 39 years for women, but the group of over-60s with problems is quickly growing (now 10%). Children make up 47% of the people met by the volunteers. 39% of the total calls for help comes from foreigners (42% of them are legal immigrants), the rest are French citizens. The first thing they need is “listening, advising, acceptance”; then, they need food (56%) and then they need help paying the rent and bills (18.5%), not least because nearly 68% of the people who go to Secours Catholique are jobless. Note that there were over 4.8 million people in the French food help programme in 2015 (they were 2.8 million in 2008). 73.8% of calls for help come from people who live in big cities; 11.7% from people living in the suburbs, and 14.5% from people who live in small towns or rural areas.