The d?artements (or departments) are administrative units of France, roughly analogous to British counties and now grouped into 22 metropolitan and four overseas r?ionss. They are subdivided into 342 arrondissements. D?artements are also found in C?e d'Ivoire.
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2 History 3 Map and list of d?artements 4 Former d?artements |
Each d?artement is administered by a Conseil G??al elected for six years, and by a pr?et appointed by the French government and assisted by one or more sous-pr?ets based in district centres outside the departmental capital. An administrative reform in 1982 transferred some of the pr?et's powers to the president of the Conseil G??al.
The capital city of a d?artement bears the title of pr?ecture. D?artements are divided into one to five arrondissements. The capital city of an arrondissement is called the sous-pr?ecture. The civil servant in charge is the sous-pr?et.
The d?artements sub-divide into communes, governed by municipal councils. France (as of 1999) had 36,779 communes.
Most of the d?artements have an area of around 4,000-8,000 km² and a population between 250,000 and a million. The largest in terms of area is Gironde (10,000 km²) and the smallest the city of Paris (105 km² excluding the suburbs, now organised in adjacent d?artements). The most populous is Nord (2,550,000) and the least populous Loz?e (74,000).
See also: List of French d?artements by population
The d?artements are numbered: their two-digit numbers appear in postal codes and on car number-plates. Note that there is no number 20, but 2A and 2B instead. Note also that the two-digit code "98" is used by Monaco. Together with the ISO 3166-1 country code FR the numbers form the ISO 3166-2 country subdivision codes for the metropolitain departments. The overseas departments get two letters for the ISO 3166-2 code.
D?artements were created on January 15, 1790 by the Constituent Assembly to replace the country's former provinces with a more rational structure. They were also designed to deliberately break up France's historical regions in an attempt to erase cultural differences and build a more homogeneous nation. Most d?artements are named after the area's principal river(s) or other physical features.
The number of d?artements rose from an initial 83 to 130 by 1810 with the territorial gains of the Republic and of the Empire (see Provinces of the Netherlands for the annexed Dutch departements), but they were reduced again to 86 with Napoleon I's defeat in 1814-1815. Three more were added with the acquisition of Nice and Savoy in 1860. The numbering was estabished on the alphabetical order of those 89 d?artements.
Three d?artements in Alsace-Lorraine which had been ceded to Germany in 1871 - (Haut-Rhin, Bas-Rhin, and Moselle) - re-joined France in 1919.
Reorganisations of the Paris region (1968) and the division of Corsica (1975) have added a further seven d?artements, raising the total to one hundred - including the four overseas d?artements d'outre-mer (DOM) of Guyane (French Guiana) in South America, Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean Sea, and R?nion in the Indian Ocean.Administrative role
History
| French r?ions and d?artements |
Notes:
Former d?artements
(incomplete list)
See also: Administrative divisions of France