Departments of France

In the administrative divisions of France, the department (french: département, ) is one of the three levels of government under the national level (" territorial collectivities"), between the administrative regions and the

communes

. Ninety-six departments are in

metropolitan France

, and five are overseas departments, which are also classified as overseas regions. Departments are further subdivided into 332 arrondissements, and these are divided into cantons. The last two levels of government have no autonomy; they are the basis of local organisation of police, fire departments and, sometimes, administration of elections.

Each department is administered by an elected body called a departmental council ( ing. lur.. From 1800 to April 2015, these were called general councils ( ing. lur.. Each council has a president. Their main areas of responsibility include the management of a number of social and welfare allowances, of

junior high school ()

buildings and technical staff, and local roads and school and rural buses, and a contribution to municipal infrastructures. Local services of the state administration are traditionally organised at departmental level, where the prefect represents the government; however, regions have gained importance since the 2000s, with some department-level services merged into region-level services.

The departments were created in 1790 as a rational replacement of Ancien Régime

provinces

with a view to strengthen national unity; the title "department" is used to mean a part of a larger whole. Almost all of them were named after physical geographical features (rivers, mountains, or coasts), rather than after historical or cultural territories, which could have their own loyalties. The division of France into departments was a project particularly identified with the French revolutionary leader the Abbé Sieyès, although it had already been frequently discussed and written about by many politicians and thinkers. The earliest known suggestion of it is from 1665 in the writings of d'Argenson. They have inspired similar divisions in many countries, some of them former French colonies. The 1822 territorial division of Spain (reverted due to the 1823 French intervention ending the trienio liberal) and the 1833 territorial division of Spain, which forms the basis of the present day

Provinces of Spain

with minor modifications is also based on the French model of departments of roughly equal size.

Most French departments are assigned a two-digit number, the "Official Geographical Code", allocated by the (). Overseas departments have a three-digit number. The number is used, for example, in the postal code, and was until recently used for all vehicle registration plates. Residents commonly use the numbers to refer to their own department or a neighbouring one, for example, inhabitants of

Loiret

may refer to their department as "the 45". More distant departments are generally referred to by their names, as few people know the numbers of all the departments.

In 2014, President

François Hollande

proposed to abolish departmental councils by 2020, which would have maintained the departments as administrative divisions, and to transfer their powers to other levels of governance. This reform project has since been scrapped.

History

The first French territorial departments were proposed in 1665 by Marc-René d'Argenson to serve as administrative areas purely for the '' Ponts et Chaussées'' (Bridges and Highways) infrastructure administration.

Before the

French Revolution

, France gained territory gradually through the annexation of a mosaic of independent entities. By the close of the Ancien Régime, it was organised into

provinces

. During the period of the Revolution, these were dissolved, partly in order to weaken old loyalties. The National Constituent Assembly decided to create a more uniform division into departments (''département'') and

districts

in late 1789. The process began on 4 August 1789 with the elimination of provincial privileges, and a 22 December 1789 decree (with letters patent in January 1790) provided for the termination of the provincial governments.

The modern department system, as all-purpose units of the government, was decreed on 26 February 1790 (with letters patent on 4 March 1790) by the National Constituent Assembly. Their boundaries served two purposes:
* Boundaries were chosen to break up France's historical regions in an attempt to erase cultural differences and build a more homogeneous nation.
* Boundaries were set so that every settlement in the country was within a day's ride of the capital of a department. This was a security measure, intended to keep the entire national territory under close control.

The old nomenclature was carefully avoided in naming the new departments. Most were named after an area's principal river or other physical features. Even Paris was in the department of Seine.

Savoy

, during its temporary occupation, became the department of Mont-Blanc. The provinces continued to exist administratively until 21 September 1791.

The number of departments, initially 83, had been increased to 130 by 1809 with the territorial gains of the Republic and of the First French Empire. Following

Napoleon

's defeats in 1814–1815, the

Congress of Vienna

returned France to its pre-war size and the number of departments was reduced to 86 (three of the original departments having been split). In 1860, France acquired the

County of Nice

and

Savoy

, which led to the creation of three new departments. Two were added from the new Savoyard territory, while the department of Alpes-Maritimes was created from Nice and a portion of the Var

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