Departments of France

• 1. Introduction

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  France is divided into 101 departments, a number that took more than two centuries to reach from an original 83. Each one carries a two-digit number that appears on everything from postal codes to vehicle registration plates, and residents commonly refer to their own department simply by that number. The department of Loiret, for instance, is known to its own inhabitants as "the 45." What most people never stop to ask is why France chose this particular shape of government in the first place, why the names of new departments studiously avoided mountains, rivers, and coastlines named after old loyalties, and why a system born in revolution has outlasted every regime that followed. The answers reach back to a single decree issued on the 26th of February 1790, a security logic built around the speed of a horse, and a thinker whose idea for reorganising France can be traced to a single document written in 1665.

• 2. A Revolutionary Geometry

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  On the 4th of August 1789, the National Constituent Assembly began eliminating provincial privileges, and a decree on the 22nd of December 1789 set the official end of France's provincial governments. The modern department system followed on the 26th of February 1790. Its logic was geometric as much as political. Every settlement in France had to sit within a day's ride of its department's capital, so that the entire national territory could be kept under close government control. The prefecture, known as the chef-lieu de département, was generally placed near the geographical centre of the department. The goal was that it be reachable on horseback from any town within 24 hours.

  The names chosen for these new units were just as deliberate as their boundaries. The Ancien Régime's provinces carried cultural identities and old loyalties, so those names were set aside. Almost all departments were named instead after rivers, mountains, and coastlines. Even Paris was placed inside the department of Seine. Savoy, during its temporary occupation by France, became the department of Mont-Blanc. The province of Berry, though it lost official standing, persisted in everyday speech for generations regardless.

• 3. The Idea Before the Revolution

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  Marc-René d'Argenson put the earliest known version of this idea on paper in 1665, proposing territorial departments purely as administrative areas for the Ponts et Chaussées, the agency responsible for bridges and highways. His proposal sat largely unrealised for more than a century. The concept was frequently discussed and written about by politicians and thinkers during that intervening period, and it became particularly associated with the French revolutionary leader the Abbé Sieyès by the time the Assembly acted on it.

  What drove the Assembly to move so quickly in late 1789 was the patchwork nature of the country it had inherited. France had expanded gradually through annexations of independent entities across many generations. By the end of the Ancien Régime, that territory was organised into provinces with distinct cultures and allegiances. The Assembly saw the new departments as a tool for dissolving those distinctions. Boundaries were drawn specifically to cut across France's historical regions, in a deliberate attempt to build a more homogeneous nation.

• 4. A Number That Kept Changing

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  Starting from 83 departments in 1790, the count had climbed to 130 by 1809, swollen by the territorial gains of the Republic and the First French Empire. Napoleon's defeats in 1814-1815 and the Congress of Vienna reversed much of that growth, reducing the total to 86, since three of the original departments had been split and could not simply be restored.

  In 1860 France acquired the County of Nice and Savoy, prompting the creation of three new departments. Two came from Savoyard territory, while the department of Alpes-Maritimes was carved from Nice and a portion of the existing Var department. After France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, parts of Bas-Rhin, Meurthe, Moselle, Vosges, and Haut-Rhin were ceded to the German Empire. A small fragment of Haut-Rhin that remained French became the Territoire de Belfort; the remnants of Meurthe and Moselle were merged into a new Meurthe-et-Moselle department. When France recovered those territories after World War I, Belfort was not reabsorbed into Haut-Rhin, and in 1922 it became France's 90th department.

  The Île-de-France reorganisation in 1968 and the division of Corsica in 1975 added six more departments, bringing metropolitan France to 96. Mayotte joined as an overseas department on the 31st of March 2011, rounding the national total to 101.

• 5. How Departments Are Governed

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  Each department is administered by a departmental council, an elected assembly with a six-year term chosen by universal suffrage. The council's president serves as executive of the department. Before 1982, that executive role belonged to the prefect, an official appointed by the President of the French Republic to represent the national government in each department. Since 1982, the prefect's authority has narrowed; in practice, the role is largely limited to ensuring local policy does not conflict with national policy.

  The main responsibilities of departmental councils cover social and welfare allowances, junior high school buildings and their technical staff, local roads, school buses, and rural buses, along with contributions to municipal infrastructure. Local state services have traditionally been organised at the departmental level, though regions have grown more significant since the 2000s, with some department-level functions folded into regional services.

  The departments are further divided into 333 arrondissements and 2,054 cantons as of 2023. Neither of those sub-levels has any political autonomy; they exist to organise police, fire departments, and in certain cases elections. Departments themselves rest on top of the communes, and as of 2025 France counted 34,746 communes. Paris holds a distinctive position: it is simultaneously a commune and a department.

• 6. Size, Scale, and Numbers

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  In mainland France, the median land area of a department is 5,965 km2, which is roughly two-and-a-half times the median area of England's ceremonial counties and slightly more than three-and-a-half times the median area of an American county. Most departments fall between 4,000 and 8,000 km2. Gironde is the largest in area at 10,000 km2; Paris is the smallest at 105 km2. Nord is the most populous department with 2,550,000 inhabitants, while Lozère is the least with 74,000.

  At the 2001 census, the median population of a continental French department was 511,000 inhabitants, which is 21 times the median for an American county, though less than two-thirds of the median for an English or Welsh ceremonial county.

  The numbering system that identifies each department was originally alphabetical. It appears in postal codes, in INSEE codes that function as the equivalent of social security numbers, and until 2009 it was embedded in vehicle registration plates. For Corsica, the codes 2A and 2B were introduced when the island was split, though the island has since reverted to code 20. Monaco uses the code 98. Together with the country code FR, these numbers form France's ISO 3166-2 subdivision codes.

• 7. Departments Beyond France

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  The French department model spread well beyond France's own borders. Spain's 1833 territorial division, which forms the basis of present-day Spanish provinces with minor modifications, drew directly on the French model of departments of roughly equal size. An earlier 1822 Spanish division also followed the French template but was reversed following the French intervention that ended the trienio liberal in 1823.

  Algeria presents the most extensive case of the model applied to a colony. Unlike the rest of France's African possessions, Algeria was divided into departments from 1848 until its independence in 1962, with the departments classified as territories intended to be eventually assimilated or integrated into France itself. Haiti and other former colonies in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and elsewhere also received departmental divisions during the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods.

  The overseas departments that survived into the modern era, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Réunion, were all created in 1946. These four, plus Mayotte which joined in 2011, carry three-digit INSEE codes rather than the two-digit codes used in metropolitan France. They are simultaneously classified as overseas regions, giving them a dual status that reflects the particular complexity of territories that are constitutionally part of France while being geographically far from it.

• 8. Debates Over Survival

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  Frédéric Lefebvre, spokesman for the UMP, said in December 2008 that a fusion of departments with regions was a matter to be addressed soon. That statement was promptly refuted by Édouard Balladur and Gérard Longuet, members of the committee for the reform of local authorities that bore Balladur's name. In January 2008, the Attali Commission had already recommended eliminating the departmental level of government within ten years.

  The Balladur Committee did not endorse abolition. Instead it advocated for the voluntary grouping of departments, a similar approach for regions with the aim of reducing their number to 15, and the suppression of cantons. In 2014, President François Hollande proposed abolishing departmental councils by 2020, a plan that would have kept departments as administrative divisions while stripping them of political power. That reform project was eventually abandoned.

  Meanwhile, a concrete structural change arrived in 2015 when the Urban Community of Lyon was separated from the Rhône department to form the Métropole de Lyon, an entity formally classified as a "territorial collectivity with particular status." It holds the powers of both an intercommunality and a department on its territory but does not belong to any department. In Corsica, region and department functions have been managed by a single territorial collectivity since 2018, even though Corse-du-Sud and Haute-Corse remain administrative departments as of 2019.