Provinces of France

• 1. Introduction

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  The name Artois belonged to three different things in the old kingdom of France. There was the parlement d'Artois, a court. There was the gouvernement d'Artois, a military command. There was the intendance d'Artois, an administrative district. None of them covered the same ground as the others. The Provinces of France were never a single tidy map, and Artois is the cleanest proof. Before the Revolution, the kingdom was cut up by courts, by armies, by bishops and by tax collectors. Each system borrowed the names of the same regions and drew its own lines around them. So what was a province, really? Where did these lines come from, and who first drew them? And why do French people still speak of these regions as living places, long after the royal map was officially torn up?

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• 2. Gallic Peoples

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  Fifty-four main peoples lived in Gaul, along with more than a hundred smaller ones. Flavius Josephus counted as many as 300. Julius Caesar called each of these independent states a civitas. The word meant a people and its territory, not a town. Some of these states were divided further into units called pagi. Many of the smaller peoples were clients of stronger neighbors and sometimes paid them tribute. Larger confederations, such as those of the Arverni, the Aedui and the Armoricans, formed a kind of province before Rome reorganized the land.

  What happened to these peoples next is the surprising part. Their cities, with their territories and the names of their chief towns, became dioceses under the Lower Empire. They were held in a legal status called mainmorte, which kept them from being broken up like inheritable estates. That is why they stayed almost intact until the end of the Ancien Régime. Neither the Romans, nor the Germans, nor feudalism, nor the monarchy managed to destroy them.

  The old tribal names lived on in the regional names. Poitou came from the Pictons, and Auvergne came from the Arverni. Rouergue came from the Ruteni, and Périgord came from the Pétrocores. Rome, meanwhile, had its own idea of a province, and the word itself carried a boast of conquest.

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• 3. Roman Provinces

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  The Latin word provincia can be split into pro vincere, which means conquered in advance. In Gaul, each Roman province had a precise legal definition, firm boundaries and a codified administration. A proconsul or a propraetor headed each one. One region was already Roman when Caesar arrived. It was called Provincia, and its name survives today as Provence. Caesar then divided Gaul into three provinces: Aquitanica, Celtica and Belgica.

  The map did not stay still. Over four centuries of Roman control, the number of Gallic provinces grew from three to eleven. The empire expanded, and the original provinces were cut into smaller pieces. The later names include the two Germanias, four Lugdunensis provinces, two Narbonensis provinces and several Alpine provinces such as Alpes Maritimae. Beneath them, the number of cities, the civitates, rose from 33 to 113.

  When the empire fell, the Church inherited this arrangement, and it kept it far longer than any emperor had.

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• 4. The Church's Map

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  After the fall of the Roman Empire, the first bishops administered the old Roman provinces. Those territories became the metropolises, each under a metropolitan archbishop, and people also called them provinces. Under them sat the dioceses, which succeeded the ancient civitates. A diocese almost always kept the name of an ancient Gallic people, and gave the same name to its capital.

  The smallest unit was the parish, a group of inhabitants who could gather in one church. The names and boundaries of those parishes were preserved in the 36,000 communes of France. Because of their mainmortal status, church districts were the oldest and most stable divisions of the territory. They lasted from late antiquity until the general reorganization of 1802. Today, about 130 of these districts are grouped into 90 départements.

  Law followed a very different logic, and its dividing line ran from La Rochelle to Geneva.

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• 5. Courts and Taxes

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  A line running from La Rochelle to Geneva split the kingdom into two legal worlds. South of it lay the countries of written law. North of it lay the countries of customary law. The division followed the laws, customs and languages of each area.

  Each side contained several parlements, which were appeal courts. The territory of each parlement formed a judicial province. All the royal jurisdictions belonged to them, including the bailliages and the sénéchaussées. These were made up of smaller countries, each matching a general custom. Some matched a particular custom tied to a former vicus that had kept its local ways. The seneschalty of Quercy, for example, contained five secondary bailiwicks, matching five former vigueries.

  Tax collection produced yet another unit, the généralité. Some authors try to treat a généralité as the same thing as a province. The two sometimes coincide, when a généralité roughly overlaps an older territory, but they are not synonyms.

  The crown's greatest vassals were defined by neither courts nor tax rolls. They were defined by the military aid they owed.

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• 6. Fiefs and Governors

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  Around 1212, six great fiefs held the rank of peerage, in addition to the Duchy of France, which merged into the royal domain. Three were duchies: Aquitaine or Guyenne, Burgundy and Normandy. Three were counties: Toulouse, Flanders and Champagne. Their holders ranked as electors of the King of France, together with six ecclesiastical peers. These were the bishop-dukes of Reims, Laon and Langres, and the bishop-counts of Beauvais, Châlons and Noyon.

  The list of great fiefs kept changing through inheritances, confiscations, conquests, losses and treaties. Provence, Anjou, Brittany and Lorraine were permanently attached over time. Some additions were simple returns to the crown. Burgundy, for instance, had been held by a brother of Hugues Capet. Others came from outside. Savoy, Corsica, the Comtat-Vénessin and the County of Nice were acquired from the Empire or the Holy See.

  Unlike church districts, these units moved with the fortunes of their holders. The Duchy of Gascony vanished in the 11th century. The Duchy of Normandy was split into two military governments.

  By the end of the Ancien Régime, thirty-six regions each had a governor in charge of defense. Each had its own nobility. Their governments handled the raising of men-at-arms and the building of fortresses, arsenals and castles. They also dealt with judges-at-arms, and with questions of nobility and armorial bearings. Overseas lands sat outside this count, including Pondicherry, Mauritius and New France. New France was a province from 1663 until 1763, when it was ceded to Great Britain and Spain.

  Most governments had a capital, and some also hosted a parlement or a conseil souverain. Occasionally that body met in a different city. Alsace had Strasbourg as its capital, with its sovereign council at Colmar. Flanders and Hainaut had Lille, with Douai for the council. Corsica had Ajaccio, with Bastia for the council.

  In 1789, a new assembly would ask whether a single town could hold every one of these functions at once.

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• 7. The Revolution's Grid

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  On the night of the 4th of August 1789, the National Constituent Assembly abolished the rights and customs peculiar to each region. These included the privileges of the classes, the nobility and the clergy. In place of the tangle, it decided to create one uniform division of territory: the départements. The same division would serve every function of the state. Military, religious, fiscal, administrative, university and judicial matters would all follow it.

  The plan was ambitious about its capitals. Each departmental capital was supposed to hold a prefecture, a court, a university and a military post. It would also have a bishopric, a stock exchange, a fair and a hospital. Towns that had long served one of these roles protested. They stood to lose a court of appeal, an arsenal, a university or a fair. Their protests stopped the plan from being carried out completely.

  The new names broke with the old tribal ones. Where Poitou once stood, there was the département of Vienne. Auvergne became Puy-de-Dôme, Rouergue became Aveyron and Périgord became Dordogne. Rivers and mountains had replaced peoples.

  The Assembly adopted departments and districts in late 1789. Even so, the provinces continued to exist administratively until the 21st of September 1791.

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• 8. A Slippery Word

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  In the 15th century, the word province first appeared in French, borrowed from the institutions of the Roman Empire. Since then it has spread through official documents and everyday speech alike. Yet no dictionary, whatever its century, gives a firm definition. The reason is that several systems of division coexisted under the Ancien Régime, and none of them was called a province by the people living in it.

  Later writers filled the gap. They confused the military general government with the cultural province, because general governments often used the names and borders of a province. This was not always so, and the confusion explains why the borders of some provinces are uncertain. The geographer Onésime Reclus criticized the idea of provinces and provincial identity at length. He sometimes denied that the word covered any tangible reality. The lists and maps of French provinces are indeed neither perfectly superimposable nor exactly comparable.

  Still, the thirty-six governments, together with the regions attached to France since 1791, make up what people now call the former provinces of France. Today the word names regional areas that keep a cultural and linguistic identity. Some modern regions share a name with an old province, and their borders may cover roughly the same territory.

  The list also has gaps. The Principality of Orange, the Republic of Mulhouse, the Principality of Montbéliard and the Principality of Salm-Salm are all part of France today, yet none of them belonged to the kingdom.

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