Upper Normandy

• 1. Introduction

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  Upper Normandy existed as a name long before anyone drew a line on a government map. The territories it described by tradition, including the Pays de Caux, the Pays de Bray, the Roumois, the Campagne of Le Neubourg, the Plain of Saint-André, and the Norman Vexin, had their own character and their own histories. Then in 1956, France turned that tradition into an administrative fact, carving Normandy into two separate regions. What followed was decades of debate over whether that division made any sense at all. And on the 1st of January 2016, the answer came: Upper and Lower Normandy were finally merged back into a single region called Normandy. This is the story of how a region was created, contested, and eventually dissolved into something larger.

• 2. Birth of a Region

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  In 1956, France reorganized its territory and gave Upper Normandy a formal administrative existence built from two departments: Seine-Maritime and Eure. The division of Normandy into upper and lower halves was not welcomed everywhere. From the very beginning, the split provoked controversy, with many people calling for the two regions to be reunited. That pressure never fully subsided. For six decades, the question of whether Normandy should be one or two remained alive in public debate. The reunion that eventually came on the 1st of January 2016 was, in that sense, not a surprise but a conclusion that had been building since the region's founding.

• 3. Two Cities, One Region

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  Rouen served as the regional capital, a city of historically important churches and buildings, among them the tallest cathedral tower in France. Le Havre held a different kind of distinction: it was the largest city in terms of municipal population, though Rouen surpassed it as the most populous urban and metropolitan area. These two urban centers anchored a region whose economy rested on agriculture, industry, petrochemicals, and tourism. Beyond France, Upper Normandy maintained an international connection through its twinning with the London Borough of Redbridge in England.

• 4. Land and Its Names

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  The territories grouped under the name Upper Normandy carried their own distinct identities long before the 1956 administrative creation. The Pays de Caux and the Pays de Bray, the Roumois, and the Norman Vexin each had geographic and cultural weight of their own. The Pays d'Auge and part of the Pays d'Ouche fell on the other side of the regional boundary, landing instead within Lower Normandy. Communities spread across the region included Dieppe on the coast, Évreux, Bernay, Fécamp, Louviers, Vernon, and a cluster of towns near Rouen: Le Grand-Quevilly, Le Petit-Quevilly, Mont-Saint-Aignan, Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, and Sotteville-lès-Rouen. When the 2016 merger arrived, all of these places passed into the broader region of Normandy, carrying their names but losing the administrative boundary that had defined Upper Normandy since 1956.