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Can you locate all 50 provinces of Spain?
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The department is the tier France actually runs on. It was drawn in 1790, it has outlived every regime since, and its number is the first two digits of every postcode, the middle of every administrative form and the thing on the blue band of a number plate. There are 101 of them, 96 in Europe and five an ocean away, and this page is the whole list, grouped by region the way the game groups it.
A département is the middle tier of French local government: below the region, above the commune, and older than both. The Constituent Assembly created 83 of them at the end of 1789 to replace the provinces of the kingdom, deliberately drawn so that anybody could ride to the chef-lieu and back in a day, and deliberately named after rivers, mountains and coasts rather than after the old provinces they cut up. That is why the map is full of Aube, Marne, Oise, Somme, Rhône and Var, and why Brittany, Normandy and Burgundy are nowhere on it: erasing those names was the point.
Each one has a préfecture, which is both the town and the prefect sitting in it, appointed from Paris and representing the state. Beside the prefect is an elected conseil départemental, which pays for the collèges, the D roads and most of the country's social spending. The two together are why the department survived the regions being invented on top of it in the 1950s, and survived the periodic proposals to abolish it since.
The number is the part worth learning, because it is written everywhere:
The boundary itself is signposted, usually with the name and the council's logo, and it is one of the few administrative lines in France you can actually see from a car.
The traps are the names that repeat. Loire is a department, Haute-Loire is another, Loire-Atlantique is a third at the estuary, Loiret is a fourth on a tributary, and Maine-et-Loire is a fifth: five different answers, one river. Charente and Charente-Maritime, Savoie and Haute-Savoie, and the three Pyrenean departments work the same way. And a few names have moved: what is now Loire-Atlantique was Loire-Inférieure until 1957, Côtes-d'Armor was Côtes-du-Nord until 1990, and older maps and older people still use both.
The groups are the regions, which is how anybody in France places a department they cannot picture. Brittany and Corsica are the shortest, so they are the places to start; Occitanie, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and Nouvelle-Aquitaine are a dozen or more each and are worth a sitting on their own. The overseas five are grouped together because each of them is a region and a department at the same time, so a group per region would be five groups of one.
Paris is a commune and a department at once: about a hundred square kilometres, the smallest by a distance, and on a map of the whole country it is a dot you can lose behind the label. It has no departmental council of its own any more, since the city and the department were merged into one body in 2019, and it is still 75 on every postcode and every form. It is drawn at its real size here rather than given a clickable blob, because a blob big enough to help would cover the three departments wrapped around it, so this is one to zoom into.
The odd one out on the eastern border, and the smallest in metropolitan France after Paris. When Germany annexed Alsace in 1871, the strip of Haut-Rhin that France kept was too small to be a department and was administered separately; it was made one in 1922 and kept the name it had been given as a leftover. It is the reason the numbering runs to 90 before the Paris ring gets a number at all.
French Guiana is a department and a region on the northeast shoulder of South America, and it is larger than the eight largest metropolitan departments put together, most of it rainforest with no road in it. On this map it has been shrunk and moved into the Atlantic with the other four overseas departments, inside a bracket, because drawn where it belongs it would be four thousand kilometres off the left hand edge.
Corsica was department 20 until 1976, when it was split into Corse-du-Sud in the southwest and Haute-Corse in the northeast, taking the letters 2A and 2B rather than two new numbers. The postcodes there still start with 20, no department has been numbered 20 since, and since 2018 both councils have been merged into a single collectivity for the island while the two departments carry on as administrative divisions of the state. Haute-Corse is the larger and holds Bastia; the boundary runs across the middle of the island, not down it.
101: 96 in metropolitan France and five overseas, which are Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, Reunion and Mayotte. The count was 100 until 2011, when Mayotte became one after voting for it two years earlier. Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, Saint-Barthelemy, Saint-Martin, French Polynesia, New Caledonia and Wallis-et-Futuna are overseas collectivities rather than departments, which is why they are not in this game.
They are alphabetical. When the list of departments was written out and numbered, it was in alphabetical order of the names of the time, so 01 is Ain and the numbers climb through the alphabet rather than across the map. Everything created later was added at the end instead: Territoire de Belfort as 90 in 1922, the five departments of the Paris region as 91 to 95 in 1968, and the overseas ones in the 970s. Corsica was 20 until 1976 and is 2A and 2B now.
Age, size and job. The departments were drawn in 1790 and there are 101 of them; the regions were built on top in the twentieth century, given elected councils in 1982 and merged down to 18 in 2016. A department runs the colleges, the departmental roads and most social spending; a region runs the lycees, the regional trains and economic development. Every department is inside exactly one region, which is how this game groups them.
Almost always. The first two digits of a five digit postcode are the department number, so 59000 is Nord and 13001 is Bouches-du-Rhone. The exceptions are Corsica, whose two departments share the 20 prefix, and the overseas departments, whose codes use all three digits of theirs, such as 97400 for Reunion. A handful of communes near a boundary are delivered from a sorting office on the other side of it and carry that department's prefix instead.
Not as an assignment. Plates issued before 2009 end in the number of the department the car was registered in, and there are still plenty of them about. The system that replaced it gives a car one number for life and puts a department number and a regional logo in a blue band at the right hand end, chosen by the owner. People usually pick where they are from, so it is evidence about a driver rather than about a place.
French Guiana is the largest at about 83,500 square kilometres, which is roughly the size of Austria. Gironde is the largest in Europe at around 10,000. Paris is the smallest at about 105 square kilometres, and Territoire de Belfort is the smallest after it at around 600.
They are being worked around rather than abolished. Corsica merged its two departmental councils into a single island collectivity in 2018, Alsace merged its two into the Collectivite europeenne d'Alsace in 2021, Lyon and its suburbs have been governed by the Metropole de Lyon since 2015, and Paris merged its city and departmental councils in 2019. In each case the numbers, the postcodes, the prefectures and the boundaries carried on, which is why the map here still shows a department in every one of those places.
The sign, and then the road number. A boundary is normally marked with the name of the department you are entering and the council's logo, and departmental roads are renumbered at that line, so a D road changes number as you cross. The style of the signs, the design of the kilometre markers and even the colour of the road furniture can change with the council that buys them, which is the sort of difference worth noticing once you have the country down to a region.
The tier above this one is France Regions, whose thirteen European answers are thirteen of the groups here, the overseas five making up the fourteenth. France Dialing Codes is the same country cut a third way, into five telephone zones whose borders run along these department lines. For the same level of government elsewhere, try Spain Provinces or Germany Districts.
