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France's regions are the youngest map in Europe that everybody is expected to know: seven of them were merged into existence on 1 January 2016, and several still had a working title on their first road sign. Thirteen of them cover Europe and five are an ocean away, on this map moved into the Atlantic so they can be clicked. This page is the whole set, and the game asks you to put each name where it belongs, in English or the way it is written in French.
A région is the top tier of French local government, sitting above the 101 departments and a long way below a German state in what it is allowed to do. France is not a federation: the region has no laws of its own, and its council runs the things a national ministry handed down in the 1980s and after, which are the lycées, the regional trains, and economic development. The state is still present in every one of them in the person of a prefect appointed from Paris, seated in the regional capital.
The current map is only a decade old. A law passed in January 2015 merged the 22 metropolitan regions into 13 from the first day of 2016, and it did the merging by hyphen: Bourgogne-Franche-Comté and Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes are exactly the two and two regions they say they are. Four of the new ones were named in a hurry and renamed a few months later, which is the reason the biggest region in the country spent 2016 being called Aquitaine-Limousin-Poitou-Charentes before it settled on Nouvelle-Aquitaine, and why Grand Est, Hauts-de-France and Occitanie are invented names rather than old ones. Six regions were left alone, and they are the six with the oldest names on the map.
The five overseas regions are each a single department as well as a region, and no two of them are put together quite the same way: some have one council doing both jobs and some have two. What matters here is that they are regions in the same sense the European thirteen are, sending the same deputies to the same parliament and using the same euro, which is why a map of France that stops at the Mediterranean is missing five of its eighteen pieces.
For actually reading a region off a photograph, France is harder than Germany or Poland, because the signs, the markings and the plates are national. Three things do vary:
Most mistakes here are made on names rather than shapes. Île-de-France is not an island and never was: the name is older than the region and describes the land between the Seine, the Marne and the Oise. Two regions have the Loire in their name and neither owns much of the river, since the upper Loire rises in the southeast and only the estuary is in Pays de la Loire. And the three invented names are compass directions in disguise, which helps until you notice that Grand Est is the east, Hauts-de-France is the north, and Occitanie is the south by way of a language rather than a direction.
The other trap is the region that is still spoken about as though 2016 never happened. Alsace, Picardie, Aquitaine, Limousin, Poitou-Charentes, Languedoc, Auvergne and Lorraine are all live words in France for places that no longer have a council, and several of them appear on the brown tourist signs beside a motorway. A name on a sign is not evidence of a region any more.
The name in brackets is the French one, and it appears for the five where the two forms differ. That is what the game shows if you turn on the local name in the start dialog, and it is what a boundary sign says. Each group can be played on its own from the start dialog, and the overseas five are the group worth drilling first, because they are the ones nobody meets by accident.
The largest region in the country and larger than Austria, covering the Atlantic coast from below the Loire estuary to the Spanish border and inland as far as the Massif Central. It was made in 2016 out of Aquitaine around Bordeaux, Poitou-Charentes above it and Limousin inland, three regions that had little in common beyond adjacency, and it is the one people undersize because they are still placing Aquitaine.
The smallest of the thirteen in Europe and by a distance the most populous: Paris and the ring of suburbs and countryside around it, about two per cent of the country holding nearly a fifth of its people. The name is medieval and describes land between rivers rather than water, and the region is small enough on this map that it is often the click people miss.
The peninsula, and the region with the most obvious identity on the ground: bilingual signs in Breton, its own flag on everything, and a boundary you can hear. The catch is the southeast corner of it. Nantes and the Loire estuary were historically Breton and are not in this region, having been left in Pays de la Loire when the regions were drawn, which is a live argument locally and a trap on a map.
An island in the Mozambique Channel, closer to Madagascar than to any other part of France, and the most recent addition: it voted to become a department in 2009 and was one from 2011. It is the smallest of the eighteen by area and the poorest by a wide margin. On this map it has been moved into the Atlantic with the other four and scaled up to something clickable.
18: 13 in Europe and 5 overseas. The European count was 22 until the end of 2015, when a merger reduced it to 13 from 1 January 2016. Corsica is usually counted among the 18 and is drawn as one here, though since 2018 its legal form is a single territorial collectivity rather than a region and a department side by side.
A law of 16 January 2015 merged them, with effect from 1 January 2016, on the argument that French regions were too small and too poor to matter next to a German state or a Spanish autonomous community. The merger was done on paper by joining whole regions, so no department changed hands and no border moved: seven groups became seven regions and six regions were left as they were.
Age and job. The departments were drawn in 1790, there are 101 of them, and they are what a French address, a phone number and a plate registration have historically referred to. The regions were built on top in the 1950s and given elected councils in 1982, and they handle lycées, regional trains and economic development. A department is the middle tier between the region and the commune.
Yes. Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, Reunion and Mayotte are each simultaneously a region and a single department, fully part of France and of the European Union, using the euro and voting in the same elections. The internal arrangements differ: some have one assembly doing both jobs and some have two. French Polynesia, New Caledonia and the other overseas collectivities are a different category and are not regions, which is why they are not in this game.
Language first. Breton, Corsican, Basque, Catalan, Occitan and German spellings under the French on a sign each pin one region or a corner of one. After that it is the regional logo on town entry signs, buses and TER trains, and then the ordinary geographical evidence: roof tiles, vegetation, the shape of the hills. The blue band on a number plate shows a department number and a regional logo, but the driver chooses it, so it is weak evidence at best.
Nouvelle-Aquitaine is the largest by area, at about 84,000 square kilometres, which is bigger than Austria. Ile-de-France has by far the most people, around a fifth of the country, while being the smallest of the thirteen European regions by area. Mayotte is the smallest of all eighteen at under 400 square kilometres.
Socially yes, administratively no. Alsace, Picardy, Aquitaine, Limousin, Auvergne and Languedoc are all names people still use for where they live, and they turn up on tourist signs, on food labels and in the names of wines and cheeses. None of them has had a regional council since the end of 2015, and several of them are now a corner of a region named after something else.
More European maps in the same shape: Germany States, Poland Voivodeships and Germany Districts. The same country cut a different way, along the department lines the regions ignore, is France Dialing Codes.
