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54-499: Covering an area 6,817 square kilometres (2,632 sq mi), Nièvre is landlocked between six other departments: Yonne to the north, Côte-d'Or to the east, Saône-et-Loire to the southeast, Allier to the south, Cher to the west and Loiret to the northwest. Nièvre is one of the original 83 departments created during the French Revolution on 4 March 1790. It was created from the former province of Nivernais . Nièvre

108-463: A county of the United States . At the 2001 census, the median population of a department in continental France was 511,000 inhabitants, which is 21 times the median population of a United States county, but less than two-thirds of the median population of a ceremonial county of England and Wales. Most of the departments have an area of between 4,000 and 8,000 km (1500 to 3000 sq. mi.), and

162-500: A more uniform division into departments ( département ) and districts in late 1789. The process began on 4 August 1789 with the elimination of provincial privileges, and a 22 December 1789 decree (with letters patent in January 1790) provided for the termination of the provincial governments. The modern department system, as all-purpose units of the government, was decreed on 26 February 1790 (with letters patent on 4 March 1790) by

216-513: A population between 320,000 and 1 million. The largest in area is Gironde (10,000 km (3,900 sq mi).), while the smallest is the city of Paris (105 km (41 sq mi).). The most populous is Nord (2,550,000) and the least populous is Lozère (74,000). The departments are numbered: their two-digit numbers appear in postal codes , in INSEE codes (including "social security numbers") and on vehicle number plates . Initially

270-460: A population of 335,707 (2019). Its largest city is its prefecture Auxerre, with a population of about 35,000 within city limits and 68,000 in the urban area. The first evidence of occupation in this area is found in the Grottes d'Arcy-sur-Cure, where paintings have been found dating back 28,000 years. The Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers of that time also left behind numerous flint artefacts. The area

324-405: A president. Their main areas of responsibility include the management of a number of social and welfare allowances, of junior high school ( collège ) buildings and technical staff, and local roads and school and rural buses, and a contribution to municipal infrastructures. Local services of the state administration are traditionally organised at departmental level, where the prefect represents

378-479: A result of the passing of an Act on December 22, 1789. It was carved out of parts of the provinces of Burgundy , Champagne and Orléans , and to a lesser extent from parts of the Nivernais and Île-de-France . Yonne is a department in central France, one of the eight constituent departments of the region of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté. To the northeast lies the department of Aube , to the east lies Côte-d'Or , to

432-399: A three-digit number. The number is used, for example, in the postal code and was until recently used for all vehicle registration plates . Residents commonly use the numbers to refer to their own department or a neighbouring one, for example inhabitants of Loiret may refer to their department as "the 45". More distant departments are generally referred to by their names, as few people know

486-667: Is believed to have been occupied for about 200,000 years. By 4000 BC, a wave of Neolithics arrived from the Danube River region of eastern Europe. They built substantial wooden houses and introduced pottery decorated with the characteristics of the Linear Pottery culture . Further waves of migrants followed, the Chasséen culture , and the Michelsberg culture . The Celtic tribe in the area were named "Icauna", after

540-533: Is commonly associated, though not all are officially recognised or used. Unlike the rest of the French possessions in Africa , Algeria was divided into departments just like Corsica or Normandy from 1848 until its independence in 1962. These departments were supposed to be "assimilated" or "integrated" to France sometime in the future. There are a number of former departments in territories conquered by France during

594-411: Is known as the prefecture ( préfecture ) or chef-lieu de département and is generally a town of some importance roughly at the geographical centre of the department. This was determined according to the time taken to travel on horseback from the periphery of the department. The goal was for the prefecture to be accessible on horseback from any town in the department within 24 hours. The prefecture

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648-562: Is not necessarily the largest city in the department: for instance, in Saône-et-Loire department the capital is Mâcon , but the largest city is Chalon-sur-Saône . Departments may be divided into arrondissements . The capital of an arrondissement is called a subprefecture ( sous-préfecture ) or chef-lieu d'arrondissement . Each department is administered by a departmental council ( conseil départemental ), an assembly elected for six years by universal suffrage , with

702-428: Is now an important provider of employment. Tourists are attracted by the numerous historic sites. The Canal du Nivernais waterway is popular with houseboating enthusiasts. Nièvre is a rural department with about 31 inhabitants per km. Only one city (Nevers) has more than 10,000 inhabitants. It indicates the characteristic of the department, which is predominantly rural. The department is slowly losing its population since

756-466: Is one of the poorest and most rural departments in France. During the hundred years leading up to 1962, its population declined by around 100,000, while all of the surrounding departments experienced population growth. Yonne had been bypassed by the development of the railways. As French industry flourished elsewhere in the late nineteenth century, the young people left Yonne seeking better opportunities, and

810-490: Is one of the three levels of government under the national level (" territorial collectivities "), between the administrative regions and the communes . There are ninety-six departments in metropolitan France , with an additional five overseas departments , which are also classified as overseas regions. Departments are further subdivided into 333 arrondissements and 2,054 cantons (as of 2023). These last two levels of government have no political autonomy, instead serving as

864-485: Is part of the current region of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté , although historically it was not part of the province of Burgundy . The department is crossed by the river Loire , the longest river in France. Industry developed around cast iron foundries using the ample supply of wood then available. Coal mining also developed during the Middle Ages around Decize and continued until the last mine closed in 1974. Forestry

918-533: Is the Puisaye , which has a higher elevation and is more wooded. To the centre and east, the land inclines to the northwest where the higher land of the Tonnerrois region lies. To the east the rock is mostly limestone. The Auxerrois region is renowned for the grapes grown here, which are used in the production of Chablis wine. To the south lies the mountainous massif of Morvan , the highest parts of which are in

972-587: The Ponts et Chaussées (Bridges and Highways) infrastructure administration. Before the French Revolution , France gained territory gradually through the annexation of a mosaic of independent entities. By the end of the Ancien Régime it was organised into provinces . During the Revolution they were dissolved, partly in order to weaken old loyalties. The National Constituent Assembly decided to create

1026-671: The 1823 French intervention ending the trienio liberal ) and the 1833 territorial division of Spain , which forms the basis of the present day Provinces of Spain with minor modifications, are also based on the French model of departments of roughly equal size. Most French departments are assigned a two-digit number, the Official Geographical Code, allocated by the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques ( Insée ). Overseas departments have

1080-827: The Formula One French Grand Prix from 1991 to 2008, the Bol d'Or from 2000 to 2014, and the French round of the Superbike World Championship since 2003. USO Nevers is a professional rugby team that plays in Rugby Pro D2 . Yonne Yonne ( French: [jɔn] ) is a département in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region in France . It is named after the river Yonne , which flows through it, in

1134-474: The ISO 3166-2 country subdivision codes for the metropolitan departments. The overseas departments have three digits. Originally, the relationship between the departments and the central government was left somewhat ambiguous. While citizens in each department elected their own officials, the local governments were subordinated to the central government, becoming instruments of national integration. By 1793, however,

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1188-597: The National Constituent Assembly . Their boundaries served two purposes: The old nomenclature was carefully avoided in naming the new departments. Most were named after an area's principal river or other physical features. Even Paris was in the department of Seine . Savoy , during its temporary occupation, became the department of Mont-Blanc . The provinces continued to exist administratively until 21 September 1791. The number of departments, initially 83, had been increased to 130 by 1809 with

1242-661: The President of the Departmental Council as executive of the department. Before 1982, the chief executive of the department was the prefect ( préfet ), who represents the Government of France in each department and is appointed by the President of the French Republic . The prefect is assisted by one or more sub-prefects ( sous-préfet ) based in the subprefectures of the department. Since 1982,

1296-586: The Territoire de Belfort ; the remaining parts of Meurthe and Moselle were merged into a new Meurthe-et-Moselle department. When France regained the ceded departments after World War I , the Territoire de Belfort was not reintegrated into Haut-Rhin. In 1922 it became France's 90th department. Likewise the Lorraine departments were not changed back to their original boundaries, and a new Moselle department

1350-675: The UMP , said in December 2008 that the fusion of the departments with the regions was a matter to be dealt with soon. This was soon refuted by Édouard Balladur and Gérard Longuet , members of the committee for the reform of local authorities, known as the Balladur Committee. In January 2008, the Attali Commission recommended that the departmental level of government should be eliminated within ten years. Nevertheless,

1404-482: The 1970s, at the rate of 900 people a year. Abandoned houses can be seen in villages and the price of peripheral real estate is one of the lowest in France. Population development since 1801: The most populous commune is Nevers , the prefecture. As of 2019, there are 6 communes with more than 4,000 inhabitants: Nièvre is also well known for its white wine , Pouilly Fumé . The vineyards are scattered around villages including Pouilly-Sur-Loire, which lends its name to

1458-412: The Balladur Committee has not retained this proposition and does not advocate the disappearance of the departments, but simply "favors the voluntary grouping of departments", which it suggests also for the regions, with the aim of reducing the number of regions to 15. This committee advocates, on the contrary, the suppression of the cantons. Each department has a coat of arms and a flag with which it

1512-524: The Departmental Council is Socialist Fabien Bazin, elected in July 2021. The Departmental Council of Nièvre has 34 seats. The left-wing coalition led by the Socialist Party has 20 seats. Nièvre is traditionally a left-wing department. The results of the second round of voting in presidential elections reflect this consistently: This historical tendency has been recently and dramatically reversed as

1566-843: The Republic (all created in 1946) – French Guiana , Guadeloupe , Martinique and Réunion – the total number of departments in the French Republic had become 101. In 2015 the Urban Community of Lyon was split from Rhône to form the Métropole de Lyon , a sui generis entity, with the powers of both an intercommunality and those of a department on its territory, formally classified as a "territorial collectivity with particular status" ( French : collectivité territoriale à statut particulier ) and as such not belonging to any department. As of 2019 Corse-du-Sud and Haute-Corse are still administrative departments, although they no longer have

1620-462: The River Yonne through locks at Migennes a little further north. The second biggest town is Sens , situated at the confluence of the rivers Vanne and Yonne. The geology of the department is complex with concentric rings of granite, Jurassic, Cretaceous and Tertiary rocks, and layers of sedimentary rocks. The terrain is mostly a low-lying plateau used for agriculture. The southwestern part

1674-593: The River Yonne which they thought sacred. The region was later occupied by Gallic tribes . In that period, the area came under the control of the Roman Empire , whose chief town was Sens, which they called Agendicum. It was the capital of their province of Gallia Lugdunensis , one of four provinces into which France was divided. The present main roads from Lyon to Boulogne , and from Sens to Alise-Sainte-Reine date from this period. About this time, Auxerre, Tonnerre (Tornodurum) and Avallon were growing in size. In

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1728-423: The administrative basis for the local organisation of police, fire departments as well as, in certain cases, elections. Each department is administered by an elected body called a departmental council ( sg. conseil départemental , pl. conseils départementaux ). From 1800 to April 2015, these were called general councils ( sg. conseil général , pl. conseils généraux ). Each council has

1782-494: The appellation, Tracy sur Loire, Boisgibault, Saint Andelain. The word fumé is French for "smoky", and it is said the name comes from the smoky or flinty quality of these wines. The only grape allowed in the Pouilly-Fumé AC is Sauvignon blanc , which produces wines that are generally crisp, tart, and somewhat grassy. There is also a confidential production of red pinot noir wine near La Charité sur Loire. The President of

1836-414: The country's capital city, is a commune as well as a department. In continental France ( metropolitan France , excluding Corsica ), the median land area of a department is 5,965 km (2,303 sq mi), which is two-and-a-half times the median land area of the ceremonial counties of England and the preserved counties of Wales and slightly more than three-and-half times the median land area of

1890-465: The country's north-central part. One of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté's eight constituent departments, it is located in its northwestern part, bordering Île-de-France . It was created in 1790 during the French Revolution . Its prefecture is Auxerre , with subprefectures in Avallon and Sens . Its INSEE and postcode number is 89. Yonne is Bourgogne-Franche-Comté's fourth-most populous department, with

1944-541: The department stagnated. The viticulture industry was severely affected by the advent of powdery mildew and the arrival of Phylloxera in the nineteenth century; at the same time, the development of the railway network allowed cheaper wines from other regions to undercut Chablis wine in the Paris market. The once-thriving industry never recovered. By 1945, only 4000 hectares of grapevines remained, and only 471 hectares of grapes were grown for Chablis. More recently,

1998-593: The department was allotted a budget of 410 million euros. The department elects three members of parliament to the National Assembly . In the 2012–17 parliamentary term, two represented the right-wing Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) and one the Socialist Party (France) (PS). Departments of France In the administrative divisions of France , the department ( French : département , pronounced [depaʁtəmɑ̃] )

2052-472: The department, as well as mayor of Château-Chinon for 22 years before his election to the presidency of France in 1981. In the 2017 legislative election , Nièvre elected the following representatives to the National Assembly : In the 2017 Senate election , Nièvre elected Patrice Joly ( Socialist Party ) and Nadia Sollogoub ( miscellaneous right ) to the Senate . The Circuit de Nevers Magny-Cours hosted

2106-399: The far-right Front National party has come out ahead in all the elections since 2015. In the 2017 and 2022 presidential elections, Marine le Pen won most votes in the first rounds. However the two députés of the department belong to République En Marche, the party of Emmanuel Macron. Nièvre's best-known political representative was François Mitterrand who served as a senator and a deputy for

2160-538: The fourth century, Sens became a walled city. The first bishops were appointed in Sens and Langres , and they influenced the region profoundly because of their power. In 1771, the north-westerly part of the present department belonged to Prince Francis Xavier of Saxony , the uncle of Louis XVI of France . The current Yonne department was organized and defined during the French Revolution, on March 4, 1790, as

2214-620: The government; however, regions have gained importance since the 2000s, with some department-level services merged into region-level services. The departments were created in 1790 as a rational replacement of Ancien Régime provinces with a view to strengthen national unity; the title "department" is used to mean a part of a larger whole. Almost all of them were named after physical geographical features (rivers, mountains, or coasts), rather than after historical or cultural territories, which could have their own loyalties, or after their own administrative seats. The division of France into departments

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2268-403: The neighbouring department of Nièvre. The department has some forested areas but is mainly used for pasture or cultivated for wheat. The most populous commune is Auxerre , the prefecture. As of 2019, there are 6 communes with more than 5,000 inhabitants: Population development since 1801: Over fifty percent of the inhabitants of the department are engaged in agricultural activities. Yonne

2322-659: The new Savoyard territory, while the department of Alpes-Maritimes was created from Nice and a portion of the Var department. The 89 departments were given numbers based on the alphabetical order of their names. The department of Bas-Rhin and parts of Meurthe , Moselle , Vosges and Haut-Rhin were ceded to the German Empire in 1871 following France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War . A small part of Haut-Rhin, however, remained French and became known as

2376-407: The numbers corresponded to the alphabetical order of the names of the departments, but several changed their names and some have been divided, so the correspondence became less exact. Alphanumeric codes 2A and 2B were used for Corsica while it was split but it has since reverted to 20. The two-digit code "98" is used by Monaco . Together with the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code FR, the numbers form

2430-442: The numbers of all the departments. In 2014, President François Hollande proposed abolishing departmental councils by 2020, which would have maintained the departments as administrative divisions, and transferring their powers to other levels of governance. This reform project has since been scrapped. The first French territorial departments were proposed in 1665 by Marc-René d'Argenson to serve as administrative areas purely for

2484-519: The population trend has been reversed. During the period 1999 to 2007, it rose by 8000 to a total of 341,418. However, with a population of 46 inhabitants per square kilometre, the density in Yonne is still less than half that for the whole of France, which was 100.5 for the same year. The president of the Departmental Council is Patrick Gendraud, elected in 2017. In 2015, the General Council of

2538-429: The prefect retains only the powers that are not delegated to the department councils. In practice, their role has been largely limited to preventing local policy from conflicting with national policy. The departments are further divided into communes , governed by municipal councils . As of 2013, there were 36,681 communes in France. In the overseas territories , some communes play a role at departmental level. Paris ,

2592-412: The revolutionary government had turned the departments into transmission belts for policies enacted in Paris. With few exceptions, the departments had this role until the early 1960s. These maps cannot be used as a useful resource of voter preferences, because Departmental Councils are elected on a two-round system, which drastically limits the chances of fringe parties, if they are not supported on one of

2646-595: The south lies Nièvre , to the west lies Loiret and to the northwest, the department of Seine-et-Marne . The River Yonne flows northwards through the department. Auxerre , the capital of the department, is situated on the River Yonne, and the River Serein joins this a few kilometres north of the city. The Canal de Bourgogne , which connects the Mediterranean Sea with the Atlantic Ocean, joins

2700-428: The status of departmental " territorial collectivities ": region and department functions have been managed by a " single territorial collectivity " since 2018. Despite the intention to avoid the old nomenclature, often the names of pre-1790 provinces remained in use. For example, the name of Berry , though no longer having an official status, remains in widespread use in daily life. The departmental seat of government

2754-593: The territorial gains of the Republic and of the First French Empire . Following the defeats of Napoleon in 1814–1815 the Congress of Vienna returned France to its pre-war size and the number of departments was reduced to 86 (three of the original departments having been split). In 1860 France acquired the County of Nice and Savoy , which led to the creation of three new departments. Two were added from

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2808-455: The two rounds by a moderate party. After the 1992 election, the left had a majority in only 21 of the 100 departments; after the 2011 election, the left dominated 61 of the 100 departments. (Mayotte only became a department after the election.) Key to the parties: The removal of one or more levels of local government has been discussed for some years; in particular, the option of removing the departmental level. Frédéric Lefebvre , spokesman for

2862-490: Was a project particularly identified with the French revolutionary leader the Abbé Sieyès , although it had already been frequently discussed and written about by many politicians and thinkers. The earliest known suggestion of it is from 1665 in the writings of d'Argenson . They have inspired similar divisions in many countries, some of them former French colonies. The 1822 territorial division of Spain (reverted due to

2916-472: Was created in the regained territory, with slightly different boundaries from the pre-war department of the same name. The reorganisation of Île-de-France in 1968 and the division of Corsica in 1975 added six more departments, raising the total in Metropolitan France to 96. By 2011, when the overseas collectivity of Mayotte became a department, joining the earlier overseas departments of

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