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59-714: Two French departments are named after the Vienne: Haute-Vienne (87) in the Limousin region and Vienne (86) both in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region. The Vienne rises as a spring in the department of Corrèze , at the foot of Mont Audouze, on the Plateau de Millevaches , near Peyrelevade . It then flows roughly west to the city of Limoges where it once played a major role in the famous Limoges porcelain industry. A little way after Limoges it takes

118-463: 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

177-685: A combined army–navy operation. On 23 September, the guns of the Sancti-Petri and Trocadero forts and of Duperré's fleet bombarded the town and on 28 the constitutionalists adjudged the town lost. Thus, the Cortes decided to dissolve itself, give back absolute power to Ferdinand VII and hand him over to the French. On 30 September Cádiz surrendered and on 3 October more than 4,600 French troops landed at its port. The French army fired its last shots in Spain at

236-488: A force for Hamelin to succeed in this mission and so on 27 August he was replaced by Counter-Admiral des Rotours, then by Duperré , who arrived only on 17 September, with meagre reinforcements. On 31 August the French infantry assaulted Fort de Trocadero and successfully captured it at the cost of 35 killed, 110 wounded (with 150 dead, 300 wounded, 1,100 captured among the garrison), turning its powerful guns towards Cádiz. On 20 September, Fort Sancti-Petri fell in its turn in

295-650: A military expedition. The Holy Alliance ( Russia , Austria and Prussia ) refused Ferdinand's request for help, but the Quintuple Alliance ( Russia , Britain , France , Prussia and Austria ) at the Congress of Verona in October 1822 gave France a mandate to intervene and restore the Spanish monarchy. Britain protested loudly but was outvoted. On 22 January 1823, a secret treaty, from which Britain

354-500: 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

413-513: 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

472-405: 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

531-429: A song by Béranger spread throughout March and April inciting the French soldiers to mutiny: Brav' soldats, v'la l'ord' du jour: Point de victoire Où n'y a point de gloire. Brav' soldats, v'la l'ord' du jour: Gard' à vous! Demi-tour! Brave soldiers, this is the order of the day: There is no victory Where there is no glory. Brave soldiers, this is the order of the day: Attention! About face! On 6 April,

590-399: 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

649-523: A turn to the north. En route to its confluence with the Loire, the Vienne is joined by the rivers Creuse and Clain . Finally, after a journey of 372 km it reaches the Loire at Candes-Saint-Martin in the department of Indre-et-Loire . The Vienne flows through the following departments and towns: Tributaries include: Departments of France In the administrative divisions of France ,

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708-533: 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

767-411: 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

826-562: 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

885-654: 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

944-618: 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

1003-591: The Battle of Ayacucho in 1824. Although the goals of the military campaigns in Spain were completely different, François-René de Chateaubriand , foreign minister in France's Villèle government (from 28 December 1822 to 6 June 1824), contrasted the expedition's successful aide in restoring the Spanish royalist with Napoleon 's failure of subjugating and conquering Spain in the Peninsular War : Striding across

1062-671: The French Revolution and Napoleonic Empire that are now not part of France: Dutch Republic : Holy Roman Empire : Dutch Republic : Holy Roman Empire : Dutch Republic : Holy Roman Empire : Holy Roman Empire : Electorate of the Palatinate Electorate of the Palatinate Kingdom of Prussia : Imperial Free City of Wesel (after 1805) Notes for Table 7: Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis Spanish and French Bourbon royalist victory The " Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis "

1121-474: 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,

1180-597: 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

1239-661: 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,

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1298-586: 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

1357-675: 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,

1416-584: The department ( French : département , pronounced [depaʁtəmɑ̃] ) 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

1475-412: 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

1534-539: The Constitutionalists' provisional capital and thus the French force's main strategic objective. It contained the Cortes and the imprisoned king and was defended by a garrison of 14,000 men. At first Riego, then Generals Henry Joseph O'Donnell, Count of La Bisbal , Quiroga and Miguel de Álava led the action. Access to the city was protected by the batteries of Fort Santa Catalina and Fort San Sebastian to

1593-626: The First Empire. Four of the five army corps were placed under generals who had fought for Napoleon – Marshal Nicolas Charles Oudinot , Duke of Reggio; General Gabriel Jean Joseph Molitor ; Marshal Bon Adrien Jeannot de Moncey , Duke of Conegliano; and General Étienne Tardif de Pommeroux de Bordesoulle . The Prince of Hohenlohe commanded the Third Corps, the least-trusted of the five, with only two divisions and 16,000 men (as opposed to three or four divisions and 20 to 27 thousand men in

1652-646: The French regular army) and was led by the Duke of Angoulême , nephew of Louis XVIII and son of future King Charles X . The French name of the conflict is l'Expédition d'Espagne ("the Expedition of Spain"). In 1822, Ferdinand VII applied the terms of the Congress of Vienna , lobbied for the assistance of the other absolute monarchs of Europe, in the process joining the Holy Alliance formed by Russia, Prussia, Austria and France to restore absolutism. In France,

1711-843: 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

1770-537: The Spanish laws. However, on 1 October 1823, feeling bolstered by French forces, Ferdinand broke his oath and again repealed the Constitution of Cádiz and declared null and void all the acts and measures of the liberal government. The war also seriously disturbed Spanish efforts to crush the independence struggles in Hispanic America . The last Spanish forces in mainland South America were defeated in

1829-423: 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

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1888-470: The constitutional government's forces and with the support of the middle classes and part of the urban population. In the north, Hohenlohe's 3rd Corps (reinforced in July by Lauriston 's 5th Corps) forced General Morillo to retreat before rallying his troops. The French were left in control of the rural parts of Navarre , Asturias and Galicia ; however, lacking siege equipment, they were unable to blockade

1947-414: 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

2006-487: The demonstrators were killed and the others dispersed. Many of them joined Englishmen under Colonel Robert Wilson , Belgians under Jan Willem Janssens and other French or Italian volunteers to form a liberal legion and a squadron of "liberty lancers" to fight beside the Spanish constitutional forces. The following day, on 7 April, the "100,000 Sons of Saint Louis" under the Duke of Angoulême entered Spain without opposition from

2065-476: The detriment of the public treasury. The organisation of the expedition's command structure posed many problems. Pro-Bourbon commanders had to be given the full chance to exercise the roles they had so recently been given by the Bourbon Restoration without compromising the army's loyalty or efficiency. The solution was to give the secondary commands to royalist former émigrés and Vendéens , and

2124-502: The doubts of some and the illusions of others dispersed. On the banks of the Bidassoa , 500 liberal French and Piedmontese men faced off against the forward positions of the 9th Light Infantry Regiment. Brandishing a French Tricolour flag and singing La Marseillaise , they incited the soldiers not to cross the frontier. The King's infantrymen hesitated until General Louis Vallin rushed to them and ordered them to open fire. Several of

2183-479: The engineers under Guillaume Dode de la Brunerie took up positions before Cádiz from mid-July. Forced to use several naval divisions for surveillance of Spain's Atlantic and Mediterranean ports and coasts (held by the Constitutionalists), the French navy was able to spare only a small squadron of 10 ships under Counter-Admiral Jacques Félix Emmanuel Hamelin to blockade the city. That proved too small

2242-487: The expedition. Chateaubriand and the ultra-royalists rejoiced; the royal army was going to prove its bravery and devotion in the face of Spanish liberals, fighting for the glory of the Bourbon monarchy. The new prime minister , Joseph de Villèle , intended to oppose the war. The operation's cost just for aide was excessive, the army's organisation was defective and the troops' loyalty was uncertain. The superintendent of

2301-520: The final columns of Rafael Riego , who was captured by the Absolutists on 15 September and hanged in Madrid on 7 November, two days before the fall of Alicante . In Catalonia , Moncey managed to quell General Mina 's regular and guerrilla forces, with Barcelona surrendering only on 2 November. More decisive operations spread across Andalusia , since it was the site of Cádiz , transformed into

2360-620: 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

2419-538: The military was unable to assure logistic support for the expedition's 95,000 men (as counted at the end of March) concentrated in the Basses-Pyrénées and the Landes with 20,000 horses and 96 artillery pieces. To remedy his doubts, he had to consult the munitions-supplier Ouvrard , who quickly concluded that marches in Spain were as favourable to his own interests as to those of the army, even if they would be to

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2478-659: 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

2537-407: 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

2596-442: 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

2655-527: The other corps). The expedition was made up of regiments in which many of the officers, NCOs and men had been marked by memories of the Napoleonic Wars and so were disposed more kindly towards the liberals than were the French and Spanish Bourbons. The liberals hoped to dissuade the Frenchmen from fighting "for monks, against liberty". Villèle was worried at their propaganda in bars and billets, as

2714-429: 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 ,

2773-592: The primary ones to former generals of the Revolution and First Empire . Despite his lack of military experience, the Duke of Angoulême, whose father was heir to the throne, was made commander-in-chief of the Army of the Pyrénées, but he agreed to a role overseeing only the political direction of the expedition, leaving its military direction to Major-General Armand Charles Guilleminot , a tried-and-tested general of

2832-464: 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

2891-424: The start of November. On 5 November, the Duke of Angoulême left Madrid and re-entered France on 23 November, leaving behind an occupying force of 45,000 men under the command of Bourmont . Spain was then progressively evacuated, but the French withdrawal was fully completed only in 1828. France's role in aiding to Ferdinand was key. The liberals thus negotiated their return in exchange for Ferdinand's oath to respect

2950-428: 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

3009-538: 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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3068-460: The towns, where the liberals continued to resist for several more months. The city of A Coruña surrendered on 21 August, Pamplona on 16 September, and San Sebastián on 27 September. To the east and the southeast, General Molitor pushed back General Francisco Ballesteros into Aragon , pursuing him as far as Murcia and Granada , winning an engagement at Campillo de Arenas on 28 July and forcing his surrender on 4 August. At Jaén , he defeated

3127-455: 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

3186-614: The ultra-royalists pressured Louis XVIII to intervene. To temper their counter-revolutionary ardor, the Duc de Richelieu deployed troops along the Pyrenees Mountains along the France-Spain border, charging them with halting the spread of Spanish liberalism and the "yellow fever" from encroaching into France. In September 1822 this "cordon sanitaire" became an observation corps and then very quickly transformed itself into

3245-410: The west, Fort Santi-Pietri to the east and above all by the fortified peninsula of Fort de Trocadéro, where Colonel Garcés positioned 1700 men and 50 guns. Under the command of General Étienne Tardif de Pommeroux de Bordesoulle , soon joined by the Duke of Angoulême and Guilleminot, the infantry of generals Bourmont, Obert and Goujeon, the cavalry of Foissac-Latour, the artillery of Louis Tirlet and

3304-490: 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

3363-472: 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

3422-588: Was excluded, was signed at the Congress of Verona, allowing France to intervene in Spain to help restore Ferdinand VII as an absolute monarch. With the agreement from the Holy Alliance, on 28 January 1823 Louis XVIII announced that "a hundred thousand Frenchmen are ready to march, invoking the name of Saint Louis , to safeguard the throne of Spain for a grandson of Henry IV of France ". At the end of February, France's Chambers voted an extraordinary grant for

3481-614: Was the popular name for a French army mobilized in 1823 by the Bourbon King of France , Louis XVIII , to help the Spanish Bourbon royalists restore King Ferdinand VII of Spain to the absolute power of which he had been deprived during the Liberal Triennium . Despite the name, the actual number of troops was between 60,000 and 90,000. A minor campaign, the force comprised some five army corps (the bulk of

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