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Provinces of France

Subdivisions of the Kingdom of France

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The country was subdivided ecclesiastically into dioceses, judicially into généralités, militarily into general governments. None of these entities was called "province" by their contemporaries. However, later interpretations confused the term of "general government" (a military division) with that of a cultural province, since the general governments often used the names and borders of a province. It was not always the case, which causes confusion as to the borders of some provinces.

Today, the term "province" is used to name the resulting regional areas, which retain a cultural and linguistic identity.

Borrowed from the institutions of the Roman Empire, the word first appeared in the 15th century and has continued to spread, both in official documents and in popular or common usage. Whatever the century or dictionary consulted, the definition of the word often remains vague, due to the coexistence of several territorial division systems under the Ancien Régime. Some geographers, even some of the most famous, such as Onésime Reclus, have widely criticised the idea of provinces and provincial identity, sometimes denying that the word covers any tangible reality. In fact, the many lists and maps showing the provinces of France are neither perfectly superimposable nor exactly comparable. The fact remains, however, that the names of many of the territorial subdivisions of the Ancien Régime refer to Gallic civitates.

Before the French Revolution, France was made up of territorial divisions resulting from history, geography and settlement, which differed according to the different powers that were exercised there, with different categories such as metropolises, dioceses, duchies, baronies, governments, states, elections, generalities, intendances, parliaments, countries, bailliages, seneschaussées, etc. Each of these categories took the name of a province, without covering the same geographical area. For example, the jurisdiction of the parlement d'Artois did not correspond to the same territory as the gouvernement d'Artois or the intendance d'Artois.

The Constituent Assembly of 1789, having abolished all the rights and customs specific to the different regions (also known as privileges, such as those of the classes, nobility and clergy) during the night of 4 August, decided to establish a uniform division of the territory, the départements, and that this division would be the same for the different functions of the State: military, religious, fiscal, administrative, university, judicial, etc. The town chosen as the capital of each department would have to be the seat of each of these functions, and at the same time have a prefecture, a court, a university, a military post, a bishopric, a stock exchange, a fair, a hospital, etc. The protests of the towns which had always fulfilled one of these functions and which were thus deprived of their court of appeal, their arsenal, their university or their fair, prevented this plan from being completely implemented.

In some cases, modern regions share names with the historic provinces; their borders may cover roughly the same territory.

History and preceding divisions

Gallish civitates

It's worth noting that the old Gallic states retained their names, their boundaries and a kind of moral existence in people's memories and affections until very recently. Neither the Romans, nor the Germans, nor feudalism, nor monarchy destroyed these enduring units; they can still be found in the provinces and countries of present-day France.

— Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions politiques de l'ancienne France

Gaul was occupied by fifty-four main peoples and more than a hundred individual peoples (300 according to Flavius Josephus), some with very different customs. Julius Caesar called each of these independent states civitas (city, without the word in this case referring to the idea of town or village), some of which were subdivided into pagi. Many of the smaller Gallic peoples were clients of their neighbors, and therefore dependent on them, sometimes paying them tribute. These confederations, the best-known of which are those of the Arverni, Aedui and Armoricans, formed a kind of province before Roman reorganization.

The Gallic cities, with their territory and the name given to their chief town, became dioceses under the Lower Empire; their status as "mainmorte", having escaped the division of patrimonial domains, explains why they remained almost intact until the end of the Ancien Régime. These divisions were subsequently taken over and partly regrouped to form the generalités, then the départements, but replacing their former ethnic names (e.g. Poitou for the country of Pictons, Auvergne for the country of Arverni, Rouergue for the country of Ruteni, Périgord for country of Pétrocores, etc.) with a physical geographic name (giving respectively the départements of Vienne, Puy-de-Dôme, Aveyron, Dordogne, etc.).

Roman provinces

The Latin etymology of the term provincia gives us an idea of its original meaning: pro vincere, conquered in advance. Each of Gaul's Roman provinces had a precise legal definition, clearly defined boundaries and codified administrative structures. The number of provinces, their organization and boundaries varied widely over the course of five centuries, and each was headed by a proconsul or propraetor. In addition to Provincia (Provence), which was already Roman, Caesar divided Gaul into three provinces: Aquitanica, Celtica and Belgica. Over the course of four centuries of Roman control, the number of provinces increased from three to eleven, due to both the expansion of the empire and the reduction in size of the original provinces: 1st and 2nd Germania, 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th Lugdunensis, 1st and 2nd Aquitanica, 1st and 2nd Belgica, 1st and 2nd Narbonensis, Novempopulanie, Sequanorum, Viennensis, Alpes Cottiarum, Alpes Maritimae, Alpes Graiae et Poeninae. These provinces were subdivided into cities (civitas or civitates in the plural), the number of which rose from 33 to 113.

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