Last summer, my mother-in-law and I brought my son to the store Nature et Découvertes in Paris to find a little toy to keep him occupied on the plane ride home. We didn’t find the perfect toy to keep a 1-year-old happy on an eight hour flight (I’m not sure that it exists!), but we did find something else. It was a magnetic puzzle map of France, made up of 101 puzzle pieces signifying its 101 departments (96 being in metropolitan France, and the other five being overseas) and 22 regions. Each puzzle piece is decorated with a cartoon of what that area is known for. We fell in love with it instantly, and I imagined hanging it up on my son’s wall to teach him about where his father came from and where his grandparents live.
The salesperson who was helping us told us the puzzle was special and could become a collector’s item because of the current réforme territoriale. As of 2016, France’s administrative regions (and potentially its départements) will change and no longer look the same. The map that I bought last year will become obsolete.
France is divided up into separate levels of administrative territories (from largest to smallest): regions, départements, arrondissements, cantons, and communes. Today France has 272regions, including Île-de-France, Languedoc-Roussillon, Lorraine, Alsace, Bretagne, Pays de la Loire, among others. As of 2016, these 22 familiar regions will be redrawn into 13 regions. Of course, these 13 regions will be much larger than the previous ones and will include quite a bit of reorganization. With great organization comes great discord, and political parties fear that they will be misrepresented in the redrawing of France’s regions.
France’s bicameral Parliament passed the law allowing these new 13 regions in December, but there is still a lot of decisions to be made. Just today, the French government announced the list of new regional capitals, however the definite details of these 13 regions have not yet been decided. See the article in LeParisien.fr here.
So, why did the French government decide to begin la nouvelle réforme territoriale? For an obvious reason: saving costs, as well as to reduce bureaucracy. But on top of electoral ramifications, the French government must now decide what will happen to public regional employees who may, otherwise, lose their jobs.
To complicate matters further, a law called le droit d’option stipulates that, from 2016-2019, any département that does not like its new region can choose to switch to a separate, nearby region. This means that we may not see the finalized administrative territories of France until at least 2019. Until then, drawing any map of France may be a very difficult, if not impossible, task.
For more information about the history of la réforme territoriale, see this article at LeParisien.fr.
