The French parliament is considering to abolish the “departement” system that has shaped regional administration in France since the days of the French Revolution.

In France, local administration is handled at a regional level through the system of 94 different departements such as the Dordogne or Lot. The system has been in place since 1790, when the revolutionaries divided France into roughly square areas twice the size of an average English county in an attempt to establish a central form of control over the country’s historical provinces.

The Departements were as much a political strategy as an administrative one. Although their size was dictated by the distance a state official could rise on horseback from the border to the capital, their names were chosen to remove the provincial loyalties of the old regime and replace them with neutral identities taken from local rivers. A useful example of this is Paris – located in the Seine department – or the Dordogne, with replaced the historical Occitan province.

Now this historic system could be abandoned, as the Daily Telegraph reports that French parliamentary committees are considering how the modern government could implement “territorial reform.”

According to the newspaper, this was first attempted in 2008 when President Sarkozy set up a committee to “liberate growth” by slashing bureaucracy.

The committee recommended that the departement system should be entirely abolished over the next 10 years and their administrative powers over municipal services transferred to the 22 regional authorities. At the local level, services would be organised by 6,000 ‘super-communes’, drastically cutting back on the existing 36,682 such bodies currently in the country.

However the plans met with fierce opposition from local politicians in both the French Left and Right. They argued that the historic organisation was a crucial form of local identity and reform would damage the heritage that draws people across Europe to take a French holiday in some of the country’s more rural areas.

Sarkozy quickly backed down – but The Telegraph reports that the then set up another committee, careful to avoid any mention of abolishing the departement. Instead the new proposals would see the creation of a ‘territorial councillor’ who would sit on both regional and departemental councils – eventually replacing the role of local politicians and, in the words of former prime minister Balladur, have the end result of the “Evaporation of the department.”

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