Number of communes

As of January 2021, there were 35,083 communes in France, of which 34,836 in metropolitan France, 129 in the overseas departments and 83 in the overseas collectivities and New Caledonia.^[2] This is a considerably higher total than that of any other European country, because French communes still largely reflect the division of France into villages or parishes at the time of the French Revolution.

The whole territory of the French Republic is divided into communes; even uninhabited mountains or rain forests are dependent on a commune for their administration. This is unlike some other countries, such as the United States, where unincorporated areas directly governed by a county or a higher authority can be found. There are only a few exceptions:

• COM (collectivité d'outre-mer, i.e., overseas collectivity) of Saint-Martin (33,102 inhabitants). It was previously a commune inside the Guadeloupe région. The commune structure was abolished when Saint-Martin became an overseas collectivity on 22 February 2007.
• COM of Wallis and Futuna (14,944 inhabitants), which still is divided according to the three traditional chiefdoms.
• COM of Saint Barthélemy (6,852 inhabitants). It was previously a commune inside the Guadeloupe region. The commune structure was abolished when Saint-Barthélemy became an overseas collectivity on 22 February 2007.

Furthermore, two regions without permanent habitation have no communes:

• TOM (territoire d'outre-mer, i.e., overseas territory) of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands (no permanent population, about 200 resident scientists, soldiers and meteorologists)
• Clipperton Island in the Pacific Ocean (uninhabited)

Area of a typical commune

In metropolitan France, the average area of a commune in 2004 was 14.88 square kilometres (5.75 sq mi). The median area of metropolitan France's communes at the 1999 census was even smaller, at 10.73 square kilometres (4.14 sq mi). The median area gives a better sense of the size of a typical mainland France commune than the average area, since the average includes some very large communes.

In Italy, the median area of communes (comuni) is 22 km² (8.5 sq mi); in Belgium it is 40 km² (15 sq mi); in Spain it is 35 km² (14 sq mi); and in Germany, the majority of Länder have communes (Gemeinden) with a median area above 15 km² (5.8 sq mi). Switzerland and the Länder of Rhineland-Palatinate, Schleswig-Holstein, and Thuringia in Germany were the only places in Europe where the communes had a smaller median area than in France.

The communes of France's overseas départements such as Réunion and French Guiana are large by French standards. They usually group into the same commune several villages or towns, often with sizeable distances among them. In Réunion, demographic expansion and sprawling urbanization have resulted in the administrative splitting of some communes.

Population of a typical commune

The median population of metropolitan France's communes at the 1999 census was 380 inhabitants. Again this is a very small number, and here France stands absolutely apart in Europe, with the lowest communes' median population of all the European countries (communes in Switzerland or Rhineland-Palatinate may cover a smaller area, as mentioned above, but they are more populated). This small median population of French communes can be compared with Italy, where the median population of communes in 2001 was 2,343 inhabitants, Belgium (11,265 inhabitants), or even Spain (564 inhabitants).

The median population given here should not hide the fact that there are pronounced differences in size between French communes. As mentioned in the introduction, a commune can be a city of 2 million inhabitants such as Paris, a town of 10,000 inhabitants, or just a hamlet of 10 inhabitants. What the median population tells us is that the vast majority of the French communes only have a few hundred inhabitants; but there are also a small number of communes within much higher populations.

In metropolitan France 57 percent of the 36,683 communes^[4] have fewer than 500 inhabitants and, with 4,638,000 inhabitants, these smaller communes constitute just 7.7 percent of the total population. In other words, just 8 percent of the French population live in 57 percent of its communes, whilst 92 percent are concentrated in the remaining 43 percent.

Example: Alsace

Alsace, with an area of 8,280 km² (3,200 sq mi), and now part of the Région Grand Est, used to be the smallest of the regions of metropolitan France, and still has no fewer than 904 communes. This high number is typical of metropolitan France but is atypical when compared with other European countries. It shows the distinctive nature of the French commune as a geo-political or administrative entity.

With its 904 communes, Alsace has three times as many municipalities as Sweden, which has a much larger territory covering 449,964 km² (173,732 sq mi) and yet is divided into only 290 municipalities (kommuner). Alsace has more than double the total number of municipalities of the Netherlands which, in spite of having a population nine times larger and a land area four times larger than Alsace, is divided into just 390 municipalities (gemeenten).

Most of the communes in Alsace, along with those in other regions of France, have rejected the central government's calls for mergers and rationalization. By way of contrast, in the German states bordering Alsace, the geo-political and administrative areas have been subject to various re-organizations from the 1960s onward. In the state of Baden-Württemberg, the number of Gemeinden or communities was reduced from 3,378 in 1968^[5] to 1,108 in September 2007.^[6] In comparison, the number of communes in Alsace was only reduced from 946 in 1971^[7][8] (just before the Marcellin law aimed at encouraging French communes to merge with each other was passed, see Current debate section below) to 904 in January 2007. Consequently, the Alsace region—despite having a land area only one-fifth the size and a total population only one-sixth of that of its neighbor Baden-Württemberg—has almost as many municipalities. The small Alsace region has more than double the number of municipalities compared to the large and populous state of North Rhine-Westphalia (396 Gemeinden in September 2007).

Status of the communes

Despite differences in population, each of the communes of the French Republic possess a mayor (maire) and a municipal council (conseil municipal), which jointly manage the commune from the municipal hall (mairie), with exactly the same powers no matter the size of the commune. This uniformity of status is a legacy of the French Revolution, which wanted to do away with the local idiosyncrasies and tremendous differences of status that existed in the kingdom of France.

French law makes allowances for the vast differences in commune size in a number of areas of administrative law. The size of the municipal council, the method of electing the municipal council, the maximum allowable pay of the mayor and deputy mayors, and municipal campaign finance limits (among other features) all depend on the population echelon into which a particular commune falls.

Since the PLM Law of 1982, three French communes also have a special status in that they are further divided into municipal arrondissements: these are Paris, Marseille, and Lyon. The municipal arrondissement is the only administrative unit below the commune in the French Republic, but existing only in these three communes. These municipal arrondissements are not to be confused with the arrondissements that are subdivisions of French départements: French communes are considered legal entities, whereas municipal arrondissements, by contrast, have no official capacity and no budget of their own.

The rights and obligations of communes are governed by the Code général des collectivités territoriales (CGCT) which replaced the Code des communes (except for personnel matters) with the passage of the law of 21 February 1996 for legislation and decree number 2000-318 of 7 April 2000 for regulations.^[9][10]

From 1794 to 1977 — except for a few months in 1848 and 1870-1871 — Paris had no mayor and was thus directly controlled by the departmental prefect. This meant that Paris had less autonomy than certain towns or villages. Even after Paris regained the right to elect its own mayor in 1977, the central government retained control of the Paris police. In all other French communes, the municipal police are under the mayor's supervision.

Kingdom of France

French Revolution

On 14 July 1789, at the end of the afternoon, following the storming of the Bastille, the provost of the merchants of Paris, Jacques de Flesselles was shot by the crowd on the steps of Paris City Hall.^[11] Although in the Middle Ages the provosts of the merchants symbolized the independence of Paris and even had openly rebelled against King Charles V, their office had been suppressed by the king, then reinstated but with strict control from the king, and so they had ended up being viewed by the people as yet another representative of the king, no longer the embodiment of a free municipality.

Following that event, a "commune" of Paris was immediately set up to replace the old medieval chartered city of Paris, and a municipal guard was established to protect Paris against any attempt made by King Louis XVI to quell the ongoing revolution. Several other cities of France quickly followed suit, and communes arose everywhere, each with their municipal guard. On 14 December 1789, the National Assembly (Assemblée Nationale) passed a law creating the commune, designed to be the lowest level of administrative division in France, thus endorsing these independently created communes, but also creating communes of its own. In this area as in many others, the work of the National Assembly was, properly speaking, revolutionary: not content with transforming all the chartered cities and towns into communes, the National Assembly also decided to turn all the village parishes into full-status communes. The Revolutionaries were inspired by Cartesian ideas as well as by the philosophy of the Enlightenment. They wanted to do away with all the peculiarities of the past and establish a perfect society, in which all and everything should be equal and set up according to reason, rather than by tradition or conservatism.

Thus, they set out to establish administrative divisions that would be uniform across the country: the whole of France would be divided into départements, themselves divided into arrondissements, themselves divided into cantons, themselves divided into communes, no exceptions. All of these communes would have equal status, they would all have a mayor at their head, and a municipal council elected by the inhabitants of the commune. This was a real revolution for the thousands of villages that never had experienced organized municipal life before. A communal house had to be built in each of these villages, which would house the meetings of the municipal council as well as the administration of the commune. Some in the National Assembly were opposed to such a fragmentation of France into thousands of communes, but eventually Mirabeau and his ideas of one commune for each parish prevailed.

On 20 September 1792, the recording of births, marriages, and deaths also was withdrawn as a responsibility of the priests of the parishes and handed to the mayors.^[12][13] Civil marriages were established and started to be performed in the mairie with a ceremony not unlike the traditional one, with the mayor replacing the priest, and the name of the law replacing the name of God ("Au nom de la loi, je vous déclare unis par les liens du mariage." – "In the name of the law, I declare you united by the bonds of marriage."). Priests were forced to surrender their centuries-old baptism, marriage, and burial books, which were deposited in the mairies. These abrupt changes profoundly alienated devout Catholics, and France soon was plunged into the throes of civil war, with the fervently religious regions of western France at its center. It would take Napoleon I to re-establish peace in France, stabilize the new administrative system, and make it generally accepted by the population. Napoleon also abolished the election of the municipal councils, which now were chosen by the prefect, the local representative of the central government.

Trends after the French Revolution

Today, French communes are still very much the same in their general principles as those that were established at the beginning of the Revolution. The biggest changes occurred in 1831, when the French Parliament re-established the principle of the election of municipal councils, and in 1837 when French communes were given legal "personality", being now considered legal entities with legal capacity. The Jacobin revolutionaries were afraid of independent local powers, which they saw as conservative and opposed to the revolution, and so they favored a powerful central state. Therefore, when they created the communes, they deprived them of any legal "personality" (as they did with the départements), with only the central state having legal "personality." By 1837 that situation was judged impractical, as mayors and municipal councils could not be parties in courts. The consequence of the change, however, was that tens of thousands of villages which had never had legal "personality" (contrary to the chartered cities) suddenly became legal entities for the first time in their history. This is still the case today.

During the revolution, approximately 41,000 communes were created,^[14] on territory corresponding to the limits of modern-day France (the 41,000 figure includes the communes of the departments of Savoie, Haute-Savoie and Alpes-Maritimes which were annexed in 1795, but does not include the departments of modern-day Belgium and Germany west of the Rhine, which were part of France between 1795 and 1815). This was fewer than the 60,000 parishes that existed before the revolution (in cities and towns, parishes were merged into one single commune; in the countryside, some very small parishes were merged with bigger ones), but 41,000 was still a considerable number, without any comparison in the world at the time, except in the empire of China (but there, only county level and above had any permanent administration).

Since then, tremendous changes have affected France, as they have the rest of Europe: the Industrial Revolution, two world wars, and the rural exodus have all depopulated the countryside and increased the size of cities. French administrative divisions, however, have remained extremely rigid and unchanged. Today about 90 percent of communes and departments are exactly the same as those designed at the time of the French Revolution more than 200 years ago, with the same limits. Countless rural communes that had hundreds of inhabitants at the time of the French Revolution now have only a hundred inhabitants or fewer. On the other hand, cities and towns have grown so much that their urbanized area is now extending far beyond the limits of their commune which were set at the time of the revolution. The most extreme example of this is Paris, where the urbanized area sprawls over 396 communes.

Paris in fact was one of the very few communes of France whose limits were extended to take into account the expansion of the urbanized area. The new, larger, commune of Paris was set up under the oversight of Emperor Napoléon III in 1859, but after 1859 the limits of Paris rigidified. Unlike most other European countries, which stringently merged their communes to better reflect modern-day densities of population (such as Germany and Italy around 1970), dramatically decreasing the number of communes in the process – the Gemeinden of West Germany were decreased from 24,400 to 8,400 in the space of a few years – France only carried out mergers at the margin, and those were mostly carried out during the 19th century. From 41,000 communes at the time of the French Revolution, the number decreased to 37,963 in 1921, to 36,569 in 2008 (in metropolitan France).

Thus, in Europe, only Switzerland has as high a density of communes as France, and even there an extensive merger movement has started in the last 10 years. To better grasp the staggering number of communes in France, two comparisons can be made: First, of the original 15 member states of the European Union there are approximately 75,000 communes; France alone, which comprises 16 percent of the population of the EU-15, had nearly half of its communes. Second, the United States, with a territory fourteen times larger than that of the French Republic, and nearly five times its population, had 35,937 incorporated municipalities and townships at the 2002 Census of Governments, fewer than that of the French Republic. The number of barangays in the Philippines, villages of Indonesia, and muban in Thailand also have a higher number than the French communes.

Communes nouvelles

There have long been calls in France for a massive merger of communes, including by such distinguished voices as the president of the Cour des Comptes (the central auditing administrative body in France). In 1971 the Marcellin law offered support and money from the government to entice the communes to merge freely with each other, but the law had only a limited effect (only about 1,300 communes agreed to merge with others). Many rural communes with few residents struggle to maintain and manage basic services such as running water, garbage collection, or properly paved communal roads.

Mergers, however, are not easy to achieve. One problem is that mergers reduce the number of available elected positions, and thus are not popular with local politicians. Moreover, citizens from one village may be unwilling to have their local services run by an executive located in another village, whom they may consider unaware of or inattentive to their local needs.

In December 2010 the law n° 2010-1563 regarding reform of territorial collectivities was adopted, which created the legal framework for the communes nouvelles (lit. "new communes").^[15] A commune nouvelle can be created by merger of a number of communes at the request of the municipal councils of all the communes or at the initiative of the state representative in the department (the prefect). The municipal council of the new commune can decide to create communes déléguées (lit. "delegated communes") in the place of the former communes, which are represented by a delegated mayor and a delegated council. Between 2012 and 2021, about 820 communes nouvelles have been established, replacing about 2,550 old communes.

Intercommunality

The expression "intercommunality" (intercommunalité) denotes several forms of cooperation between communes. Such cooperation first made its appearance at the end of the 19th century in the form of a law on 22 March 1890,^[16] which provided for the establishment of single-purpose intercommunal associations. French lawmakers having long been aware of the inadequacy of the communal structure inherited from the French Revolution for dealing with a number of practical matters, the so-called Chevènement law of 12 July 1999 is the most recent and most thoroughgoing measure aimed at strengthening and simplifying this principle.

In recent years it has become increasingly common for communes to band together in intercommunal consortia for the provision of such services as refuse collection and water supply. Suburban communes often team up with the city at the core of their urban area to form a community charged with managing public transport or even administering the collection of local taxes.

The Chevènement law tidied up all these practices, abolishing some structures and creating new ones. In addition, it offered central government finance aimed at encouraging further communes to join in intercommunal structures. Unlike the only partially successful statute enacted in 1966 and enabling urban communes to form urban communities, or the more marked failure of the Marcellin law of 1971, the Chevènement law met with a large measure of success, so that a majority of French communes are now involved in intercommunal structures.

There are two types of these structures:

• Those without fiscal power, the loosest form of intercommunality. Mainly in this category are the traditional syndicates of communes. Communes gather and contribute financially to the syndicate, but the syndicate cannot levy its own taxes. Communes can leave the syndicate at any time. Syndicates can be set up for a particular purpose or to deal with several simultaneous matters. These structures have been left untouched by the Chevènement law, and they are on the decline.
• Structures with fiscal power. This is what the Chevènement law was concerned with, and it distinguished three structures with fiscal power:
  • the community of communes (communauté de communes), aimed primarily at rural communes;
  • the community of agglomeration (communauté d'agglomération), aimed at towns and middle-sized cities and their suburbs;
  • the urban community (communauté urbaine), aimed at larger cities and their suburbs.
  • the metropolis (métropole), established in 2014, aimed at the largest cities and their suburbs.

These three structures are given varying levels of fiscal power, with the community of agglomeration and the urban community having most fiscal power, levying the local tax on corporations (taxe professionnelle) in their own name instead of those of the communes, and with the same level of taxation across the communes of the community. The communities must also manage some services previously performed by the communes, such as garbage collection or transport, but the law also makes it mandatory for the communities to manage other areas such as economic planning and development, housing projects, or environment protection. Communities of communes are required to manage the fewest areas, leaving the communes more autonomous, while urban communities are required to manage most matters, leaving the communes within them with less autonomy.

Most and least populous communes

• Paris is the most populous commune of France with 2,187,526 residents as of 2017.^[18]
• Six of the French villages destroyed in the First World War have never been rebuilt. All are found in the département of Meuse and were destroyed during the Battle of Verdun in 1916. After the war, it was decided that the land previously occupied by the destroyed villages would not be incorporated into other communes, as a testament to these villages which had "died for France", as they were declared, and to preserve their memory. The following communes are entirely unpopulated and are managed by a council of three members, appointed by the prefect of Meuse:
  • Beaumont-en-Verdunois
  • Bezonvaux
  • Cumières-le-Mort-Homme
  • Fleury-devant-Douaumont
  • Haumont-près-Samogneux
  • Louvemont-Côte-du-Poivre
• Apart from the above cases, the communes with the fewest inhabitants in the French Republic are:^[18]
  • commune of Rochefourchat (Drôme), in southeastern France, one inhabitant as of 1999. (a 38-year-old divorced man)
  • commune of Leménil-Mitry (Meurthe-et-Moselle), in eastern France, three inhabitants as of 2017.
  • the communes of La Bâtie-des-Fonds (Drôme), Caunette-sur-Lauquet (Aude) and Majastres (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence), each with four inhabitants as of 2017.

Most and least subdivided communes

• Pas-de-Calais is the department in France with the most communes, with 890.
• Paris is the department in France with the fewest communes, with only single commune of an arrondissement and the department itself.

Largest and smallest commune territories

• The largest commune of the French Republic is Maripasoula (with 3,710 inhabitants) in the département of French Guiana: 18,360 square kilometres (7,090 sq mi).
• The smallest commune of the French Republic is Castelmoron-d'Albret (53 inhabitants) near Bordeaux: 3.54 hectares (8.75 acres).
• In metropolitan France the largest commune is the commune of Arles (50,513 inhabitants) near Marseille, the territory of which encompasses most of the Camargue (the delta of the Rhône): 8.7 times the area of the city of Paris (excluding the outlying parks of Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes) at 759 square kilometres (293 sq mi).

Communes farthest away from the capital city of France

• The commune of the French Republic farthest away from Paris is the commune of L'Île-des-Pins (1,840 inhabitants) in New Caledonia: 16,841 km (10,465 miles) from the center of Paris.
• In continental France (i.e., European France excluding Corsica), the communes farthest away from Paris are Coustouges (93 inhabitants) and Lamanère (52 inhabitants) at the Spanish border: both at 721 km (448 mi) from the center of Paris as the crow flies.

Shortest and longest commune names

Road sign marking the end of the village of Y in the Somme department of Hauts-de-France

• The commune of the French Republic with the shortest name is the commune of Y in Somme (91 inhabitants).
• The two communes in the French Republic with the longest names (38 letters):
  • Saint-Remy-en-Bouzemont-Saint-Genest-et-Isson in Marne (517 inhabitants)
  • Beaujeu-Saint-Vallier-Pierrejux-et-Quitteur in Haute-Saône (937 inhabitants)

Communes with non-French names

Mittelhausbergen in Alsace

Vacqueyras in Provence,
showing double French/
Provençal name

In areas where languages other than French are or were spoken, most place-names have been translated into a French spelling and pronunciation, such as Dunkerque (Duinkerke in Dutch), Toulouse (Tolosa in Occitan), Strasbourg (Straßburg in German), Perpignan (Perpinyà in Catalan), and many place names derived from Gaulish or Latin. However, many smaller communes have retained their native name. Other examples of retained names in the languages once spoken, or still spoken, on French territory:

• Alsatian: the commune of Mittelhausbergen (1,680 inhabitants)
• Amerindian: the commune of Kourou (19,107 inhabitants)
• Arpitan: the commune of Chamonix (9,514 inhabitants)
• Austronesian: the commune of Kouaoua (1,586 inhabitants)
• Basque: the commune of Ainhoa (683 inhabitants)
• Breton: the commune of Brest (141,315 inhabitants)
• Catalan: the commune of Banyuls-dels-Aspres (1,007 inhabitants)
• Comorian: the commune of M’Tsangamouji (5,028 inhabitants)
• Corsican: the commune of Calvi (5,377 inhabitants)
• Dutch: the commune of Steenvoorde (4,024 inhabitants)
• Italian: the commune of Bocognano (372 inhabitants)
• Occitan: the commune of Alès (41,205 inhabitants)
• Polynesian: the commune of Hitiaa O Te Ra (8,683 inhabitants)

Citations

Sources