[1] These last two levels of government have no political autonomy, instead serving as the administrative basis for the local organisation of police, fire departments as well as, in certain cases, elections.

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.

[5] 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 was a project particularly identified with the French revolutionary leader the Abbé Sieyès,[6][7] although it had already been frequently discussed and written about by many politicians and thinkers.

[9] 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).

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.

[12] Before the French Revolution, France gained territory gradually through the annexation of a mosaic of independent entities.

The National Constituent Assembly decided to create a more uniform division into departments (département) and districts in late 1789.

[13] 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 the National Constituent Assembly.

[13] The number of departments, initially 83, had been increased to 130 by 1809 with the territorial gains of the Republic and of the First French Empire.

[17] 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.

When France regained the ceded departments after World War I, the Territoire de Belfort was not reintegrated into Haut-Rhin.

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.

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.

The departmental seat of government 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.

[citation needed] Originally, the relationship between the departments and the central government was left somewhat ambiguous.

By 1793, however, the revolutionary government had turned the departments into transmission belts for policies enacted in Paris.

Frédéric Lefebvre, spokesman for the UMP, said in December 2008 that the fusion of the departments with the regions was a matter to be dealt with soon.

[18] In January 2008, the Attali Commission recommended that the departmental level of government should be eliminated within ten years.

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.