Pays de France

Two tectonic accidents have had a powerful influence on the geological structure of the Pays de France: the Seine syncline with the associated Saint-Denis basin, in the west, and the Louvres anticline, in the east.

The outcrops, such as the Butte-Pinson at Montmagny, Pierrefitte and Villetaneuse and the Butte d'Écouen at Villiers-le-Bel and Écouen, contain significant deposits of gypsum; which was mined both in open pits and underground until the first half of the twentieth century.

It is greatly influenced by precipitation and fluctuates significantly in depth, but in general lies close to the surface, requiring special care in sealing cellars and basements.

The Pays de France is a plain which has traditionally had a prosperous agricultural economy (particularly cereal crops and sugar beets) based on its fertile silt soils.

Major north-south communication routes cross it—Route nationale 1, the A1 autoroute and the LGV Nord—and both Charles de Gaulle and Le Bourget airports lie within it.

Economic expansion is being driven by, for example, the Plaine Saint-Denis and Charles de Gaulle Airport, which employs more than 85,000 people and creates associated jobs, notably in logistics.

Currently, eight settlements (communes) have it as part of their names: Baillet-en-France, Belloy-en-France, Bonneuil-en-France, Châtenay-en-France, Mareil-en-France, Puiseux-en-France, Roissy-en-France,[4] and since August 1989 Tremblay-en-France, which was previously called Tremblay-lès-Gonesse.

The Pays de France was inhabited by hunter-gatherers during the Lower Palaeolithic, as shown by Acheulean and Levallois hand axes and racloirs which have been found at Gonesse, Villiers-le-Bel, Fontenay-en-Parisis, Puiseux-en-France and Louvres.

[5] During the Migration Age and the Merovingian and Carolingian eras, there are few sources on the history of the area, merely mentions of some of the settlements: Luzarches, Écouen, Ézanville, Louvres and Mareil-en-France.

Thanks to its fertile soils, covered with a thick layer of silt, under the Ancien Régime it provided food for the capital, especially corn and bread from the bakeries at Gonesse.

In the nineteenth century, railway lines were built and caused the development of urban centres around the new stations, as far north as Fosses and Survilliers and as far east as Mitry-Mory.

In the twentieth century, the area then became an outlet for the rapid growth of the Parisian agglomeration, with its southern part industrialising and being massively urbanised by the development of popular housing estates along the Paris–Lille railway, for example at Villiers-le-Bel and Goussainville.

Villiers-le-Bel, Arnouville-lès-Gonesse, Gonesse, Goussainville, Aulnay-sous-Bois and Stains grew by fifty to one hundred houses a year, gradually producing a suburban residential landscape.

However, the northern half of the area retains its rural character, which has been protected by its partial integration into a regional nature park, the Parc naturel régional Oise-Pays de France.