La Poste (French pronunciation: [la pɔst]) is a postal service company in France, operating in Metropolitan France, the five French overseas departments and regions and the overseas collectivity of Saint Pierre and Miquelon.

The company was created in 1991 following the split of the French PTT, a government department responsible for mail, telegraph and telephone services in France.

However, in 1997 EU directive 97/67/EC required member states to "fully open the postal sector to competition",[3] with the result that the French government allowed private postal service companies in 2005 and transformed La Poste into a public-owned company limited by shares in 2010.

Although its postal activities are declining because of the development of the Internet, they still represented half of the company's income.

[1] During the Middle Ages, postal delivery in France was not organised by the state and was provided by private enterprise.

They prefigured modern postal services and their existence led to the appearance of the first post offices at the end of the 16th century.

The ferme générale was abolished two years later and post offices started to be directly administered by the state.

As a reaction to the commonplace opening of letters by the royal authorities, an oath of confidentiality became compulsory for post employees in 1790.

The first French mail coach appeared in 1793 and the first telegram in the world was delivered in 1794 with Claude Chappe's optical telegraph on the Paris-Lille line.

An 1801 decree reasserted the state monopoly on mail delivery, postal orders were created in 1817 and postage stamps were introduced in 1849, nine years after they were invented in the United Kingdom.

However, changes in the structure of the PTT were opposed by trade unions who feared that employees could lose their status as civil servants.

Such a move was encouraged by the European Economic Community, and the United Kingdom had already separated its national telephone company from its postal services in 1981.

While France Telecom was privatised and floated on the stock exchange in 1997, La Poste has remained a public service.

To comply with the law and EU directives, the banking activities had to form a distinct subsidiary in 2006, called La Banque postale.

Most of the companies dealing with mail services only operate on a local scale, because they could not compete with the extremely wide network of offices that La Poste enjoyed throughout the country.

Although most of the Western European countries had fully privatised their postal service companies, public opinion in France was largely against such a move.

Via its joint venture with Swiss Post, Asendia, the Group acquired Pitney Bowes’ international mail business operations in the UK, and a 40% stake in Irish e-commerce firm eShopWorld.

[7] In December 2016, La Poste launched a regular delivery line by drones to deliver to isolated companies in secluded areas of France.

[9] La Poste offers three different rates for sending mail in France: first-class, second-class and green letter.

[11] Most of these faster parcel services are grouped under GeoPost which provides two brands in France, Chronopost and DPD (formerly Exapaq).

La Poste is the second biggest provider for parcel delivery in Europe, with a 15% share of the market and a €5 billion revenue.