Provinces of France

Borrowed from the institutions of the Roman Empire, the word first appeared in the 15th century and has continued to spread, both in official documents and in popular or common usage.

Whatever the century or dictionary consulted, the definition of the word often remains vague, due to the coexistence of several territorial division systems under the Ancien Régime.

Some geographers, even some of the most famous, such as Onésime Reclus, have widely criticised the idea of provinces and provincial identity, sometimes denying that the word covers any tangible reality.

The town chosen as the capital of each department would have to be the seat of each of these functions, and at the same time have a prefecture, a court, a university, a military post, a bishopric, a stock exchange, a fair, a hospital, etc.

The protests of the towns which had always fulfilled one of these functions and which were thus deprived of their court of appeal, their arsenal, their university or their fair, prevented this plan from being completely implemented.

It's worth noting that the old Gallic states retained their names, their boundaries and a kind of moral existence in people's memories and affections until very recently.

Julius Caesar called each of these independent states civitas (city, without the word in this case referring to the idea of town or village), some of which were subdivided into pagi.

The Gallic cities, with their territory and the name given to their chief town, became dioceses under the Lower Empire; their status as "mainmorte", having escaped the division of patrimonial domains, explains why they remained almost intact until the end of the Ancien Régime.

Today, these 130 or so districts are grouped into the 90 départements and their capital cities, although their ethnonyms have been replaced by names related to physical geography: rivers, mountains, coasts.

In modern times, the "thirty-six governments" corresponded to the provinces on which all the fiefs and arrière-fiefs depended, providing territorial districts for defense and marshaling, the raising of men-at-arms, the construction of squares, arsenals and castles, judges-at-arms, and therefore also all questions of nobility, armorial bearings, etc.

At the end of the Ancien Régime, not counting overseas territories such as the French islands of America, Pondicherry, Mauritius or New France (a province from 1663 to 1763, when it was ceded to Great Britain and Spain), there were thirty-six regions with a governor in charge of defense, called governments.

Bold indicates a city that was also the seat of a judicial and quasi-legislative body called either a parlement (not to be confused with a parliament) or a conseil souverain (sovereign council).