Prior to the French Revolution, French law was far from being unified. The prevailing system was layered and mixed, with civil matters following local customs at times, and Roman law at others. Even religious matters fell under their own canon. While the king sat above it all as a source of justice and supreme authority, he couldn’t change civil laws as they were a product of historical accumulation (ie, ancient, or a result of divine order) and existed independently of him.

This Ancien Droit reigned until the Revolution and reflected a kingdom that was not only still finding itself but that was split in other ways, such as between Oïl and Oc dialects, and pays de coutumes (spoken laws) and pays de droit écrit (written laws). The divide was both geographical, roughly along the Loire, and political. The south retained stronger Roman influence in both language and law, while the north developed along more local and partly Frankish lines.

The divide between types of laws continued for centuries, shaping legal practice across the kingdom without ever being fully resolved under the monarchy. It was only with the collapse of the old order at the end of the 18th century, followed by extensive reforms, that this long-standing legal duality was ended. The change came with Napoleon’s Civil Code of 1804, which established a unified legal system across all of France.

Not long after, in 1837, law student Henri Klimrath produced the first graphic representation of this historical divide, the Carte de la France coutumière, giving visual form to a boundary that had long structured the kingdom. The sinuous line ran from La Rochelle in the west to Geneva in the east. Klimrath would have relied on earlier compilations of the customs, such as Antoine Loisel’s Institutes coutumières (1607) and Bourdot de Richebourg’s Nouveau Coutumier général (1724) which were some of the most comprehensive sources available.

These compilations and maps preserved customs that had long existed in practice rather than by decree. They set the stage for customary law, rules that grew organically within communities and were later recorded in writing.

Spoken Law

Spoken law in France came about “from the practice of acts, repeated and recognized, by the members of the same community on the same territory, for a period long enough to fix its continuum” [2]. Furthermore, it’s born from and used by the social group it applies to, in an organic, bottom-up manner that is as flexible as the speech it’s based on. Its origin can be found in the 11th century, in the web of loyalties and obligations between lords and their subjects, as well as in the local authority that lords exercised over their lands.

In effect, customary (spoken) law was the result of a need for practices to regulate everyday interactions. Practices that were too recent or lacked historical precedent could be challenged as mauvaise coutume, or a bad custom1. Likewise, customs that were no longer valid or useful could be discarded, showcasing a system that was both adaptive and flexible.

In the North, customs could be proved through the testimony of trusted local men in a procedure called the enquête par turbe2, showing how customary authority was fundamentally communal [2]. If their decision was unanimous, the custom was recognized as valid and could thereafter be treated as a coutume notoire, meaning it no longer needed to be proven in similar cases. This system continued until the Civil Ordinance of 1667, one of the major legal reforms under Louis XIV.

While these northern laws were oral in nature and transmitted that way, some were eventually written down, as previously mentioned. This included royal charters guaranteeing local customs as well as collections called customaries, where jurists recorded rules already familiar to inhabitants and those who governed them. These texts illustrate how oral law could be documented without changing its social and practice-based character. The recording of these customs also led jurists to consider whether they could serve as a model for other regions.

Celebrated French jurist Charles Dumoulin considered that the customs of his Parisian hometown, being the most refined and coherent, could be used for the entire country. Dumoulin’s aim was not to impose Parisian law by force, but instead to provide a foundational reference point when local customs were unclear or underdeveloped. This desire for a reference partly explains why some legal theorists later tried to draw comparisons between French spoken laws and Italian statuti, or medieval city statutes that were more akin to municipal legislation [3]. In Italian cities, if a statute covered an issue, it was applied; if not, jurists and judges fell back on the main European legal framework known as ius commune, of which Roman law was the dominant component (both served as a default system to fill gaps and guide interpretation).

Dumoulin opposed this comparison because it oversimplified inherently different legal systems. French customs developed organically from long-standing social practice and were recognized by the community, whereas Italian statutes were deliberately created as written legislation. He similarly rejected equating Roman law with common law, since each had different sources of authority and internal logic - views shared by his contemporary, French jurist Guy Coquille. While northern customs continued to develop organically, the foundations of written law in southern France reached back centuries.

Written Law

In the 6th century, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Corpus Juris Civilis was commissioned by the Eastern Roman emperor Justinian. It was a systematic codification of centuries of Roman law intended to unify and clarify legal practice across the empire. Written law, by contrast, was created to cover most foreseeable cases and relied on theory and formal authority. Its development differed from customary law, which adapted organically from lived experience.

In the 11th and 12th centuries, this body of civil law was rediscovered in Italy and venerated as precedents from classical heritage. It soon spread to southern France. This wasn’t the start of pays de droit écrit in the region since pre-Justinian Roman law was already prevalent there and had influenced southern Gaul for centuries. What the Corpus did was standardize and formalize written legal tradition so that everyone in the legal field had a single body of work to refer back to.

Traveling notaries making their way from Italy into France - likely along the same paths used by itinerant peddlers - brought this revitalized set of laws into the Languedoc and Provence regions via trade routes in the late 12th century. In a region tied to Mediterranean trade and shaped by urban life, Roman law offered a degree of legal precision that made it especially attractive.

The transition was largely driven by the practical need to defend one’s property. Landowners quickly recognized that the rediscovered Roman law provided a technical advantage in court, governed by rules the profane couldn’t understand. It soon created a distinct professional class of jurists who traveled to Bologna for extended studies before returning to take up key administrative roles [4]. But a large class of notaries, who perhaps couldn’t afford to go to Italy, learned on the job, using Roman terminology to dress up medieval practices and get results that wouldn’t be possible had they merely followed one strict set of laws [5].

Roman law did not simply replace local custom. In many cases, local jurists borrowed its vocabulary and prestige while continuing to apply older practices. Its influence was often linguistic and technical, shaping the law in the south without entirely displacing what had come before.

Cases

Political expansion, such as the Treaty of 1259 between Saint Louis and the English king, helped solidify the boundaries of Capetian authority3 in France. These feudal fronts effectively made it so that certain regions were under different levels of royal control, which in turn reinforced the historical divide between customary law in the north and written, Roman-influenced law in the south. Local political relationships also played a role, as territories that submitted more fully to the French crown tended to fall on the customary side, while others kept written-law traditions [6].

Many examples survive of how this legal divide played out in practice, sometimes in ways that were highly technical and at other times almost absurd. The academic paper La France méridionale avait-elle une frontière sous l’Ancien Régime? covers such cases, three of which are below:

• The Bridge at Saintes: In 1427, the Parliament of Paris had to investigate whether a specific court was located in the city of Saintes (written law) or on the bridge spanning the Charente river. Because the river served as the legal boundary, a courtroom’s physical position on the bridge determined whether a litigant had to pay a fine for an “unjustified appeal” (a penalty that only existed in customary law).

• The “Odd and Even Months” of Cournon: In this Auvergne village, two separate jurisdictions (one written, one spoken) were eventually bought by a single lord. To resolve the conflict, a bizarre system was established: cases initiated in even months were judged by written law (appealable to Clermont), while those in odd months followed customary law (appealable to Riom).

• The Split Households of Auvergne: In some areas, the legal border was so granular that it was said to pass through the middle of a street or even a single house. This led to inextricable situations where a person’s legal status, such as whether a minor reached adulthood at puberty (written law) or at age twenty-five (customary), could theoretically change depending on which room they were in.

End of the old divide

By the 18th century, France’s legal fragmentation had become a common object of criticism. Voltaire, a vocal opponent of spoken law, famously remarked that one changed laws in France as often as one changed horses. What had once reflected the kingdom’s long, layered history increasingly came to be seen as a problem.

The events of 1789 and the reforms that followed aimed to end that patchwork. While provincial privileges were abolished and regional divisions were broken up, departments were created to replace local differences with a single system. In legal terms, this was brought about by Napoleon’s Civil Code of 1804, which abolished the old customs and applied one civil law across France.

Even so, the transition was not exactly immediate, and legal voids still existed. Revolutionary governments had not managed to legislate for every area of civil life, and older customs sometimes continued to be applied out of necessity until the Code was fully implemented. Even after 1804, older legal situations, such as inheritances and marriages contracted under provincial custom, could still be judged according to the previous rules.

Yet the disappearance of the old divide didn’t mean its legacy vanished. The Napoleonic Code itself retained aspects inherited from both spoken law and written law, preserving a unified version of what had once existed in parallel. In that sense, the Code didn’t erase the legal history of France so much as absorb and reorganize it.

This larger movement toward standardization was not limited to civil law alone. Royal efforts to impose uniformity had already extended into language and administration centuries earlier, most famously with the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts in 1539, which required all legal and administrative acts to be written in French rather than Latin, laying a foundation for centralized authority.

For most of its history, France did not operate under one rule of law but under several, depending on where one stood (including literally). The divide between spoken and written law reflected older regional worlds that long survived inside the kingdom. The Civil Code of 1804 finally closed that chapter, replacing local variation with a single, national system, but it did so on the shoulders of the customs and Roman principles it inherited, absorbing centuries of layered legal history instead of erasing it.

Additional Information

Captions for the spoken laws map: grey (applies only to real estate); off-white
(applies to lifetime gifts); green vertical stripes (acquired property can be subject to the area); yellow horizontal stripes (applies to the property of the deceased); yellow (excluded in favor of Roman legal principles); green (leaves both the reserved portion for heirs and the disposable portion undefined).

Sources

1 - Aux origines de la réserve héréditaire du Code civil : la légitime en pays de coutumes (xvi^e-xviii^e siècles)

2 - La coutume: conserver, rédiger et réformer

3 - Le droit commun en France selon les coutumiers

4 - Le droit féodal dans les pays de droit écrit

5 - Pratique notariale et droit romain dans les pays de droit écrit

6 - La France méridionale avait-elle une frontière sous l’Ancien Régime?

French geographer Jean-François Gravier described the extreme primacy of Paris as a case of urban macrocephaly, or an overconcentration around a single dominant pole. In his influential 1947 book Paris et le désert français (Paris and the French desert), he traces this imbalance to a chain of historical choices: monarchs like Louis XIV drawing elites to Versailles; the French Revolution’s deep distrust of the provinces as potential counter-revolutionary strongholds; and Napoleon, followed by later regimes, sticking with centralization because it was seen as efficient, controllable, and stabilizing.

These large swaths of the mainland suffering from low population density and divestment, known as the diagonale du vide (empty diagonal), extend from the Ardennes to the Pyrenees via the Massif Central. These trends were already apparent to 19th-century observers.

At its 1884 congress, the Société des Géographes Français - concerned about the exode rural - warned about the depopulation and demographic stagnation of vast areas of the country. A few decades later, in the same intellectual milieu, the father of French geography Paul Vidal de la Blache explored his interest in the relationship between man and his environment in his 1904 book Tableau de la géographie de la France1. He paid particular attention to how industrialization and rapid urban growth were reshaping settlement patterns.

The main concern is not just where people settle but how demographic changes affect the sociability threshold. Once an area drops below it, schools close, shops disappear, services vanish, and social networks thin out. This was particularly relevant during the so-called Trente Glorieuses2 which saw industrial expansion, rising living standards, urbanization, and the growth of the welfare state.

One issue with diagnosing the empty diagonal in any era is the shifting definitions of French administrative divisions: departments, cantons and municipalities [1]. This difficulty stems from the instability of territorial units throughout history. After the 1790 creation of the départements, the two most significant shifts of this type were the late-19th-century adjustments of communes and cantons alongside the rise of modern statistics, and the post-1960s reorganization that created régions and intercommunal bodies, changing how population and activity are counted.

Territory in language

Linguistics also play a role in determining how society views macrocephalic changes. The term parisianisme - initially meaning a linguistic or cultural trait of a Parisian - underwent semantic drift towards the pejorative. A modern interpretation is more aligned with a contemptuous attitude that distinguishes what happens in Paris as being more important than what happens elsewhere in the country. It contrasts with the terms province and provincial in French. From pro + vincere (“to conquer”), it speaks to subordination; a territory brought under control.

Nineteenth-century literature crystallized this opposition. Balzac famously framed France as split between Paris and a jealous, diminishing province, a view repeated throughout the century. Dictionaries later fixed this meaning in language itself, defining provincial as gauche or lacking distinction. And writers from Goncourt to Mauriac reinforced the image of provincial life as stagnant and dull.

Language doesn’t only demean the province; it can also empty it of identity. Marc Augé’s notion of the non-lieu (or non-place), captures this shift, where certain spaces are no longer even described as inferior, but as functionally anonymous and culturally unworthy of mention.

Industry & inequality

It is not just historical configurations and negative connotations that define these geographical differences. Industry and services can change the fate of entire areas of the country. For example, agriculture’s economic role varies sharply across territories. High-yield cereal regions in the Paris Basin or highly specialized wine areas like Champagne are well integrated into global markets, while medium-mountain regions where one finds extensive mixed farming remain far less profitable and weakly connected to wider economic networks.

In 1827, mathematician Charles Dupin highlighted the Saint-Malo-Geneva line, a statistical northwest–southeast figurative boundary illustrating early industrial vs. agrarian regions. Later commentators have linked it conceptually to the idea of the empty diagonal. In his treatise, he divides France into North and South, according to productive and commercial forces, stating [2]:

The division is by no means arbitrary; the two parts it presents contain two populations that differ more from each other, in wealth, industry, and education, than France as a whole differs from the three British kingdoms, similarly taken as a whole.

Dupin’s figurative Map of the Popular Instruction of France above is the world’s first choropleth map3, depicting the availability of basic education in France by department. In it, he highlights the aforementioned the Saint-Malo-Geneva line, showing the “enlightened France” of the North and the “dark France” of the South.

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, industrialization and infrastructure - from railways to roads - gradually reinforced these regional contrasts. Northern and eastern France became more urbanized and industrially dynamic, while many southern and mountainous areas remained mostly rural, with their economies tied to small-scale farming and local markets.

From the 1950s onward, the French state tried to counterbalance Parisian overconcentration through decentralizing industry. By limiting new industrial construction in Île-de-France and pushing these companies toward provincial cities - often with subsidies - it aimed to take pressure off Paris and to spur regional growth. This approach was later organized through DATAR4, which promoted “equilibrium metropolises” to encourage development outside Paris.

This logic fits within aménagement du territoire, a distinctly French way of treating space as a political and economic problem. After WWII, territory was thought of as something to be actively organized, including populations, industries, and infrastructures. Over time, especially from the 1980s onward, this model weakened with decentralization and European integration, giving way to more competition and fragmentation.

Along with these policies, French geographers popularized a new divide called the Le Havre–Marseille line, separating more dynamic eastern areas from agricultural western ones, to the east of which about 60 % of the French population lives.

Conclusion

Paris et le désert français highlighted the country’s overreliance on Paris, creating a lasting and memorable metaphor. Gravier not only described the gaps but framed them as a structural pathology. That framing directly led to postwar aménagement du territoire thinking.

He deliberately used harsh, provocative language against cities, perhaps to shock readers and draw attention to his argument. His ruralist and authoritarian assumptions show how deeply anti-urban and anti-Paris ideas shaped early policy around territories. While many of his claims didn’t age well, the core idea of a Paris-province divide remained. Later planners and policy adopted his views of the imbalance more so than his proposed solutions. Even as the opposition shifted, from Paris vs province to cities vs peripheries, the metaphor continued to influence thinking and keep his work relevant.

France’s unusually early decline in fertility around the turn of the 19th century made these contrasts visible sooner. Of course, low birth rates didn’t create the inequality but they made it difficult to self-correct. In areas outside the cities, departures weren’t being offset by births, while Paris and a few large cities continued to increase their populations through migration. This unevenness helped keep regional differences in place. Ultimately, the story of Paris and the provinces reveals how historical patterns of settlement and policy created lasting regional contrasts.

Additional information

1 - Les voyages de Mat: Diagonale du vide

A diagonal journey through rural France, in words and images. 2500 km off the beaten track to discover the least populated departments of France and meet those for whom life is here.

Sources

1 - La diagonale se vide? Analyse spatiale exploratoire des décroissances démographiques en France métropolitaine depuis 50 ans

2 - Forces productives et commerciales de la France (pg 249)

Forming associations in France before the 20th century was tightly controlled by legal decree under the ruling monarch or head of state. This system served to suppress dissent, sedition, and unauthorized organizing, as those caught forming unsanctioned groups had no legal defense for their act of association.

The way around this was with a 12th century invention out of France and England, called lettres patentes, or letters patent1 [1]. If you successfully petitioned the state to allow your group to legally exist, you would be granted a public document2. Non-compliance fell under the purview of the local bailliff and seneschal3 or - in the case of the republic - the bureaucratic apparatus formed by a prefecture, prosecutor and criminal court.

In the absence of judicial process, the king could issue lettres de cachet, signed personally and not subject to court oversight [2]. These kinds of documents fell under two types: administrative, which were absolute orders to stop group assembly; and punitive, used to imprison, confine, or expel individuals from the realm.

Letters patent grew out of post-Roman bureaucracy, preserved and spread by the papacy. Royal and, later, civil chanceries - charged with handling official documents - adapted these legal instruments for the medieval period.

The Law of 1901

As shown above, before the 20th century, no general right to associate existed in France. Associations weren’t outright illegal, but they required government authorization, which was rarely granted. The Association loi de 1901, or Law of 1901, effectively ended that system by granting automatic legal status to associations of two or more people, as long as they followed the rules [4]. There were only three requirements: a contractual agreement, the pooling of knowledge or activity without seeking profit, and a selfless purpose.

Legit profit-making businesses formed a société, or company, which were ipso jure part of the legal structure. But a not-for-profit entity, let’s say a political group, cultural club, or charity, required the loi 1901 structure to operate.

There is a loophole of sorts, or rather more of an anomaly, that sidesteps the Law of 1901 and is therefore disconnected from the linear evolution of French law. The Alsace-Moselle association law allows for simpler association formation on a narrower, more local level, as long as the entity is formed in one of the departments of the Alsace-Moselle region [5]. Just like how Llívia, a Spanish exclave in southern France, retains its native identity outside the mainland, Alsace-Moselle preserves a unique legal framework within France, grandfathered in when the region was under German rule.

Conclusion

Anomolies aside, medieval ordinances for the exercising of professions in France were often regulated under letters patent [6] and were historical precursors to the Law of 1901. In fact, the law was a turning point. Instead of needing special, top-down permission, people could finally form groups by default, without royal permission or any legal gymnastics required. What used to be a privilege became a basic right, opening the door to everything from sports clubs to political movements.

Sources

1 - Letters patent (Wiki)

2 - Lettres de cachet (Wiki)

3 - Letters close (Wiki)

4 - Association loi de 1901 (Wiki)

5 - Association de droit local alsacien-mosellan (Wiki)

6 - Liste des ordonnances médiévales touchant aux métiers (Wiki)

In the July 1907 edition of the prominent weekly French magazine L’Illustration, journalist and writer Jean Cervin takes the reader on a journey through France [1]. The ultimate destination? Royan1 - a popular summer getaway for Parisians in the years leading up to WWI, known for its mild climate, beautiful beaches, and upscale seaside resorts.

During the famed Belle Époque, a time of industrialization and urban growth, expanding railway lines spurred the rise of seaside tourism. Starting in England, the trend of domesticating the beach and turning it into a place for thalassotherapy (sea therapy) had reached the French Atlantic coast at the start of the 1800s. Over the course of the century, seaside activities - such as taking in fresh air and sea baths - shifted away from health and more towards leisure, enjoyment, rest and relaxation.

Although the wealthy were already vacationing by train, by 1875, improvements in rail service made the trip from Paris to the southwestern coast rather quick, at under 10 hours. Soon, an influx of upper-class visitors - mainly the bourgeoisie from Bordeaux and Paris - led to the rise of casinos, theaters, trams, & rapid urban development in places like Royan. [2].

By the 1880s, third-class travelers were able to take day-trips with circular tickets that allowed for multiple stops. They enthusiastically boarded these trains de plaisir, or pleasure trains - for dedicated excursions at reduced rates of 40-70% - to destinations like Deauville, Nice, Biarritz, and Cannes.

Suddenly, everyone could “enjoy wandering for a few hours in lazily picturesque, somewhat hidden corners” [1], just like the early 20th century itinerary we’re following (to which I’m adding commentary).

Saumur and Montreuil-Bellay

Four hours from Paris, the first two stops lie in the heart of the Loire Valley, a region celebrated for its vineyards. The highlight is Saumur, a city shaped by the two rivers that encircle it, its châteaux and churches, and its renowned AOC-designated sparkling and red wines. These qualities have earned it a place in the works of Balzac, Voltaire, and Victor Hugo.

Montreuil-Bellay is part of the Saumur Attraction Area2, which is composed of 31 towns. The city has 17 historical sites to explore - including its famous Château de Montreuil-Bellay - on the banks of the Thouet River.

Niort and Saintes

A few hours southwest from Saumur, we arrive at the historical Poitou-Charentes area. Despite its small size in 1907, Niort and the surrounding Poitevin Marsh3 drew significant attention in the 19th century, with both Napoleon and King Louis-Philippe ordering extensive public works to develop the marshlands through canals and drainage systems.

In the 1870s and 80s, mutual insurance companies started forming to support agricultural workers and small businesses, and it would eventually turn Niort into France’s fourth most important financial center.

Tourists could explore city’s Romanesque twin dungeons, visit Les Halles de Niort - a historic covered market built from iron and steel, inspired by the famous Halles of Paris - ride through the calm canals of the nearby marsh, or perhaps even catch a glimpse of an automobile, as Niort was home to Automobiles Barré4, one of France's pioneering car makers.

As for Saintes, it was the regional seat of the French state-owned railway company, making it an obvious stop on the way to the seaside. Tourist activities also abound here, especially in terms of Roman era constructions and ruins5.

But, alas, it’s time to catch the final short stretch of rail to our destination.

Royan’s rise, fall & rebirth

Situated at the mouth of the Gironde estuary - the largest estuary in Europe - Royan was always an attractive site, but also open to siege. It was subject to Visigoth invasions and Viking incursions, and was destroyed by Louis XIII during the Wars of Religion in the early 17th century. During the Restoration, after the fall of Napoleon, Royan finally had some respite from ruin, and began to be known a place of repose.

Royan experienced an era of grand villas and elegant promenades, along with its aforementioned mild climate and beautiful beaches that intermingle with five limestone cliffs - locally known as conches. And if the seaside isn’t of interest, the city is surrounded by the Pontaillac, Pousseau and Belmont marshes, with the latter two being special protection areas for 31 bird species.

Future generations would find another city in its place. During the Allied bombings in 1945, over 85% of Royan was destroyed, including its town center, its historic buildings, harbor and beachside6. Far from an isolated incident, the same occurred with Dunkirk, Toulon, Le Havre, Saint-Dié and Calais. The collective rebuilding of these seaside towns was deemed an "urban planning research laboratory".

The rebuilding of Royan itself was supposed to adhere to a regional Saintongeais style of architecture and urban design but Brazilian modernism, filtered through Le Corbusier, took hold in the city. By the early 1950s, elements such as brise-soleils, curved forms, and indoor-outdoor integration transformed the city’s architecture, replacing older 19th-century features with something avant-garde [4, 5].

Today, Royan offers much for the modern visitor: a blend of sport and relaxation, culture and nature, urban beaches and the Atlantic coast, oyster marshes and vineyard hillsides, Romanesque heritage & 50s architecture [6].

In 2010, it was classified as protected cultural heritage status, or a Town of Art and History (Ville d’Art et d’Histoire). These days, it attracts around 700,000 yearly visitors, generating 172 million of the region’s 430 million euros [7].

The city's evolving narrative mirrors the experience of a train journey through time, where one moment you’re aboard a runaway train, the next you’re taking a leisurely ride on one of France’s classic tourist trains, revisiting its past. One thing is for sure, if the historical journey of Royan were itself a train ride, its stations would require passengers to switch trains, alternating between these two paths. Luckily, readers can skip the runaway kind7.

Additional Information

1 - Le peuple, grâce aux chemins de fer, apparaît enfin sur « les plages saines et vivifiantes »

2 - Un âge d’or du chemin de fer français : a-t-il existé et quand?

3 - Un aspect du voyage en chemin de fer: le voyage d'agrément sur le réseau de l'Ouest des années 1830 aux années 1880

Sources

1 - L’illustration (pg 11), or simply here.

2 - François and the Atlas Mountain: "Royan"

3 - Les affiches touristiques

4 - L’invention du balnéaire « cinquante » à Royan

5 - La reconstruction de Royan

6 - Royan Atlantique Tourist Office (& online guide books)

7 - Royan and its festivals

France has had a total of nine different capitals, inlcuding places that temporarily acted as seats of government due to political unrest and wars. Overall, the location of the capital has changed 13 times. Yet Paris, the heart of France, has strangely never been officially named its capital by law - despite having stood as the de facto and symbolic center of power and culture for over 400 years of the country’s history.

Settled in the 3rd century BC by the Celtic tribe Parisii (the city's eventual namesake), it was a key trading hub. The Romans found Paris - which they named Lutetia - to be the best place in the region to cross the Seine. Despite it being an important trade route between modern-day Germany and Spain, Lutetia was initially not ranked highly among the seven cities of its province. So how and why did Paris rise to prominence?

From provincial city to capital

Paris gained recognition and eventually became the capital of Roman Gaul due to a combination of advantages, including militarily. Its location on the Île de la Cité in the middle of the Seine provided a strong defensive position, making it difficult for enemy forces to capture. The river’s natural barriers, together with the need for long, exposed bridges to approach the city, made it a military stronghold during the eventual decline of the Roman Empire. [2].

In addition to its defenses, Paris had many natural resources that contributed to its development. The region had high-quality limestone for building, clay for roof tiles, and gypsum for making plaster [3]. Additionally, there was plentiful timber during the time of the Parisii on the hills of Montmarte, Ménilmontant, Belleville, and the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. And in the Roman era, timber was found further afield in the forests along the Somme river, which was important as a fluvial trade route and - unlike the Seine - never froze, overflowed, or dried up [4, 5].

The French capital could have easily become Lyon, or Lugdunum as it was known in Roman Gaul. Lyon was better positioned as it connected northern Europe to the Mediterranean (as well as Rome itself), and its location at the confluence of the Rhône and Saône rivers meant that trade and transportation was greatly facilitated. The city’s influence was greater than its location or attributes, as it was also the administrative capital of the Three Gauls.

As the Roman Empire declined, partly due to the Frankish conquest under King Clovis, the Franks advanced from the northeast, with Paris being the first major Roman outpost they encountered after winning a battle against the Visgoths in 508. Frankish rulers saw the city’s defensive and political advantages and its importance grew from there.

Clovis did not have a permanent capital or centralized government but by choosing Paris as his burial site, he gave the city significant symbolic value. His grandsons nearly came to blows over who would rule the city but finally decided it should be a common possession and a key symbol of their dynasty [6].

Another show of the city’s importance was during the reign of Eudes, or Odo of France, after he was coronated the king of West Francia in 888. Already the Count of Paris, his rule saw the gradual emergence of a separate West Francia following the decline of Carolingian rule.

Finally - if such a word can even be used - further solidification of Paris as central to the French monarchy came by the late 12th century. Under Philip Augustus, the Louvre was built, the royal archives at the Palais de la Cité were established, and the royal administration was centralized, placing Paris at the epicenter of royal power.

To find out how the city of Rome came to be, see my article on that topic.

Additional information

1 - During my research I found an intriguing short article saying another location - in the Paris suburbs - is the original site of the Parisii, not the Île de la Cité.

Sources

1 - Voyage en Gaule Antique: Paris

2 - Why is the capital of France historically not located in the centre of France?

3 - Paris Perspective #10: Lutetia and the foundations of empire

4 - Commerce maritime en baie de Somme

5 - Histoire de Paris par Fernand Bournon

6 - France in the World: A New Global History

If the historical layers of standard French are peeled back, we find langues d’oïl, that is, a set of northern languages in a dialect chain (mutually intelligible languages in the same geographic region). The other main chain is found in the south of the country, and known as langues d’oc, or Occitan. Both chains together, as used in Gaul (modern day France), make up what’s now called Vulgar Latin.

Vulgar Latin didn’t develop evenly in Gaul, since the South was colonized by Romans earlier than the North, making Occitan languages more romanized than Oïl languages. The former not only sounded more like Latin, it also took on less foreign influences, namely from the Germanic invasions in the North.

Over the centuries, Modern French would eventually develop from a subset of Oïl dialects spoken in the northern center of royal power - Orleans, Touraine and Île-de-France. The larger set of Oïl languages, across the whole of the North, came to be treated as dialects of a single language (sometimes referred to as francien), considered to be the main dialect of Old and Middle French.

Middle French Overtakes Latin

One of the first legal measures to change the de-facto language of government affairs, from Latin to the “French maternal language”, was a bill called the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, signed into law in 1539. Articles 110 and 111 of the law [1] sought to bring clarity to any document of legal importance, impose the primacy of French as an administrative language, as well as shorten procedure by removing often badly understood Latin terms. Both articles are in use today, making them the oldest French laws still in existence.

The Ordinance wasn’t entirely novel, as it was preceded by three other royal edicts surrounding the preferred - but not mandatory - use of French in courts and administration. Additionally, French was already the main language of the government, making most edicts and ordinances administrative in nature rather than being sweeping reforms.

The French Institutions

The 1600s was considered the “Great Century” of French cultural dominance in Europe. By 1635, at the request of the statesman Cardinal Richelieu, the French Academy was created as the premiere institution to guide and protect the European lingua franca - the French language. Italy served as the model with its own version, the Accademia della Crusca, which in addition to being the oldest language institute in the world, successfully helped solidify the Tuscan dialect as progenitor of the Italian language.

The French Academy not only has a role as arbiter, as it publishes an official dictionary, known as the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, with the first edition being presented to King Louis XIV in the late 1600s. While the dictionary is meant to be considered an authority, each edition takes decades to compile and publish, leaving room for other, more modern dictionaries to take its place (ex. those by Larousse and Le Robert).

Later editions, in particular the third and fourth, were the most innovative as they underwent orthographic changes in roughly half the entries. In all other respects, French spelling has been rather fixed for most of its modern history, as mandated by the Academy.

Similarly undergoing few alterations - aside from disruption caused by the French Revolution - the Academy has operated uninterrupted. Most of its existence has been spent under the umbrella of the Institut de France, which houses four other art and science academies and currently manages around 1,000 foundations.

Reign of Terror

Linguistic protection comes in many forms. A Royalist French writer, Antoine de Rivarol, penned an 1784 essay titled On the Universality of the French Language, stating why French belonged, just under Latin, at the top of a linguistic hierarchy, and how it was perfect as a universal language. He exalted it for its structure and logic, perfect for philosophy (yet sadly, according to him, lacking in its musical applications). Rivarol, raised in the southern Languedoc region where the Occitan language was prevalent, even went so far as to state that - different from French - other languages derived from Latin were vulgarized and thus unworthy.

Several years later, in 1790, a member of French Parliament named François-Joseph Bouchette - known as the Defender of Regional Languages - essentially put an end to the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts by proposing to make all official decrees be published in both French and regional patois, or idioms. Most translations came out of Paris but regional offices were also created to facilitate the publication of new decrees.

A few years later, however, the endeavor was scrapped in light of its high costs and under the weight of political changes that were going on at the time, principally the French Revolution. As French identity was consolidated, the bourgeois viewed the local languages as problematic, stifling the spread of their ideas. By 1794, speaking anything other than the langue d’oïl - that is, the French language - was considered counterrevolutionary and even deemed la terreur linguistique, or linguistic terror.

Language had effectively been placed under the charge of the State, and such Revolutionary slogans as a “united and indivisible Republic” and “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (or death”, as another version of the phrase stated) could only be achieved if internal division was eliminated. On the one hand, equality was allowing everyone to speak their own language but, on the other, it was antidemocratic if the population at large was uneducated in the language of ideas and politics. For a dying kingdom in the throws of transformation, the ruling class saw reeducation as being more important than obscuratinism caused by an unaware majority.

Problematic for those wishing to force French upon society was the fact that French was only exclusively spoken in 15 of France’s 83 departments, according to a 1794 report by Abbé Grégoire. In populational terms, less than three million, out of 25 million countrymen (that is, 12%), spoke French in their daily lives. The “unimportant” patois were spoken by the masses.

Looking at another report - a census - 12 years later, the division of languages spoken appears, at first glance, quite different.

In the 1806 census, 58.5% speak a langue d’oïl dialect, 25% a langue d’oc dialect. The others are divided into Franco-Provençal, German, Breton, Corsican, Flemish, Catalan, Basque dialects. [3]

As mentioned previously, among the many Oïl dialects that the majority were speaking is one that is being deemed French, which seems to coincide with the 1794 report, at least in the sense that French was spoken by few.

A Matter of Education

Almost 100 years later, the Minister of Education Jules Ferry created educational reform with two laws, between 1881 and 1886, which made education compulsory and free for all children. It also made French the only language for all educational levels.

Before this point, due to teacher shortages in areas of the country that were isolated or far from the seat of government (and thus enforcement) - not to mention the lack of teaching material in French - schools had been able to teach in their regional languages and dialects. Knowing how to speak French was also rather useless to the parts of the population that had no reason to speak it in their daily lives.

Further developments would come in 1951, with the Deixonne law which finally recognized regional languages and introduced Basque, Breton, Catalan and Occitan into education. The years 1992 and 1994 saw the Constitution state that "the language of the Republic is French" and that the French language is "the language (...) of public services". While these statements gained constitutional power, similar points were already covered in much older laws, as previously mentioned.

Foreign Threats

Threats to the French language are often seen as coming from outside the language, that is, from anglicisms. Borrowing terms from foreign languages has often been portrayed as a somewhat new phenomenon, principally due to American cultural supremacy, but it dates back centuries.

According to the French Academy, anglicisms in French belong to three categories: semantic, reintroductions and loan translations (ex. négocier, coach and guerre froide, respectively). Language purists reserve their ire for the worst offenders, namely words that have a perfectly acceptable option in the source language yet lose out to foreign (namely, English) vocabulary.

The possible confusion doesn’t end there. There are also psuedo-anglicisms, or borrowed words that are spelled like English words but have a completely different meaning in French (ex. spleen, which means melancholy, deriving from a proto-psychological theory that the feeling was related to the organ). Yet another example is the word sweat, meaning sweatshirt (additionally confusing due to it being pronounced “sweet”).

In the business and technology sector, anglicisms are more likely to crop up. In these instances, the Commission for the Enrichment of the French language came up with their own terms such as gazelle for a scaleable start-up, référencement naturel for search engine optimization, among many others [6].

Foreign borrowings come from other languages as well. Italianisms are actually more predominant in the French language than anglicisms, as a result of Italy’s own cultural supremacy during the Renaissance.

Of all the words of foreign origin listed in the Dictionary of the French Academy, English […] accounts for only 25.8% of imports, and is behind Italian, which leads with 27.42%. [7].

The French Academy, in its role as official guardian, is active in voicing its opinion when they see threats appear. One such case, in 2008, saw them come out against the government's proposal to constitutionally recognize and protect regional languages [8]. As recent as 2022, they opposed the rise of English words in everyday public and private organizations and firms.

The flagged terms include train operator SNCF’s low-cost Ouigo (pronounced “we go”) services, or imports from English such as “big data” or “drive-in” [9].

In regards to the 2008 skirmish, the government won and declared all the [regional] languages "are part of France's heritage", although a 2021 law which was ultimately vetoed shows there still remains work to be done in regards to lesser used languages [10]. Occitan even has a word for policies of linguistic discrimination: vergonha [11].

The English Doormat Academy, or Académie de la Carpette anglaise, which hands out awards to the French elite who overuse anglicisms, is a slightly humorous take on the matter (a list of past winners and each of their linguistic sins are here).

The Future is French?

Transgressions aside, French is well protected. Not only in regards to the institutions that preserve the language or, in some cases, that ridicule those who dilute it, but in the very real sense that all languages are alive and evolve over time. Changes are baked in. Out of nearly 40,000 words in the French Academy’s dictionary, a mere 1.76% are of English origin. Hardly an invasion.

According to a government report [12] written in 1999 by Bernard Cerquiglini, 75 regional or minority languages were identified in the country, including those being spoken in France’s overseas territories. Despite this finding, currently, around 94% of French people speak French, and it’s spoken as the official language in 29 other countries, many of which have populations that speak local languages, or what sociolinguists might call languages of low-prestige. Lingala, the second most spoken language in the Congo, is one such example, but it still loses out to French, with 51% of the country’s nearly 100 million population knowing how to speak it.

As a result of population growth, […] the number of French speakers will rise to over 700 million by 2050, 80% of whom will be in Africa [13].

The future of French is quite secure. It is not only one of the world’s top ten most influential languages, and among the five most spoken, it’s a language of prestige, international law and diplomacy. The French government plays a part in in it as well. President Macron promised to spend hundreds of millions of euros to increase the reach and influence of French around the world, in addition to announcing his intention to replace English as the predominant language in the EU and in Africa [14].

With the strengthening of French across the world and over the centuries, it created a vacuum that stripped regional languages of their legitimacy and growth potential. There’s an analogy to be made here, between the country’s urban centers and the so-called “French desert” - large swaths of the mainland suffering from low population density and divestment. Out of many regional languages, one was crowned French, but what policies and events led to most of the country being empty and few regions being deemed livable?

A subsequent article investigates the problems inherent to favoring Paris over the provinces, and urban centers over low density regions.

Additional Information

1 - Histoire du français (in-depth timeline)

2 - Repères historiques sur la langue française (simplified timeline)

3 - Histoire de la langue française

Sources

1 - L'ordonnance de Villers-Cotterêts, Articles 110/111 (EN)

2 - Propaganda poster, 1793

3 - La République condamne les idiomes régionaux

4 - Dialects of France image

5 - Académie française: Questions de langue

6 - France Terme (French glossary for replacing foreign terms)

7 - Académie française: Questions de langue

8 - France's L'Académie Française upset by rule to recognise regional tongues

9 - Académie Française denounces rise of English words in public life

10 - The French government’s U-turn on regional languages

11 - Vergonha (Wikipedia)

12 - Les Langues de la France - Rapport de Bernard Cerquiglini

13 - The status of French in the world

14 - Macron launches drive to boost French language around world

Long before the 1960s when L’Hexagone became the term du jour to describe the six-sided borders of Metropolitan, or mainland, France, the concept of what it meant to be French, or even speak the language of Molière, was still being defined. The contours of the country weren’t always known by its inhabitants, who often lived and died within the areas surrounding their own hamlets.

Early European maps, such as the Bronze age Saint-Bélec slab from Northwestern France, were most likely cadastral plans for marking land use and ownership. But they weren’t widely-distributed, public-use depictions that aided inhabitant’s understanding of their own environment. The growing relationship between maps - as a model of reality - and reality itself would take one family line several generations to solve.

The first time that France’s residents could view their country as a whole, and in great detail, was thanks to geometric and topographic advances which culminated in the formation of the Cassini map. It was ordered by King Louis XV, and created piecemeal, by hand, from 181 smaller maps, which required almost 70 years of work (1747 - 1815) overseen by four generations of cartographer-astronomers under the surname Cassini.

The land surveys themselves, at least as noted in the 1750s, were done by a team of between eight and 20 surveyors, who were spread out at a distance of 20 km from each other, sweeping the land from north to south. They also worked from bell towers, with local clergy and lords as guides in order to collect the names of places to be depicted on the maps. The task was made more difficult by the fact that two hamlets which shared the same topography would often have different names for the same geographical feature, such as a hill. But names weren’t the only disconnect:

When one of its geometers climbed Mont Gerbier de Jonc, “he could take in at a glance several small regions whose inhabitants barely knew of each other’s existence,” author Graham Robb writes in The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War. [1] 

Following a day in the field, the surveyors reviewed their notes and drafted maps in their makeshift offices. Upon return to Paris, their work continued and underwent rigorous review, before approval and subsequent engraving. The surveys as a whole were completed on the eve of the French Revolution, in the 1790s, but the last were only printed in 1815, following the fall of the Republic.

The map wasn’t only novel due to the geometric measurements - each sheet required the calculation of 300 secondary points - but also because maps up until that moment were a military endeavour, and strategically shrouded in a certain amount of secrecy. In fact, from 1793 til 1815 - the period during and following the French Revolution - the Cassini maps were confiscated and deemed for military use only, as Napoleon considered maps to be a an arme de guerre, or weapon of war.  

In 1790, France replaced the Ancien Régime provinces - whose names were deeply connected with long-held loyalties - with the names of departments that reflected the geography of each region. This act of altering the nomenclature had, in part, the effect of lessening the nobility's power over the country - a country that was still not fully defined, even with the Cassini map being relatively complete.

An overview of the French borders at the time did not yet include Nice, Savoy and Corsica, but did include other towns, now part of Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany. Additionally, the Cassini family efforts revealed France to be smaller than previously believed. Louis XIV is supposed to have famously told his astronomers that they had lost him more territory than his generals had won (however the quote can’t be verified). Regardless of size, the completed maps would help with the establishment of new roads and canals, which futhered the development of trade and, as a consequence, increased the Kingdom’s coffers.

It would take over 50 years for the Cassini map to be superseded by the publication of the military staff officer map from the late 1800s, known as the Carte d’état-major. And despite the hundreds of years that have passed since the start of the project that would map the entirety of mainland France in great detail, and the advancements in technology - especially with the advent of satelites - the Cassini maps are still studied today.

Mapmaking wasn’t the only tool of the era that would aid in unifying the country, as language would play a large part - albeit through the State-sponsored stamping out of patois, or local languages. Both endeavors would arguably end up being boons for the nation but harmful on the local level, as evidenced by the following excerpt:

In the early 1740s, a cartographer taking part in the Cassini mission […] was hacked to death in a tiny village in the Massif Central called Les Estables. A savage and irrational act? Not according to Robb, who argues that these people 'were defending themselves against an act of war'. To be mapped out was eventually, over time, to be phased out of existence." [3]

Such a sentiment was data privacy for the Industrial Age, and it wasn’t exactly novel for the times. This can be evidenced in 1770’s Austria, where residents awoke one winter to find out that their houses had been numbered, and they were no longer private people but rather wards of the State, and possibly future fodder.

As historian Anton Tanter writes in House Numbers: Pictures of a Forgotten History:

A house number issued by the state…had the advantage of creating discrete, clearly distinguishable and fixed units. Once a sign was nailed on the wall of a house or painted on and left to dry, it was linked ineradicably as possible to the house. It enabled recruiting officers, tax collectors and court officials to know what was inside.

 In effect, it made the walls transparent. [4]

Maps reveal who we are. They identify something sacred about us, our location, affiliations, our relationship to the land we live on. Maps can also reveal us to ourselves, providing meaning and a sense of belonging. It depends largely on how they are used and how we use them.

The decision to be mapped is not always a democratic process, as shown above, but it can be, given certain historical incentives. To be numbered and identified, to identify ourselves with a specific place doesn’t necessarily even hold true over time. Sometimes there is no “there” there, as American writer Gertrude Stein once wrote, regarding her childhood home which, upon visiting later in life, she found out no longer existed.

It’s unknown if the Cassini Map makers struggled with these deeper concepts, or if they were overwhelmed by the importance and scale of the generational project they had undertaken. One can imagine that in a 70 year period there were ample moments, perhaps late at night and after a long week, where the Cassini family - who weren’t just cartographers but also astronomers - looked up and pondered the impact of their work and imbued it with meaning.

Akin to the childhood home which served a very real purpose in its time, only to be bulldozed by progress, the Cassini Map met much the same fate. Unlike Gertrude Stein, later generations can still admire and even compare past and present.

Side note regarding the last link above:

At Geoportail (France’s online mapping service), one can superimpose a current map with the Cassini map and see what’s changed. Also, at Gallica, France’s online portal for its National Library, you can peruse the 180 grids, as well as compare them with the principal map of the time. Clicking on the text above each smaller map that appears will take you to a large zoomable version of that grid. 

In order to try out the superimposition on Geoportail, click the link in question, then where it says Fonde de Carts, click Voir tous les fonds de carte, then click the Carte de Cassini option. In the settings on the right side, you can alter the opacity scale between the aerial photos and the Cassini map. The map legend is here. A full composite map is here.

Sources

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_de_Cassini

http://cassini.ehess.fr/fr/html/6_index.htm

https://sites.google.com/site/geohistoricaldata/data/cassini-data/demographic-data

https://french-genealogy.typepad.com/genealogie/2009/06/the-cassini-map.html

https://www.theguardian.com/science/the-h-word/2017/apr/27/cassini-the-astronomer-who-discovered-saturns-moons-and-shrank-france-history

http://www2.culture.gouv.fr/culture/actualites/celebrations2006/cassini.htm