La France et ses territoires ed. by Luc Brière, Suvani Vugdalic (review)

The law of 16 January 2015, which came into force in early 2016, redrew the map of France: the country’s 22 metropolitan regions were reduced to 13. Six regions underwent no territorial change; the other seven were created by merging pre-existing regions: Alsace with Lorraine and Champagne-Ardennes; Limousin with Poitou-Charentes; Auvergne with Rhône-Alpes; Bourgogne with Franche-Comté; Languedoc-Roussillon with Midi-Pyrénées; Nord-Pas-de-Calais with Picardie; and Basse-Normandie with Haute-Normandie. In connection with this historic territorial reform, INSEE has published a series of texts based on census statistics that describe the new map of France. The work includes series of key figures, fact sheets on specific topics, maps indicating the new regional boundaries, and a panorama of the 272 regions comprising the 28 countries of the European Union.

All of France’s continental regions now have over 2 million inhabitants. Limousin, which used to have the second-lowest population (736,000), has become part of a region with a total of 5.9 million inhabitants. Between them and the two largest regions–i.e. Île-de-France (population 12 million in 2014) and the region resulting from the merging of Rhône-Alpes and Auvergne (7.8 million)–are two groups of comparably-sized regions: five intermediate ones, each with 5 to 6 million inhabitants, and five others, each with 2 to 4 million inhabitants. Corsica, the only non-continental metropolitan region, has only 323,000 inhabitants and remains autonomous.

By merging some of its regions, France has created territories whose population sizes are now fairly comparable to those of regions in neighbouring countries. The geographically vast eastern region made up of Alsace, Lorraine and Champagne-Ardennes (5.5 million inhabitants) now has a larger population than its neighbour Rhineland in Germany (4 million). The new northern region (Nord-Pas-de-Calais and Picardie), with 6 million inhabitants, is far larger that Belgium’s Wallonia (3.5 million) and about the same size as Flanders (6.3 million). The new map of France has therefore worked to reduce demographic spreads between regions in contiguous European countries. And with a total of 18 regions (overseas ones included), French territory has certainly not been carved up to the same extent as the United Kingdom or Germany, with 37 and 38 regions respectively.

European Union region GDP-per-inhabitant disparities remain substantial, though they have been receding since the early 2000s, mainly as a result of closing gaps with the Eastern European states admitted in 2004. One mechanical effect of the merged French regions is smaller interregional differences at both the demographic and economic levels. Merging fourteen regions into seven larger ones diminishes differences because averages change. Densely populated regions or regions with older populations have been merged with regions with much younger, sparser populations. Per-inhabitant GDP is not as different from one region to the next as it was prior to the reform. Some territorial disparities do subsist, however; there are still considerable geographic size differences. The populations in the regions of the north and east are not rising as fast as the French average and are still relatively young even after the merger. Conversely, the populations of the regions in the south and west are rising and ageing faster than the others.

Though the government had not yet selected the new French regional capitals when the document went to press, it is a pity that it contains no comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of the former administrative centres. Should the capital of the new Bourgogne Franche-Comté region be Besançon (134,000 residents in 2011) or Dijon? (238,000.) Should Montpellier (population 400,000) remain the administrative centre of Languedoc-Roussillon Midi-Pyrénées, or should Toulouse (892,000) take over that role? The Council of Ministers report of July 2015 indicates that the larger cities of the new regions were...