Communes of France

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(incl. overseas regions)

(incl. overseas departments)

Urban communities
Agglomeration communities
Commune communities
Syndicates of New Agglomeration

Associated communes
Municipal arrondissements

Overseas collectivities
Sui generis collectivity
Overseas country
Overseas territory
Clipperton Island

The commune is the lowest level of administrative division in the French Republic. French communes are roughly equivalent to incorporated municipalities or cities in the United States or Gemeinden in Germany. French communes have no exact equivalent in the United Kingdom, having a status somewhere in between that of English districts and civil parishes.

A French commune can be a city of two million inhabitants as in Paris, a town of ten thousand people, or just a ten-person hamlet.

General characteristics

The French word commune appeared in the 12th century, from Medieval Latin communia, meaning a small gathering of people sharing a common life; from Latin communis, things held in common.

Total number of communes

As of January 9, 2008, there were 36,781 communes in France, 36,569 of them in metropolitan France and 212 of them overseas.[1][2] This is a considerably higher total than that of any other European country. This peculiarity is explained in detail in the history section below; briefly, French communes still largely reflect the division of France into villages or parishes at the time of the French Revolution more than two centuries ago.

Map of the 36,569 communes of metropolitan France.

As a rule the whole territory of the French Republic is divided into communes, even uninhabited mountains or rain forests. This is unlike other countries such as the United States where unincorporated areas directly governed by a county or a higher authority can be found. There are only a few exceptions:

• COM (collectivité d'outre-mer, i.e. overseas collectivity) of Saint-Martin (33,102 inhabitants). It was previously a commune inside the Guadeloupe région. The commune structure was abolished when Saint-Martin became an overseas collectivity on February 22, 2007.
• COM of Wallis and Futuna (14,944 inhabitants), which still is divided according to the three traditional chiefdoms.
• COM of Saint-Barthélemy (6,852 inhabitants). It was previously a commune inside the Guadeloupe region. The commune structure was abolished when Saint-Barthélemy became an overseas collectivity on February 22, 2007.

Furthermore, two regions without permanent habitation have no comunes:

• TOM (territoire d'outre-mer, i.e. overseas territory) of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands (no permanent population, about 200 resident scientists, soldiers and meteorologists).
• Clipperton Island in the Pacific Ocean (uninhabited).

Surface area of a typical commune

In metropolitan France, the average area of a commune in 2004 is 14.88 km² (5.75 sq. miles, or 3,676 acres). The median area of metropolitan France's communes (as of 1999 census) is even smaller, at 10.73 km² (4.14 sq. miles, or 2,651 acres). The median area is a better measure of the area of a typical French commune.

This median area is smaller than that of most European countries. In Italy, the median area of communes (comuni) is 22 km² (8.5 sq. miles); in Belgium it is 40 km² (15.5 sq. miles); in Spain it is 35 km² (13.5 sq. miles); and in Germany, the majority of Länder have communes (Gemeinden) with a median area above 15 km² (5.8 sq. miles). Switzerland and the Länder of Rhineland-Palatinate, Schleswig-Holstein, and Thuringia in Germany were the only places in Europe where the communes had a smaller median area than in France.

The communes of France's overseas départements such as Réunion and French Guiana are large by French standards. They usually group into the same commune several villages or towns, often with sizeable distances between them. In Réunion, demographic expansion and sprawling urbanization have resulted in the administrative splitting of some communes.

Population of a typical commune

The median population of metropolitan France's communes as of the 1999 census was 380 inhabitants. Again this is a very small number, and here France stands absolutely apart in Europe, with the lowest communes' median population of all the European countries (communes in Switzerland or Rhineland-Palatinate may have a smaller surface area, as mentioned above, but they are more populated). This small median population of French communes can be compared with Italy where the median population of communes in 2001 was 2,343 inhabitants, Belgium where it was 11,265 inhabitants, or even Spain where it was 564 inhabitants.

The median population given here should not hide the fact that differences in size are extreme among French communes. As mentioned in the introduction, a commune can be a city of 2,000,000 inhabitants such as Paris, a town of 10,000 inhabitants, or just a hamlet of 10 inhabitants. What the median population tells us is that the vast majority of the French communes only have some two hundred inhabitants; but there also exists a small number of communes within much higher populations.

In metropolitan France, there are 20,982 communes with fewer than 500 inhabitants, which is 57.4% of the total number of communes. In these 20,982 communes there live only 4,638,000 inhabitants, or 7.7% of the total population of metropolitan France. In other words, only 7.7% of the French population live in 57.4% of the communes, while 92.3% of the population concentrate in just 42.6% of the French communes.

A typical example: Alsace

Alsace, which covers 8,280 km² of land, is divided into 904 communes, in a situation typical metropolitan France.

Alsace, with a land area of 8,280 km² (3,197 sq. miles), is the smallest region of metropolitan France, yet it is divided into no fewer than 904 communes This high number of communes is not special when compared to other regions of metropolitan France, but when examined at the European level it reveals the peculiar situation of French communes.

With 904 communes, Alsace has for example three times as many municipalities as the kingdom of Sweden whose large territory covering 449,964 km² (173,732 sq. miles) is divided into only 290 municipalities (kommuner). Alsace has more than double the number of municipalities in the Netherlands which, despite a population nine times larger and a land area four times larger than Alsace, is divided into only 441 municipalities (gemeenten).

Most of the Alsatian communes have aligned with the vast majority of their counterparts in other regions in their rejection of French laws pushing communes to merge with each other, whereas in most of the German states bordering Alsace, the municipalities (Gemeinden) have been merged in various waves since the 1960s, thus massively reducing their numbers.

In the state of Baden-Württemberg, just across the Rhine, the number of Gemeinden was reduced from 3,378 in 1968[4] to 1,108 as of Sept. 2007.[5] In comparison, the number of communes in Alsace was only reduced from 945 in 1971[6][7] (just before the Marcellin law enticing French communes to merge with each other was passed, see Current debate section below) to 904 as of Jan. 2007. As a result, the Alsace region, despite a land area only a fifth the size of Baden-Württemberg and a total population only a sixth the population of Baden-Württemberg, has almost as many municipalities as this German state. The small Alsace region has more than double the number of municipalities in the very large and very populated state of North Rhine-Westphalia (396 Gemeinden as of Sept. 2007) where municipalities mergers were carried out more extensively than in Baden-Württemberg, and nearly as many municipalities as in the also very large state of Lower Saxony (1,022 Gemeinden as of Sept. 2007).[5]

Status of the communes

Despite enormous differences in population, each of the communes of the French Republic possesses a mayor (maire) and a municipal council (conseil municipal) who jointly manage the commune from the mairie (city hall), with exactly the same powers no matter the size of the commune (with the city of Paris as the only exception, where the city police are in the hands of the central state, not in the hands of the mayor of Paris). This uniformity of status is a clear legacy of the French Revolution, which wanted to do away with the local idiosyncrasies and tremendous differences of status that existed in the kingdom of France.