A Brief History of the French Regions, from Serge Antoine to François Hollande

In 2014 a new stage in decentralization was begun by the French government at the request of the President of the Republic. On 2 July, the National Assembly passed a bill on the “new territorial organization of the Republic”, which had already been approved by the Senate. This is the third strand in current decentralization measures, after the law modernizing territorial public action and strengthening metropolises (January 2014) and the law on the delimitation of regions (January 2015). The territorial reorganization envisaged (particularly the merging of regions) has ruffled a few feathers. However, reading this article republished here in “Futures of Yesteryear”, which reminds us how the current map of the regions was initially devised, it is clear that, though there are some obvious reasons for the current boundaries, there is also –as the architect of those boundaries Serge Antoine thought at the time– scope for development and realignments.