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Subdivisions of the Kingdom of France

Under the Ancien Régime, the Kingdom of France was subdivided in multiple different ways (judicial, military, ecclesiastical, etc.) into several administrative units, until the National Constituent Assembly adopted a more uniform division into departments (départements) and districts in late 1789. The provinces continued to exist administratively until 21 September 1791. The country was subdivided ecclesiastically into dioceses, judicially into généralités, militarily into general governments. None of these entities was called "province" by their contemporaries. However, later interpretations confused the term of "general government" (a military division) with that of a cultural province, since the general governments often used the names and borders of a province. It was not always the case, which causes confusion as to the borders of some provinces. Today, the term "province" is used to name the resulting regional areas, which retain a cultural and linguistic identity. 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. In fact, the many lists and maps showing the provinces of France are neither perfectly superimposable nor exactly comparable. The fact remains, however, that the names of many of the territorial subdivisions of the Ancien Régime refer to Gallic civitates. Before the French Revolution, France was made up of territorial divisions resulting from history, geography and settlement, which differed according to the different powers that were exercised there, with different categories such as metropolises, dioceses, duchies, baronies, governments, states, elections, generalities, intendances, parliaments, countries, bailliages, seneschaussées, etc. Each of these categories took the name of a province, without covering the same geographical area. For example, the jurisdiction of the parlement d'Artois did not correspond to the same territory as the gouvernement d'Artois or the intendance d'Artois. The Constituent Assembly of 1789, having abolished all the rights and customs specific to the different regions (also known as privileges, such as those of the classes, nobility and clergy) during the night of 4 August, decided to establish a uniform division of the territory, the départements, and that this division would be the same for the different functions of the State: military, religious, fiscal, administrative, university, judicial, etc. 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. In some cases, modern regions share names with the historic provinces; their borders may cover roughly the same territory.

Gaul was occupied by fifty four main peoples and more than a hundred individual peoples (300 according to Flavius Josephus), some with very different customs. 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. Many of the smaller Gallic peoples were clients of their neighbors, and therefore dependent on them, sometimes paying them tribute. These confederations, the best known of which are those of the Arverni, Aedui and Armoricans, formed a kind of province before Roman reorganization. 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. These divisions were subsequently taken over and partly regrouped to form the generalités, then the départements, but replacing their former ethnic names (e. g. Poitou for the country of Pictons, Auvergne for the country of Arverni, Rouergue for the country of Ruteni, Périgord for country of Pétrocores, etc.) with a physical geographic name (giving respectively the départements of Vienne, Puy de Dôme, Aveyron, Dordogne, etc. ).

The Latin etymology of the term provincia gives us an idea of its original meaning: pro vincere, conquered in advance. Each of Gaul's Roman provinces had a precise legal definition, clearly defined boundaries and codified administrative structures. The number of provinces, their organization and boundaries varied widely over the course of five centuries, and each was headed by a proconsul or propraetor. In addition to Provincia (Provence), which was already Roman, Caesar divided Gaul into three provinces: Aquitanica, Celtica and Belgica. Over the course of four centuries of Roman control, the number of provinces increased from three to eleven, due to both the expansion of the empire and the reduction in size of the original provinces: 1st and 2nd Germania, 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th Lugdunensis, 1st and 2nd Aquitanica, 1st and 2nd Belgica, 1st and 2nd Narbonensis, Novempopulanie, Sequanorum, Viennensis, Alpes Cottiarum, Alpes Maritimae, Alpes Graiae et Poeninae. These provinces were subdivided into cities (civitas or civitates in the plural), the number of which rose from 33 to 113.

Metropolises are territories under the jurisdiction of a metropolitan archbishop, also known as provinces because they originate from the Roman provinces administered by the first bishops after the fall of the Roman Empire. They are made up of the dioceses which, by the same process, succeeded the ancient civitas or romanized Gallic cities, and which almost always retained the name of an ancient Gallic people, also given to the diocesan capital. Dioceses were made up of parishes, groups of inhabitants who could gather in the same church, whose names and boundaries have been preserved in the 36,000 French communes. Ecclesiastical districts, by virtue of their mainmortal status, are the oldest and most stable territorial circumscriptions, from late antiquity to the general reorganization of 1802. 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.

Depending on their laws, customs and languages, the territory of the kingdom is divided into countries of written law (roughly south of a line from La Rochelle to Geneva) and countries of customary law (north of the same line). Each of these groups includes several parliaments, which are appeal courts whose jurisdictions form as many judicial provinces, and to which belong all the royal jurisdictions, baillages (bailiwicks) and seneschaussées (seneschalties). They are made up of several countries, each corresponding to a general custom, or even a particular custom corresponding to former vici that have retained local customs. For example, the seneschalty of Quercy is made up of five secondary bailiwicks, corresponding to five former vigueries.

Some authors attempt to equate the concept of province with that of generality. The concepts do occasionally coincide, when the extent of a generality more or less overlaps that of an older territorial entity, but they are not synonymous.