Département

départements français as they existed in 1790

Carte des départements français en 1801

Découpage administratif de la France en 1812

départements français, at present, our taking changes, including matters of Alsace. Lorraine, and so forth, into account

The basics of this designation

The département français is now included within the région française, though this latter, as such, rarely comes up within our historic data. these administrative units being ruled by Title XII of France's 1958 Constitution and fourth part of the Code général des collectivités territoriales. See region for disambiguation. Communes, which are more or less equivalent to cities or towns, are included within départements.

• Liste des départements français de 1790
• Département français at present, our data often interfacing between these changes

The département français is the key French geographically administrative unit featured on original French patent documents, from from 1790 and through the 19th Century and the Great War and up to our present. It is often the only location data given, for inventors located in France. Nations are usually all the data given for inventors located outside of France while filing with the French patent office. Hungarian data, when available, is quite reliable in terms of giving us the city. British data, when available, will almost always give us the most precise address data. It is rare to have the “département” mentioned on non-French patents, though Britain does this from time to time. These data are cross-referenced depending on the order in which we find the variously national patents filed by the inventors in question.

The départemental and any other locational situation of any particular inventor may change over time, and no particular key city should replace départemental data, but be added, and tracked, in its variance from patent to patent. These départemental data, like American county data, have the value of what could be called “imperfect indicators”. That is, we understand that inventors occasionally file as if they are residing with other inventors with whom they are engaged in collaboration and so forth. So location data, tracked relative to each patent, ultimately goes along with other location data which becomes available, and is all to which we can viably attest, in terms of patent-referencing, which indicate locational and other patterned changes, with this sort of mid-level locational data playing a particular role in terms of our responsiveness to unsought data, that is, to our observation of patterned and nuanced developments which arise from the data itself.

“Département”, as applied to French colonial possessions, may lead to some ambiguity in terms of the administrative protocols.

Exhaustive list

• Alger, Algeria ; Patent FR-1907-383514 gives “Algérie (Alger)”
• Ain
• Aisne
• Allier
• Alpes-Maritimes
• Ardèche‎‎
• Ardennes
• Aube
• Aude
• Aveyron
• Basses-Alpes, this becoming Alpes-de-Haute-Provence in 1970
• Basses-Pyrénées, this being defunct since 10 October 1969, and now being Pyrénées-Atlantiques
• Bouches-du-Rhône, Marseille (or Marseilles) being a key city
• Calvados
• Cantal
• Charente
• Charente-Inférieure, this being Charente-Maritime since 4 September 1941
• Cher
• Constantine, our data treating it specifically as a département, within Algeria
• Corrèze
• Corse, 1790–1793, 1811–1976 ; there is now an Haute-Corse and a Corse-du-Sud. As always, when digging into locational data, via sources which are oriented to our historic focus, we have to bear in mind these changes in administrative designation.
• Côte-d'Or
• Côtes-du-Nord, which has been “Côtes-d'Armor” since 1990, known in Breton "Côtes d'Ahaot"
• Creuse
• Deux-Sèvres
• Dordogne
• Doubs
• Drôme
• Dyle (département), a short-lived département, named after the river Dyle, founded in 1795 by the Première République after the Révolution française and the annexation of the Austrian Low Countries. It disappeared after the end of the Premier Empire and the creation of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, of which it became a province in 1815.Its key city was Bruxelles. The changing of hands of this area to Belgium is another, later, matter, as is the precise mapping of the territorial extent of this département relative to the later Belgian designations.
• Essonne, the département from the 1968 dismemberment of now former département Seine-et-Oise and being now part of la grande couronne within région Île-de-France.
• Eure
• Eure-et-Loir
• Finistère
• Gard
• Gers‎
• Gironde
• Haute-Garonne
• Haute-Loire
• Haute-Marne, L'aéronautique et la Haute-Marne : essai chronologique, particularly an entry of 2010, giving a neat aeronautical chronology specific to this département
• Haute-Saône
• Haute-Savoie
• Haute-Vienne
• Hautes-Pyrénées
• Haut-Rhin
• Hauts-de-Seine, this being new, to the west of Paris, created in 1968 in the application of a law of 1964, during the divisions of Seine and Seine-et-Oise
• Hérault
• Ille-et-Vilaine
• Indre
• Indre-et-Loire
• Isère
• Jura, Lons-le-Saunier being the key commune
• Landes
• La Réunion
• Loir-et-Cher
• Loire
• Loire-Atlantique
• Loire-Inférieure
• Loiret
• Lot
• Lot-et-Garonne
• Lozère
• Manche
• Maine-et-Loire
• Marne
• Mayenne
• Meurthe (département 1790-1871), taking its name from the Meurthe river, the département being created by decree 27 January 1790 and ceasing to exist in 1871, with France's cession of the greater part of Alsace and the northeast of Lorraine to Germany, département Meurthe-et-Moselle being then constituted of the fragments of then former département Meurthe and the fragments of still continuing Moselle which were left to France
• Meurthe-et-Moselle
• Meuse
• Morbihan
• Moselle
• Nièvre
• Nord
• Oise
• Orne
• Pas-de-Calais
• Puy-de-Dôme
• Pyrénées-Orientales
• Rhône, Lyons being a key city
• Rome (département), this likely being unnecessary, for most of our purposes, having to do with the extent of France during the Napoleonic peak ; see département Rome on French Wikipedia.
• Sambre-et-Meuse (ancien département français), this having been a département français from 1 October 1795 until 1814, at which point it was re-incorporated into the Belgian "principauté de Liège".
• Saône-et-Loire
• Sarthe
• Savoie
• Seine - This is key to our data. Though it is no longer an official French département, in this administrative sense, it was during the period on which we are focused, and in particular it was the département which included Paris. Largely for this reason it is often the initial location data we have on a majority or at least an overwhelming plurality of French inventors. Val-de-Marne, to the southeast of Paris, was created 1 January 1968, from communes of former Seine and former Seine-et-Oise.
• Seine-et-Marne
• Seine-et-Oise - This surrounded département Seine, with the bulk being to the west of said département ; decided in 1964 and put in force in 1968, Seine-et-Oise was divided into new départements including YvelinesYvelines and Val-d'Oise ; a commune such as Saint-Gratien, for instance, is now located within Val-d'Oise, but was situated within Seine-et-Oise during the period we are studying.
• Seine-Inférieure, this later becoming Seine-Maritime in 1955
• Seine-Saint-Denis, this being new, largely to the northeast of Paris, created in 1968, during the divisions of Seine and Seine-et-Oise
• Somme
• Tarn
• Tarn-et-Garonne
• Territoire de Belfort, created in 1922
• Trasimène (département), this likely being unnecessary, for most of our purposes, having to do with the extent of France during the Napoleonic peak ; see département Trasimène on French Wikipedia.
• Val-d'Oise, this being new, but factoring into our data
• Var
• Vaucluse
• Vendée - This is quite rare in our data, but already in existence during the period on which we are focused, Boulogne, now a FORMER commune française, was a key city ; variants on Boulogne are still in existence, with no connexion to this département. La Roche-sur-Yon and Sables-d’Olonne are inventor-pertinent municipalities we have on hand which are located within this département.
• Vienne
• Vosges
• Yvelines, spoken of as les Yvelines, did not exist a such during our period of focus. It results from the dismemberment of Seine-et-Oise legislated 1964 and enforced 1968. So, Vélizy-Villacoublay, for instance, is now situated in what is now département français Yvelines, in the present région française Île-de-France.

There were and are many others of course. These have been entered as they arise from our perusal of original patent documents, with various particulars being verified via French Wikipedia.

Pre-Revolutionary Provinces and other designations

• See Territoires du royaume de France, these designations pertaining to the Ancien Régime, times and context dating from the end of the Middle Ages until 1789, and thus, on rare occasions,
• Rouergue enters our data in connection with Charles Carnus.
• Béarn is an historic region in southwestern France, having become a province française in 1620, becoming part of département français Basses-Pyrénées in 1790, and this has been Pyrénées-Atlantiques since 1969. The Aero Club of Béarn, for instance, nostalgically embraces this cultural identity.

Republican and Napoleonic expansion

• We are only touching this lightly, furthest extensions touching military history, and use of balloons, but likely little or no quantitative interest in terms of patents. Insofar as entries are made regarding the département français, they will be included within the exhaustive list above.

The retroactively applicable and sometimes culturally significant région française

• See région française, these, as official designations retroactively applicable to our finer degrees of location data, date generally from Constitution française du 4 octobre 1958. To highly varying degrees, they reflect broader cultural and historical identities. On some broad stroke level, these may at some point lead to illustration of the broadest of connecting patterns. We generally do include these on the location pages of the various départements français, in the event that we may want to flesh these broad views out, but between the manner in which the data is presented to us, and the incidence of isolated communes and so forth, the département français is clearly the most crucial structural aid in the observation of geographically-based clusterings of data.