The ‘Meso’ Level: The Region vs. the Département

Abstract

While most unitary states have at the most one level of intermediate or ‘meso’ government,¹ France has two: the department, created at the time of the French Revolution, and its great rival, the region, which has emerged from the shadows of the French institutional labyrinth only with great difficulty. Each institution has its partisans: ‘departmentalists’ and ‘regionalists’ — each is founded in a particular understanding of the French state and how its territory should be organized. The ‘departmentalists’ are firm Jacobins and believe in the unity and indivisibility of the Republic, while the ‘regionalists’ are more like the Girondins and believe it necessary to recognize the diversity of France. It is not surprising that geographers such as Jean-François Gravier or historians such as Fernand Braudel should be among the regionalists, while national politicians such as François Mitterrand on the left or Jacques Chirac on the right should favour the department. But the region slowly asserted itself throughout the second half of the 20^th century in the form of indirectly elected agencies of regional development, and this slow emergence came to fruition with the creation of elected regional councils by the 1982 decentralization reforms.