- Government and society
- Cultural life
- Major rulers of France
The commune, the smallest unit of democracy in France, dates to the parishes of the ancien régime in the years before the Revolution. Its modern structure dates from a law of 1884, which stipulates that communes have municipal councils that are to be elected for six years, include at least nine members, and be responsible for “the affairs of the commune.” The council administers public land, sets up public undertakings, votes on its own budget, and over recent years has played an increasing role in promoting local economic development. It elects a mayor and the mayor’s assistants. Supervision by the central government, once very tight, has been markedly reduced, especially since 1982.
The mayor is both the chief executive of the municipal council and the representative of the central government in the commune. The mayor is in charge of the municipal police and through them ensures public order, security, and health and guarantees the supervision of public places to prevent such things as fires, floods, and epidemics. The mayor also directs municipal employees, implements the budget, and is responsible for the registry office. French mayors are usually strong and often dominate the life of the commune. They are indeed important figures in the political life of the country.
French communes are typically quite small; there are more than 36,500 of them. Efforts have been made to group communes or to bring them closer to one another, but these have been only partly successful. In certain cities, such as Lyon and Lille, cooperative urban communities have been created to enable the joint management and planning of a range of municipal services, among them waste disposal, street cleaning, road building, and fire fighting. A similar approach has been adopted elsewhere, including rural areas, with the establishment of syndicats intercommunaux that allows services to be administered jointly by several communes. Moreover, since the 1999 law on Regional Planning and Sustainable Development, the communes within urban areas of more than 50,000 inhabitants have been encouraged to pool resources and responsibilities to promote joint development projects by means of a new form of administrative unit known as the communauté d’agglomération.
The overseas territories
The status of many of France’s overseas territories—vestiges of the French Empire—changed in the 1970s. Independence was proclaimed in 1975 by the Indian Ocean archipelago of the Comoros, with the exception of Mayotte (Mahoré) island, which chose to remain within French rule; in 1977 by Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa; and in 1980 by the Anglo-French Pacific Ocean condominium of the New Hebrides, under the name of Vanuatu. Mayotte was elevated to the status of territorial collectivity in 1976, and in North America the island territory of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon was elevated to the same status in 1985. France granted Mayotte, known as a departmental collectivity from 2001, the status of overseas département in 2011.
The only places retaining overseas territory status are French Polynesia (with its capital at Papeete on the island of Tahiti), New Caledonia, the Wallis and Futuna islands in the Pacific, and the Adélie Land claim in Antarctica. These territories have substantial autonomy except in matters reserved for metropolitan France, such as diplomacy and defense. They are governed through various but similar administrative structures, usually involving an elected council and a chief executive, but they are subject to the tutelage of a representative of the French Republic. A 1998 decision regarding New Caledonia envisaged the progressive transfer of political responsibilities to the island over a period of 15 to 20 years.
In France there are two types of jurisdictions: the judiciary that judges trials between private persons and punishes infringements of the penal law and an administrative judicial system that is responsible for settling lawsuits between public bodies, such as the state, local bodies, and public establishments, as well as private individuals.
|Official name||République Française (French Republic)|
|Form of government||republic with two legislative houses (Parliament; Senate , National Assembly )|
|Head of state||President: François Hollande|
|Head of government||Prime minister: Manuel Valls|
|Monetary unit||euro (€)|
|Population||(2013 est.) 63,853,000|
|Total area (sq mi)||210,026|
|Total area (sq km)||543,965|
|Urban-rural population||Urban: (2009) 84.6%|
Rural: (2009) 15.4%
|Life expectancy at birth||Male: (2012) 78.4 years|
Female: (2012) 84.8 years
|Literacy: percentage of population age 15 and over literate||Male: (2000–2004) 98.9%|
Female: (2000–2004) 98.7%
|GNI per capita (U.S.$)||(2012) 41,750|