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It's official: France finally gets its new map

The Local France
The Local France - [email protected]
It's official: France finally gets its new map
Photo: AFP

France has finally had its new administrative map officially recognized, after it was published on Thursday.

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It only took nine months.
 
The new administrative map was published on Thursday in the Journal Officiel, the bulletin giving details of laws and official announcements in France.
 
The move comes after France remapped its regions in January in an effort to reorganize local governments and whittle back France's famously voluminous bureaucracy. 
 
The reform shaved the number of French administrative regions on the mainland from 21 to 12 (or 13 when you include Corsica). 
 
Some of the new amalgams – such as Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and Bourgogne-Franche-Comté – opted for a simple merger of their former names.
 
Normandy was created by the simply move of combining Basse-Normandie and Haute-Normandy.
 
Others chose to start afresh with brand new names. 
 
 
 
Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine became Grand-Est, Languedoc-Roussillon and Midi-Pyrénées became Occitanie, Nord-Pas-de-Calais and Picardie were baptised as Hauts-de-France, and Nouvelle Aquitaine came from a fusion of Aquitaine, Limousin and Poitou-Charentes.
 
The names have come with some mockery, with one joker pointing out that with Hauts de Fance (which could translate as Upper France), and with the region Great East, a region in central France should have been called Middle Earth after the land in fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings.
 
Six regions - Brittany, Centre-Val de Loire, Corsica, Ile-de-France, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'azur, known as PACA and Pays de la Loire – did not undergo any changes to their boundaries. They will keep their existing names.
 
Confused? Here is the full list of France's 12 regions, together with their capitals, starting with the seven new regions. 
 
Grand-Est, Strasbourg
Normandy, Rouen
Occitanie, Toulouse
Hauts-de-France, Lille
Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Lyon
Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Bordeaux
Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, Dijon
 
And those that remain the same:
 
Brittany, Rennes
Centre-Val de Loire, Orléans
Corsica, Ajaccio
Ile-de-France, Paris
Provence-Alpes-Côte d'azur, Marseille
Pays de la Loire, Nantes

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