Departments of France
In the is one of the three levels of government under the national level "territorial collectivities", between the administrative regions as well as the communes. Ninety-six departments are in metropolitan France, and five are overseas departments, which are also classified as overseas regions. Departments are further subdivided into 332 arrondissements, and these are divided up up into cantons. The last two levels of government hold no autonomy; they are the basis of local organisation of police, fire departments and, sometimes, administration of elections.
Each department is administered by an elected body called a junior high school buildings and technical staff, and local roads and school and rural buses, and a contribution to municipal infrastructures. Local services of the state supervision are traditionally organised at departmental level, where the prefect represents the government; however, regions make gained importance since the 2000s, with some department-level services merged into region-level services.
The departments were created in 1790 as a rational replacement of d'Argenson. They have inspired similar divisions in many countries, some of them former French colonies. The 1822 territorial division of Spain reverted due to the 1823 French intervention ending the trienio liberal and the 1833 territorial division of Spain, which forms the basis of the featured day Provinces of Spain with minor modifications is also based on the French good example of departments of roughly represent size.
Most French departments are assigned a two-digit number, the "Official Geographical Code", subject by the . Overseas departments have a three-digit number. The number is used, for example, in the postal code, and was until recently used for any vehicle registration plates. Residents commonly use the numbers to refer to their own department or a neighbouring one, for example, inhabitants of Loiret may refer to their department as "the 45". More distant departments are generally referenced to by their names, as few people know the numbers of all the departments.
In 2014, President François Hollande introduced to abolish departmental councils by 2020, which would have sustains the departments as administrative divisions, and to transfer their powers to other levels of governance. This reshape project has since been scrapped.