French regions, found on the map

Every one on the map

Every place listed below can be asked in this game. Places you find in a passed round drop out of your remaining pool. Grouped into 5 learning regions, matching the rounds on the France guide. Regions with no places in this map’s selection are omitted.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 13 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

Île-de-France

Île-de-France is about 12,000 square kilometers, roughly two percent of the country, and holds about a fifth of the people in it. The name is old and means the island of France: the land inside the loop of the Seine, the Marne and the Oise. Every one of the eight departments inside it would be invisible on this map, which is why the region is the shape you are asked for.

Bretagne

Brittany was settled from across the Channel in the fifth and sixth centuries, and Breton is a Celtic language closer to Welsh and Cornish than to anything else spoken on this map. It was an independent duchy until 1532. Nantes, its historic capital, is not in it: the region drawn in 1956 left Loire-Atlantique out, and getting it back is still an argument.

Normandie

Normandy is named for the Norsemen: the king of the Franks granted the land around Rouen to a Viking leader in 911, and his descendant crossed the Channel the other way in 1066. The Allied landings of 6 June 1944 came ashore on about eighty kilometers of its coast, and Mont-Saint-Michel stands on the bay at its western edge.

Hauts-de-France

This is the closest France comes to England, and the Channel Tunnel runs fifty kilometers from a portal near Calais. It was the coal and textile corner of the country and lost both industries in the twentieth century. The Somme runs across it; the battle fought along that river between July and November 1916 cost more than a million casualties.

Grand Est

Alsace, Lorraine and Champagne were merged into one region in 2016. Alsace changed hands four times between 1871 and 1945, which is why the villages there look German and the department names do not. Strasbourg has been the seat of the European Parliament since 1979, for reasons that are entirely about that history.

Bourgogne-Franche-Comté

Burgundy in the fifteenth century was not a French province but a rival: its dukes ruled a belt of territory from the Alps to the North Sea and outspent the kings of France. What is left of that is a strip of vineyard on the Côte d’Or where a single walled plot can be its own appellation, and where the whole slope is about fifty kilometers long.

Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes

Mont Blanc stands on its eastern border at 4,806 meters, the highest point in western Europe. At the other end, the Chaîne des Puys near Clermont-Ferrand is a line of about eighty volcanic cones along a fault, the youngest of them roughly seven thousand years old. Lyon sits between the two where the Rhône meets the Saône.

Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur

Provence was the first part of Gaul the Romans took, and the word province is what its name comes from. The Rhône fans out into the Camargue at its western edge, a delta of salt marsh with its own white horses and its own flamingos, and the coast east of Marseille is the one the English started coming to for the winter in the 1830s.

Occitanie

The region is named after a language rather than a place. Occitan was the speech of the whole south, and the medieval names for the two halves of France, langue d’oc and langue d’oïl, are simply their two words for yes. The Canal du Midi crosses it: 240 kilometers finished in 1681, joining the Atlantic to the Mediterranean through the Garonne.

Nouvelle-Aquitaine

At about 84,000 square kilometers it is larger than Austria and larger than ten of the countries in the European Union. Behind its dunes is the Landes forest, roughly a million hectares of pine planted from the 1850s to hold the sand and drain the marsh, which makes it the largest planted forest in western Europe. Lascaux is in its eastern hills.

Centre-Val de Loire

This is the château valley. Chambord, begun in 1519 for François I, has 440 rooms and a double spiral staircase, and he stayed in it for a matter of weeks in his whole life. Orléans, at the top of the river’s bend, is where Joan of Arc broke the English siege in May 1429, which is the event that turned the Hundred Years’ War.

Pays de la Loire

It was assembled in 1956 out of pieces of Brittany, Anjou, Maine and Poitou, and it is the reason Nantes is not in Brittany. The Vendée, in its south, rose against the Republic in 1793 in a war that killed something like a fifth of the people living there. Le Mans, in its north, has run a twenty-four hour motor race since 1923.

Corse

Corsica is about 8,680 square kilometers and is mountainous almost everywhere: Monte Cinto reaches 2,706 meters, which is high for an island 80 kilometers wide. Genoa sold it to France in 1768. Napoleon was born in Ajaccio the following year, which is the margin by which the most famous Frenchman in history was born French.

How this one works

The other maps of France

Denmark has the same map in Danish regions. Spain has the same map in Spanish regions. United Kingdom has the same map in UK regions. Italy has the same map in Italian regions. All three together on the France atlas page, the country itself on the France guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.