French rivers, lakes and seas, found on the map

North and West France5 on the map

Atlantic Ocean

What keeps this coast mild is the ocean rather than the latitude: Brest is further north than Montreal and its winters are about ten degrees warmer. The water arriving here has come up from the Gulf of Mexico, and the westerlies blowing over it are why the weather in France almost always arrives from the sea.

English Channel

The Channel is about 560 kilometers long and narrows to 34 at the Strait of Dover, which makes it the busiest shipping lane in the world. The French call it La Manche, the sleeve. It was dry land until roughly 8,000 years ago, and the ridge that dammed it gave way in a flood that cut the chalk gap the strait now runs through.

Loire

The Loire is 1,006 kilometers long and rises on the eastern side of the Massif Central, about 120 kilometers from the Mediterranean, then goes the other way. It is the last big river in western Europe with no dam on its main stem below Villerest, which is also why it is dangerous, shallow and full of moving sandbanks.

Marne

The Marne is about 514 kilometers long and gave its name to two battles. In September 1914 the French counterattack along it stopped the German advance about 50 kilometers from Paris and turned the war into a stalemate; the second battle in July 1918 was where the last German offensive was broken.

Seine

The Seine is about 777 kilometers long and falls so gently that it is navigable almost the whole way, which is why Paris is where it is. It flooded to 8.6 meters above its normal level in January 1910 and put much of the city under water for a week without a drop of rain falling on Paris itself.

East France6 on the map

Doubs

The Doubs runs about 453 kilometers to cover 90 kilometers of ground: it heads northeast, turns at the Swiss border, comes back southwest and ends up close to where it started. Besançon sits inside one of its loops, on a neck of land the citadel closes off, which is why Vauban fortified it the way he did.

Meuse

The Meuse is about 925 kilometers long and only the first third of it is French. Verdun stands on it, and the battle fought around that town from February to December 1916 was the longest of the First World War: roughly 300,000 dead over ten months on a front of about twenty kilometers.

Moselle

The Moselle is about 544 kilometers long and joins the Rhine at Koblenz, having passed through three countries to get there. The iron ore of Lorraine along its upper course is what made this valley the steel country of France, and what made it worth fighting over in 1870, 1914 and 1940.

Rhine

The Rhine is about 1,230 kilometers long and forms roughly 190 of them as the Franco-German border. It is the busiest waterway in Europe by freight. The Grand Canal d’Alsace, dug alongside it after 1928, took the navigation and most of the flow out of the river bed and left the Rhine forest behind it drying out.

Saône

The Saône falls only a few dozen meters over its last 200 kilometers, which makes it one of the most placid navigable rivers in Europe and a natural corridor: the whole route from the North Sea to the Mediterranean runs down it. The Rhône it joins at Lyon is the faster and colder of the two by a long way.

Also on the mapYonne

Southwest France6 on the map

Bay of Biscay

The bay is shallow at its edges and open to the whole Atlantic, so swell that has crossed three thousand kilometers of ocean piles up in it, which has made it a byword among sailors for bad weather. The waves off Nazaré and the surf at Hossegor and Biarritz are the same phenomenon seen from the beach.

Dordogne

The Dordogne is about 483 kilometers long and rises next to the Loire in the volcanic highlands. The limestone valley it cuts through the middle of its course is where most of the painted caves of the Vézère are, Lascaux among them, and where people have been living continuously since long before anybody was farming.

Garonne

The Garonne rises in Spain and runs about 647 kilometers. Below Bordeaux it joins the Dordogne to form the Gironde, the largest estuary in western Europe at some 635 square kilometers. Spring tides send a wave called the mascaret up it, which surfers ride for several kilometers at a time.

Gulf of Lion

The gulf is the shallow shelf off Languedoc, and the mistral blows down the Rhône valley and out across it hard enough and cold enough to sink surface water to the sea floor, which happens in only a handful of places in the world. That is one reason it is the richest fishing ground in the French Mediterranean.

Also on the mapTarn · Vienne

Southeast France and Corsica5 on the map

Durance

The Durance was called one of the three scourges of Provence, along with the mistral and the parliament, because it alternated between a trickle and a flood. It is now dammed at Serre-Ponçon, finished in 1960, whose reservoir holds well over a cubic kilometer and irrigates most of the farmland between it and the sea.

Lake Geneva

At about 580 square kilometers it is the largest lake in western Europe and about 310 meters deep. The border runs down the middle of it and leaves roughly forty percent on the French side. It is the Léman in French, and the Rhône runs straight through it, in at one end brown with Alpine silt and out at the other clear.

Mediterranean Sea

France has around 1,700 kilometers of Mediterranean coast once Corsica is counted. The sea has almost no tide, loses far more water to evaporation than its rivers put back, and is topped up by a permanent current running in through Gibraltar. It dried out almost completely about five million years ago and refilled in a matter of years.

Rhône

It rises at a glacier in Switzerland, passes through Lake Geneva and enters France as a fast, cold, high-volume river, which is why it carries more water to the Mediterranean than anything else in France and why there is a line of nuclear stations along it. Below Arles it splits into the two arms that make the Camargue.

Also on the mapLigurian Sea