https://foodimentary.com/2017/03/04/march-4th-is-national-pound-cake-day/
On this day:
Provinces of France
The Kingdom of France was organized into provinces until March 4, 1790, when the establishment of the department (French: département) system superseded provinces. The provinces of France were roughly equivalent to the historic counties of England. They came into their final form over the course of many hundreds of years, as many dozens of semi-independent fiefs and former independent countries came to be incorporated into the French royal domain. Because of the haphazard manner in which the provinces evolved, each had its own sets of feudal traditions, laws, taxation systems, courts, etc., and the system represented an impediment to effective administration of the entire country from Paris. During the early years of the French Revolution, in an attempt to centralize the administration of the whole country, and to remove the influence of the French nobility over the country, the entirety of the province system was abolished and replaced by the system of departments in use today.
In some cases, several modern regions or departments share names with the historic provinces, and their borders may cover roughly the same territory.
Departments of France
In the administrative divisions of France, the department (French: département, pronounced: [depaʁt(ə)mɑ̃]) is one of the three levels of government below the national level (“territorial collectivities”), between the administrative regions and the commune. There are 96 departments in metropolitan France and 5 overseas departments, which are also classified as regions. Departments are further subdivided into 334 arrondissements, themselves divided into cantons; the last two have no autonomy and are used for the organisation of police, fire departments and sometimes elections.
Each department is administered by an elected body called a departmental council (conseil départemental (sing.), conseils départementaux (plur.)). From 1800 to April 2015, they were called general councils (conseil général (sing.), conseils généraux (plur.)).[1] Each council has a president. Their main areas of responsibility include the management of a number of social and welfare allowances, of junior high school (collège) buildings and technical staff, and of local roads and school and rural buses, and a contribution to municipal infrastructures. Local services of the State administration are traditionally organised at departmental level, where the prefect represents the government; however, regions have gained importance in this regard since the 2000s, with some department-level services merged into region-level services.
The departments were created in 1791 as a rational replacement of Ancien Régime provinces with a view to strengthen national unity; the title “department” is used to mean a part of a larger whole. Almost all of them were named after physical geographical features (rivers, mountains or coasts) rather than after historical or cultural territories which could have their own loyalties. The division of France into departments was a project particularly identified with the French revolutionary leader the Abbé Sieyès, although it had already been frequently discussed and written about by many politicians and thinkers. The earliest known suggestion of it is from 1764 in the writings of d’Argenson. They have inspired similar divisions in many countries, some of them former French colonies.
Most French departments are assigned a two-digit number, the “Official Geographical Code”, allocated by the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques. Some overseas departments have a three-digit number. The number is used, for example, in the postal code, and was until recently used for all vehicle registration plates. While it is common for residents to use the numbers to refer to their own department or a neighbouring one, more distant departments are generally referred to by their names, as few people know the numbers of all the departments. For example, inhabitants of Loiret might refer to their department as “the 45”.
In 2014, President François Hollande proposed to abolish departmental councils by 2020, which would have maintained the departments as administrative divisions, and to transfer their powers to other levels of governance. This reform project has since been abandoned.
History
Main article: Territorial formation of France
The first French territorial departments were proposed in 1665 by Marc-René d’Argenson to serve as administrative areas purely for the Ponts et Chaussées (Bridges and Highways) infrastructure administration.
Before the French Revolution, France gained territory gradually through the annexation of a mosaic of independent entities. By the close of the Ancien Régime, it was organised into provinces. During the period of the Revolution, these were dissolved, partly in order to weaken old loyalties.
The modern departments, as all-purpose units of the government, were created on 4 March 1790 by the National Constituent Assembly to replace the provinces with what the Assembly deemed a more rational structure. Their boundaries served two purposes:
Boundaries were chosen to break up France’s historical regions in an attempt to erase cultural differences and build a more homogeneous nation.
Boundaries were set so that every settlement in the country was within a day’s ride of the capital of the department. This was a security measure, intended to keep the entire national territory under close control. This measure was directly inspired by the Great Terror, during which the government had lost control of many rural areas far from any centre of government.
The old nomenclature was carefully avoided in naming the new departments. Most were named after an area’s principal river or other physical features. Even Paris was in the department of Seine.
The number of departments, initially 83, was increased to 130 by 1809 with the territorial gains of the Republic and of the First French Empire (see Provinces of the Netherlands for the annexed Dutch departments). Following Napoleon’s defeats in 1814-1815, the Congress of Vienna returned France to its pre-war size; the number of departments was reduced to 86, as three of the original departments had been split. In 1860, France acquired the County of Nice and Savoy, which led to the creation of three new departments. Two were added from the new Savoyard territory, while the department of Alpes-Maritimes was created from Nice and a portion of the Var department. The 89 departments were given numbers based on their alphabetical order.
The department of Bas-Rhin and parts of Meurthe, Moselle, Vosges and Haut-Rhin were ceded to the German Empire in 1871, following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. A small part of Haut-Rhin remained French, however, and became known as the Territoire de Belfort, and the remaining parts of Meurthe and Moselle were merged into a new Meurthe-et-Moselle department. When France regained the ceded departments after World War I, the Territoire de Belfort was not reintegrated into Haut-Rhin. In 1922, it became France’s 90th department. Likewise, the Lorraine departments were not changed back to their original boundaries, and a new Moselle department was created in the regained territory, with slightly different boundaries from the pre-war department of the same name.
The reorganisation of Île-de-France (1968) and the division of Corsica (1975) added six more departments, raising the total to 96. Counting the five overseas departments (French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Réunion and Mayotte) the total comes to 101 departments. In 2011, the overseas collectivity of Mayotte became the 101st department.
General characteristics
Main article: Administrative divisions of France
See also: List of French departments by population
The departmental seat of government is known as the prefecture (préfecture) or chef-lieu de département and is generally a town of some importance roughly at the geographical centre of the department. This was determined according to the time taken to travel on horseback from the periphery of the department. The goal was for the prefecture to be accessible on horseback from any town in the department within 24 hours. The prefecture is not necessarily the largest city in the department: for instance, in Saône-et-Loire department the capital is Mâcon, but the largest city is Chalon-sur-Saône. Departments may be divided into arrondissements. The capital of an arrondissement is called a subprefecture (sous-préfecture) or chef-lieu d’arrondissement.
Each department is administered by a departmental council (conseil départemental), an assembly elected for six years by universal suffrage, with the president of the council as executive of the department. Before 1982, the executive of a department was the prefect (préfet) who represents the Government of France in each department and is appointed by the President of France. The prefect is assisted by one or more sub-prefects (sous-préfet) based in the subprefectures of the department.
The departments are further divided into communes, governed by municipal councils. As of 2013, there were 36,681 communes in France. In the overseas territories, some communes play a role at departmental level. Paris, the country’s capital city, is a commune as well as a department.
In continental France (metropolitan France, excluding Corsica), the median land area of a department is 5,965 km2 (2,303 sq mi), which is two-and-a-half times the median land area of the ceremonial counties of England and the preserved counties of Wales and slightly more than three-and-half times the median land area of a county of the United States. At the 2001 census, the median population of a department in continental France was 511,012 inhabitants, which is 21 times the median population of a U.S. county, but less than two-thirds of the median population of a ceremonial county of England and Wales. Most of the departments have an area of between 4,000 and 8,000 km², and a population between 320,000 and 1 million. The largest in area is Gironde (10,000 km²), while the smallest is the city of Paris (105 km²). The most populous is Nord (2,550,000) and the least populous is Lozère (74,000).
The departments are numbered: their two-digit numbers appear in postal codes, in INSEE codes (including “social security numbers”) and on vehicle number plates. Initially, the numbers corresponded to the alphabetical order of the names of the departments, but several changed their names, so the correspondence became less exact. There is no number 20, but 2A and 2B instead, for Corsica. Corsican postal codes for addresses in both departments do still start with 20. The two-digit code “98” is used by Monaco. Together with the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code FR, the numbers form the ISO 3166-2 country subdivision codes for the metropolitan departments. The overseas departments get three digits—e.g. 971 for Guadeloupe (see table below).
Originally, the relationship between the departments and the central government was left somewhat ambiguous. While citizens in each department elected their own officials, the local governments were subordinated to the central government, becoming instruments of national integration. By 1793, however, the revolutionary government had turned the departments into transmission belts for policies enacted in Paris. With few exceptions, the departments had this role until the early 1960s.
Party political preferences
These maps cannot be used as a useful resource of voter preferences, because Departmental Councils are elected on a two-round system, which drastically limits the chances of fringe parties, if they are not supported on one of the two rounds by a moderate party. After the 1992 election, the left had a majority in only 21 of the 100 departments; after the 2011 election, the left dominated 61 of the 100 departments. (Mayotte only became a department after the election.)
Born on this day:
1781 – Rebecca Gratz, American educator and philanthropist (d. 1869)
Rebecca Gratz (March 4, 1781 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania – August 27, 1869 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) was a preeminent Jewish American educator and philanthropist.
Gratz was the seventh of twelve children born to Miriam Simon and Michael Gratz. Her mother was the daughter of Joseph Simon, a preeminent Jewish merchant of Lancaster, while her father immigrated to America in 1752 from Langendorf, in German-speaking Silesia.[1] Michael, who was descended from a long line of respected rabbis, and Miriam were observant Jews and active members of Philadelphia’s first synagogue, Mikveh Israel.
In 1801, at the age of 20, Rebecca Gratz helped establish the Female Association for the Relief of Women and Children in Reduced Circumstances, which helped women whose families were suffering after the American Revolutionary War.[2] In 1815, after seeing the need for an institution for orphans in Philadelphia, she was among those instrumental in founding the Philadelphia Orphan Asylum.[1] Four years later, she was elected secretary of its Board. She continued to hold this office for forty years. Under Gratz’ auspices, a “Hebrew Sunday School” was started in 1838. Gratz became both its superintendent and president and assisted in developing its curriculum,[2] resigning in 1864.
Gratz was also one of the founding members of the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society, around November 1819. In 1850, she advocated in The Occident, over the signature A Daughter of Israel, the foundation of a Jewish foster home. Her advocacy was largely instrumental in the establishment of such a home in 1855.[2] Other organizations that came about due to her efforts were the Fuel Society and the Sewing Society.
Gratz is said to have been the model of Rebecca, the daughter of the Jewish merchant Isaac of York, who is the heroine in the novel Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott.[1] Scott’s attention had been drawn to Gratz’s character by Washington Irving, who was a close friend of the Gratz family.[3][4] The claim has been disputed, but it has also been well sustained in an article entitled “The Original of Rebecca in Ivanhoe”, which appeared in The Century Magazine, 1882, pp. 679–682.
Gratz never married. Among the marriage offers she received was one from a Gentile whom she loved but ultimately chose not to marry on account of her faith.
Her portrait was painted twice by the noted American artist Thomas Sully. One of those portraits, both owned by the Rosenbach Museum, is on display at the National Museum of American Jewish History.[5]
Shortly after Rebecca Gratz died in 1869, her brother, Hyman, founded and financed Gratz College, a teachers’ college in Philadelphia, in her memory.
Gratz is buried at Mikveh Israel Cemetery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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The Galesville Limited
Great! idea!
The Galesville Limited
