A Quick Overview of the History of the Savoie

La Province, in French, means “every part of the country that is not located within thirty miles of Paris.” Vivre en Province simply means “living outside the big city,” in a place where one cannot get a glimpse of the now-tentacular Paris suburbs’ concrete blocks.

During the pre-1789 monarchy, which the French call l’ancien régime, France was divided into provinces governed by intendants, a system of government initiated in the sixteenth century and formalized by Louis XIV a century later. Some provinces represented very definite ethnicities, such as the pure Celtic Bretons or the Alemannic Alsatians, who to this day remain, respectively, Breton- and Alemannic-German-speaking; others were ancient English possessions, still others had always been French, because they had been settled by the Franks. Provence, with the syllable en not in, which takes its name from the Latin and Roman Provincia Romana, was one of the French provinces. Often in the United States the two terms provençal and provincial are confused. The Savoie was never an ancien régime province of France, since it entered the French community for the first time, and for a period of about twenty years, in 1792, when the provinces were no longer designated administrative units, and permanently not until 1860.