Property talk:P2506

Referenced French cantons may exist both as older *administrative* cantons (part of an arrondissement before 2015), and as newer *electoral only* cantons (no longer part of an arrondissement but part of a département), currently under the same Wikidata entity if they have kept an identical name (most Wikipedia articles about these are merging the two cantonal entities on a single page.

In that case the canton has TWO INSEE codes: one before March 2015, another after March 2015 when all new French cantons were renumbered.

E.g. "Canton de Lillers" was coded 6233 by INSEE before March 2015 with the older administrative status, and is now coded 6231 since March 2015 with the newer electoral-only status.

The constraint "1 value only" is not correct: validity requires that the assigned property values should be qualified by "end date=March 2015" for the older status, and "start date=March 2015" with the new value.

The property "nature of" listing as "French canton" or as "former French canton" should also be qualified by the same dates (the two status never coexist legally at the same time, one replacing the other, with a newer eleectoral system, different legal definitions (newer cantons are no longer "administrative", they no longer have a "chef-lieu" (capital commune of the canton), no "seat", they only indicate a commune as having a "bureau centralisateur", which plays no administrative status (they were mandated proxies for relations between communes in the canton and their arrondissement), but only as proxies during the departemental elections to collect centralize the votes and communicate them not to their subprefecture of arrondissement, but diurectly with the prefecture of their department.

After that reform of French cantons (which are now only electoral circonscriptions), the municipalities no longer communicate administratively with their "chef-lieu de canton", but directly with their subprefecture of arrondissement, independantly of the new electoral canton(s) where they are located.

Note: in the two first rounds of cantonal elections (for general councils), the cantons have existed as administrative only units (they were initially introduced for the judiciary system), but they were frequently grouped because the elected "conseil général" in departments had a maximum of 30 elected seats: several cantons were part of the same electoral circonscription for elections. Cantons started then as administrative-only divisions and started to be used also for electoral purpose only in 1848.

Administrative cantons then lost recently their judiciary role in the middle of the 20th centuty with the reform of the judiciary system (many courts, notably for first instance, became managed at the "arrondissement" level, no longer at canton level).

We should be clear not to confuse the administrative role of cantons and the electoral role in departments: they have always be distinguished since their creation, but the roles were highly confused before 2015 and notably since the 5th Republic in 1959).

These roles are now distinguished clearly with a clear separation between the administrative organisation of the State ("déconcentration", frequently changing at each legislature or sometimes between two governements reorganizing the national Ministries), and the separate organisation of local collectivities initiated in the French Fifth Republic by a movement called "décentralisation" (taking more force since 1981 with régionalisation, where local collectivities got legistlative and regulatory roles transfered from the state).

Since 2015, "décentralisation" is getting even more force, the state abandoning many missions and transfering them to local collectivities (i.e. local assemblies in regions, departments, and communes, and their cooperation structures) along with increased budgetary transferts and transfers of tax collection (and reduced financial subsidizing by the state, only organizing some repartition of parts of the collected taxes, but letting local collectivities create their own receipt sources).

At the same rate, the state is reducing the old overhead of its pure hierarchic administration by reorganizing it ministry by ministry (health, social security, mandatory education, high-grade education and public research, culture, defense, European and foreign affairs, nationality and right of residence, police, justice, transport, business/industry, agriculture, environment), each one adopting its own administrative divisions. So today the prefectures and subprefectures (and their departmental arrondissements) or other "high commissariats" in overseas have a lower role: they act as proxies between the national governement and local collectivities to control them and regulate their operation. This prefectoral system also covers areas NOT governed by local collectivities (notably uninhabited areas, and the national maritime public domain along coasts or on small islands, or other protected natural areas in land, plus some national transport facilities, as well as all relations with foreign embassies and consulates, French military areas, and some critical energy installations). As well, the local collectivities (or their cooperation structures) create their own subdivision systems (sometimes bypassing the limits of communes and ignoring the electoral boundaries for departements, regions, or national elections). The state is "unitary", but local collectivies are not and they work more like states in a federation.

Verdy p (talk) 02:02, 3 October 2018 (UTC)Reply

Additional notes: the description above refers to the list of adminsitrative cantons BEFORE 2015, and so this property would only apply to them but not to the new electoral-only cantons AFTER 2015. The URL associated to the copde looks for the INSEE information site, but these links are now only valid for the NEW cantons (after 2015).

There's a deep mixup of incomaptible data, so we need also to have date qualifiers (end date=March 2015) and (start date=March 2015). That URL to INSEE is no longer valid for older cantons which have other references (and are still in use in lot of legal texts, according to the definitions they had when articles of laws or regulation were published; many of these articles of laws have not been rewritten (some have been rewritten to refer to lists of communes or referencing the new cantons, only when the rules applicable to the area need modification (so it's always important to look at the date of official publication of laws and regulations, and eventually in the laws themselves a possible date of application that applies the law only later; the default date of application is the day of official publication, not the date when the law or regulation was decided, often one or a few days before).

For that you need to look at LegiFrance, or in the repository of regulation decisions by prefectures or subprefectures (not all of them are in LegiFrance), or by ministries (most of them publish their decisions in the JORF, available in LegiFrance in plain text or sometimes just as PDF facsimiles with no OCR conversion to plain text). Some decisions made by local collectivities are also publisehd in their own official bulletins. Cantons however are defined byprefectures but published in the JORF (but not all past editions of the JORF are in LegiFrance, you sometimes need to look back and make extensive searches to see the list of former cantons, some of them were very old and the publication in JORF may be dated from the early 19th century during the French First Empire, and they are difficult to find! LegiFrance has not indexed all the past legislation that were still applicable before 2015 to French cantons). Verdy p (talk) 15:00, 3 October 2018 (UTC)Reply