French Flanders

County of Flanders Comté de Flandre
862–1791
Flag Coat of arms
French Flanders in France (1789 borders)
Capital	Lille
History
Government
• Type	Province
King of West Francia / King of France
• 862–877	Charles II
• 1774–1791	Louis XVI
Governor of Flanders and Hainaut
• 1694–1711	Louis-François de Boufflers
• 1787–1791	Charles Eugène Gabriel de La Croix
History
• County created	862
• Disestablished	1791
Preceded by Succeeded by Kingdom of France Nord
Today part of	France

French Flanders (French: La Flandre française)^[1] is a part of the historical County of Flanders in present-day France where a dialect of Dutch was or still is traditionally spoken. The region lies in the modern-day region of Hauts-de-France and roughly corresponds to the arrondissements of Lille, Douai and Dunkirk on the northern border with Belgium. Together with French Hainaut and Cambrésis, it makes up the French Department of Nord.

Territorial changes due to the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659), including French Flanders

Geography

French Flanders is mostly flat marshlands in the coal-rich area just south of the North Sea. It consists of two regions:

1. French Westhoek to the northwest, lying between the river Lys and the North Sea, roughly the same area as the Arrondissement of Dunkirk;
2. Walloon Flanders (French: La Flandre wallonne; Dutch: Waals Vlaanderen), to the southeast, south of the Lys and now the Arrondissements of Lille and Douai.

History

Map of the new region, Hauts-de-France, with its five départements, colored according to the historical provinces as they existed until 1790. Apart from the territories mentioned above in the text, tiny amounts of Artois and Picardy also contributed to the Nord département.

  Picardy

  Île-de-France

  Artois

  French Flanders

  French Hainaut

  Cambrai

  Champagne

  Other

Once a part of ancient and medieval Francia from the inception of the Frankish kingdom (descended from the Empire of Charlemagne) under the Merovingian monarchs such as Clovis I, who was crowned at Tournai, Flanders gradually fell under the control of the English and then Spanish, becoming part of the Spanish Netherlands and retained by Spain at the end of the Eighty Years' War. When French national military power returned under the Bourbons with King Louis XIV "The Sun King" (1638–1715), a part of historically French Flanders was returned to the Kingdom.

Detailed Map of French Flanders

The region now called "French Flanders" was once part of the feudal state County of Flanders, then part of the Southern Netherlands. It was separated from the county (part of Habsburgs' Burgundian inheritance) in 1659 due to the Peace of the Pyrenees, which ended the French-Spanish conflict in the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), and other parts of the region were added in successive treaties in 1668 and 1678. The region was ceded to the Kingdom of France, and became part of the province of Flanders and Hainaut. The bulk became part of the modern French administrative Nord department, although some western parts of the region, which separated in 1237 and became the County of Artois before the cession to the French, are now part of Pas-de-Calais.

During World War II, 'French Flanders' referred to all of Nord-Pas de Calais, which was first attached to the military administration of German-occupied Belgium, then part of Belgien-Nordfrankreich under a Reichskommissar, and finally part of a theoretical Reichsgau of Flanders.

Rich in coal, facing the North Sea, bordered by usually powerful neighbors, French Flanders has been fought over numerous times in the thousand years between the Middle Ages and World War II.

Language

The traditional language of northern French Flanders (Westhoek), related to the Dutch language, is known as West Flemish, specifically, a subdialect known as French Flemish, spoken by around 20,000 daily speakers and 40,000 occasional users.^[2] The traditional language of Walloon Flanders (part of Romance Flanders) is Picard (and its dialects, such as Ch'ti [fr] or Rouchi). Many schools in this region teach Flemish to schoolchildren, partially in an effort to revive the language.^[3]

Culture

In 2008, the success of the movie Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis illuminated this part of France to a wide audience.

See also

• Walloon Flanders
• Burgundian Netherlands
• Frisians
• Greater Netherlands
• Seventeen Provinces
• Wallonia

Sources and references

• Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustré, 1952.
• French Flanders
• Ethnologue Report for West Flemish
• Flemish in France

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to French Flanders.

• The Extent of Flemish in France in 1970, contains language maps Archived 29 September 2007 at the Wayback Machine

This page was last edited on 15 March 2023, at 11:29