Région française
This is an official administrative unit used by France. The région française is further divided into départements français. This latter unit is displayed on virtually all French patents.
These are naturally to be differentiated from the régions belges, which are also used only rarely within our data. The French word “région”, in its most general sense, does come up from time to time in our data. For instance, the publication Bracke, 1906, Les précipitations dans la région de Mons pertains to precipitation in the general area around Mons, Belgium, not to Wallonie, the administratively official “région belge” in which the city is located.
These are all to be disambiguated from “region” as used more generally, being that this latter will likely come up as we look into phenomena of the “social network”.