Département

This is a key administrative unit in France. This comes up quite often indeed in that on French original patent documents in particular it is often the only location data given, for inventors located in France. Nations are usually all the data given for inventors located outside of France while filing with the French patent office. Hungarian data, when available, is quite reliable in terms of giving us the city. British data, when available, will almost always give us the most precise address data. It is rare to have the “département” mentioned on non-French patents. These data are cross-referenced depending on the order in which we find the variously national patents filed by the inventor in question.

• Seine - This is key to our data. Though it is no longer an official French département, in this administrative sense, it was during the period on which we are focused, and in particular it was the département which included Paris. Largely for this reason it is often the initial location data we have on a great majority or at least plurality of French inventors.
• Ardennes
• Aveyron
• Calvados
• Gironde
• Hautes-Pyrénées
• Jura
• Nord
• Rhône
• Seine-et-Oise

There were and are many others of course.

The région is a greater administrative unit.