Faire territoire : logiques de la dénomination des communes nouvelles françaises

Abstract

This paper aims at geographically analyze the names of the 778 new municipalities (“communes nouvelles”), created in France between 2012 and January 1, 2021. Public statistics data are used to elaborate an exploratory typology of the 2,517 historical municipalities that have merged into new local bodies of governements, discussing recurring schemes of construction in a first typology (consolidation, juxtaposition, innovation). A second typology explores the meaning of terms used in neotoponymy with assistance of regional press records. All data sets and reproducible code are made available according to reproducible research principles.This contribution is threefold. First, elaborating on a growing scientific literature on toponymy, we examine the relevance of such an analysis on communes nouvelles’s toponymy. We examine how actors dealt with the need to create a new toponymy? We show that elected officials had a stronger influence, than inhabitants or marketing experts. We then focus on how neotoponymy has revealed the balance of powers between territorialized groups. The different categories of neotoponymy used are not distributed evenly between mergers (two communes will prefer juxtaposition; confirmation of a central municipality is preferred for larger mergers). Results vary highly between urban centers and urban peripheries. Finally, we analyze how visibility and heritage toponymy, vs a more trivial and standardized use of topographic features are used for territorial marketing.

Keywords

• new municipality
• neotoponymy
• typology
• territorial marketing
• toponymy
• France