Country organisation

The Place de la Concorde in Paris was designed in the 18th century, and completed in the 19th, as a metaphor for the land of France. The central area is an ellipse whose foci are two fountains representing the country’s rivers and seas. Around the square are allegorical statues of the eight cities that mark the country’s boundaries: Lille, Rouen, Brest, Nantes, Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille, and Strasbourg.

The image evoked is that of Paris, the capital city, commanding a country watered by four great rivers (Seine, Loire, Garonne and Rhône) and surrounded by the North Sea, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and bounded to the East by the Rhine, on which lies Strasbourg, the border city of a province disputed between France and Germany.

Source : France 2008, La Documentation française