In France there are 36,569 communes, a commune being an ‘administrative unit’ (like a local council). Mostly these date from the Revolution, when an inspired bureaucrat decided that every hamlet, village and town should have  its own little ‘management team’. How many of these comunes would be worth visiting on your travels? Unfortunately I have no idea.

The problem for many of the communes is that they are too small to ‘blow their own trumpet’. They won’t all be ‘most beautiful villages’ (and often not beautiful at all) but many will have their own attraction(s) – for example many of the small communes near us have their own churches each typical of the architecture in the region.

The other challenge, from the ‘traveller’ point of view, is that they will often have no idea what the place is like where they will be visiting. OK, so you have a broad idea of the main destinations – but if I told you I had a gite in Rives, Lot-et-Garonne would you be excited? There’s a pretty high chance (like about 99.99 in 100) you haven’t heard of us and have no idea if you’d like to visit – or what there might be to explore in the neighbourhood.

So here’s the idea. I’ve set up a page on francethisway for each and every commune in France (what do you mean, I’ve got too much time on my hands!) with the long term goal – to ensure that everyone visiting France has a pretty good idea what to expect before they get here. See the index of all the communes in France.

At the moment the pages show a map with the exact location of the commune, places of interest to visit nearby, and also towns in the region that have hotels. Also other communes with the same postcode, since these will be very close by (our local town includes about 8 communes in the surrounding countryside).

These pages are now waiting for comments to be added, even better if accompanied by a photo taken in the commune.

I also have an ambitious plane for a great map of France showing a photo of every single commune – that would be a great image of the whole of France, perhaps I’ll make it the big project for 2010! It might need computer help – a real map with 10 centimetre photos of every commune in France would be about 16 metres across – fascinating but a bit too large. But on the computer it would be pretty easy to do – take a look at a photographic tour of France for the ‘beta’ version, then send us your photo to be added! I’ve got quite a lot of photos that we’ve taken ourselves or people have kindly sent in to us, which I will add as time permits.  But nothing like 36,000!

Likewise if you live in a French commune or know a commune or two, become part of the great ‘French commune project’. Look up your commune in our index of  all the communes in France and then leave a comment to tell us what it is really like….