Jacques-Guillaume Thouret (1746-1794), a French député for the Third Estate for Rouen for the Estates-General (les Etats Généraux) of 1789, had a plan for rationalizing the Ancien Regime administrative structure and replacing the age-old provinces by geometrical new districts, the rectangular départements, as represented on the map.
Note however that according to von Thünen, the rational shape for states was not a rectangle but an hexagon.
Anyway, further rationalization is still on the government's agenda today.
Read the complete paper in the blog Strange Maps.
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