On the school map France is a hexagon between the Channel and the Mediterranean. The republic that governs that outline does not end there.
Five overseas departments lie outside Europe: Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean, French Guiana in South America, Réunion and Mayotte in the Indian Ocean. A child who goes to school in Cayenne or Saint-Denis goes to school in France. The euro applies, French law applies, and people vote for the same parliament.
France at a glance
Capital
Paris
Area
551,695 km²
Population
68.7 million
Official language(s)
French
Currency
Euro
Continent
Europe
Distinctive fact
Overseas land in three oceans
The hexagon is only one half
The mainland has eight land neighbours, including Germany, and an area of 551,695 square kilometres. That block is nicknamed the hexagon because the coasts and borders roughly make six sides. For school that is enough. For the state it is not.
The overseas departments are not colonies in law. They are French territorial units with the same citizenship. French Guiana borders Brazil and Suriname. Réunion lies east of Madagascar. The hexagon explains neither.
The hexagon is a classroom figure. The state is larger than the lesson.
— TerraTally · Countries desk
Three oceans, and the clock cannot keep up
Paris keeps Central European Time. On Réunion it is four hours later; in French Polynesia many hours earlier. A state that sits in three oceans cannot have a single local time. It has a political decision: these places belong to the republic, so their clocks belong to the state.
68.7 million people live in this state, most of them in the hexagon. The smaller overseas figures do not change the thesis. They only show that France does not take its size from the mainland's area, but from a refusal to confine the state to Europe.
A language that travelled farther than the border
French is the official language. On the mainland, Breton, Occitan, Alsatian and other regional languages live beside it, languages the state long suppressed. Overseas, creole languages are daily speech. The official language is the shared one, not the only one.
Tell France only as a European hexagon and people in Cayenne become a footnote. They are not. They carry the same passport and pay into the same treasury. The hexagon remains a useful figure. It is not the country.
Anyone who takes the hexagon as complete also forgets the collectivities that are not departments: New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Wallis and Futuna, Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon. They have other statutes and remain part of the French Republic. The school map has no room for them. The state does.
France is easy to draw as a hexagon and incomplete as soon as you draw the oceans too. The republic decided to be larger than its school map.