In 1947 a young geographer in Jean Monnet's planning commission, Jean-François Gravier, published a best-selling book entitled Paris et le désert français, to highlight the economic disparities between the capital city and the rest of metropolitan France. At that time income per capita in the Seine department of Paris was 80 per cent higher than the national average, while in the poorest parts of France – Brittany, Corsica, the south west and outside the cities in the southern Alps – the average per capita income was less than 75 per cent of the national average. Even worse was the fact that levels of inequality had been increasing rather than declining in the interwar period. After the war the consensus was that it was the central state, with its national plans to promote economic development, that was best placed to correct such disparities. However, disillusionment with the direction that national planning had taken under de Gaulle, illustrated by the sporadic outbursts of violence in the poorest regions, most notably Brittany and Corsica, by groups demanding some devolution of power or complete independence from France, led the Socialist party to consider the question of devolution.

The contraction of large parts of the manufacturing sector from the late 1970s onwards, which was as much a regional as a national economic problem, since most of the industries in question were located in the north and northeast of the country, added urgency to the debate. Under legislation passed in 1982 the new Socialist government promised to introduce local democracy by devolving power from the central state. The question was how much power and to which level of subnational government.

At that time there were 36,500 municipalities (communes) in France and 100 departments. Rather than merge the municipalities, as Denmark and Sweden opted to do, the Socialist government added a new layer of subnational government, that of directly elected regional councils. By 2015, regional inequalities in metropolitan France were judged to have reached their lowest level for 100 years. Average incomes in the Seine department were 35 per cent above the national average, falling to 27 per cent after income tax.