Photos

A long straight road running out of the village of Le Douhet, Captured close to the church.

Le Douhet is a French commune in the département of Charente-Maritime, Region Poitou-Charente, located about 10 kilometres to the North-East of Saintes, which in large part was founded by the Romans. The commune has a number of items of interest to the tourist besides the church, including a château, a Gallo-Roman aqueduct, a spring and some ancient quarries.

Some information about French communes taken from a very extensive article on the subject on the Free Dictionary website:

The commune is the lowest level of administrative division in the French Republic. The French word commune appeared in the 12th century, from Medieval Latin communia, meaning a small gathering of people sharing a common life, from Latin communis, things held in common.

French communes are roughly equivalent to incorporated municipalities/cities in the United States or Gemeinden in Germany. French communes have no exact equivalent in the United Kingdom, having a status somewhere in between that of English districts and civil parishes.

A French commune can be a city of 2 million inhabitants like Paris, a town of 10,000, or just a 10-person village.

As of March 1, 2007, there were 36,780 communes in France, 36,568 of them in metropolitan France and 212 of them overseas. This is considerably higher than in any other European country. This peculiarity is explained in detail in the history section below; briefly, French communes still largely reflect the division of France into villages or parishes at the time of the French Revolution more than two centuries ago.

Despite enormous differences in population, each of the communes of the French Republic possesses a mayor (maire) and a municipal council (conseil municipal) which manage the commune from the mairie (city hall), with exactly the same powers no matter the size of the commune (with the city of Paris as the only exception, where the city police are in the hands of the central state, not in the hands of the mayor of Paris). This uniformity of status is a clear legacy of the French Revolution, which wanted to do away with the local idiosyncrasies and tremendous differences of status that existed in the kingdom of France.