British Army
The British Army is the principal land warfare force of the United Kingdom, a part of British Armed Forces. As of 2018, the British Army comprises just over 81,500 trained regular personnel and just over 27,000 trained reserve personnel; the modern British Army traces back to 1707, with an antecedent in the English Army, created during the Restoration in 1660. The term British Army was adopted in 1707 after the Acts of Union between Scotland. Although all members of the British Army are expected to swear allegiance to Elizabeth II as their commander-in-chief, the Bill of Rights of 1689 requires parliamentary consent for the Crown to maintain a peacetime standing army. Therefore, Parliament approves the army by passing an Armed Forces Act at least once every five years; the army is commanded by the Chief of the General Staff. The British Army has seen action in major wars between the world's great powers, including the Seven Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War and the First and Second World Wars.
Britain's victories in these decisive wars allowed it to influence world events and establish itself as one of the world's leading military and economic powers. Since the end of the Cold War, the British Army has been deployed to a number of conflict zones as part of an expeditionary force, a coalition force or part of a United Nations peacekeeping operation; until the English Civil War, England never had a standing army with professional officers and careerist corporals and sergeants. It relied on militia organized by local officials, or private forces mobilized by the nobility, or on hired mercenaries from Europe. From the Middle Ages until the English Civil War, when a foreign expeditionary force was needed, such as the one that Henry V of England took to France and that fought at the Battle of Agincourt, the army, a professional one, was raised for the duration of the expedition. During the English Civil War, the members of the Long Parliament realised that the use of county militia organised into regional associations commanded by local members of parliament, while more than able to hold their own in the regions which Parliamentarians controlled, were unlikely to win the war.
So Parliament initiated two actions. The Self-denying Ordinance, with the notable exception of Oliver Cromwell, forbade members of parliament from serving as officers in the Parliamentary armies; this created a distinction between the civilians in Parliament, who tended to be Presbyterian and conciliatory to the Royalists in nature, a corps of professional officers, who tended to Independent politics, to whom they reported. The second action was legislation for the creation of a Parliamentary-funded army, commanded by Lord General Thomas Fairfax, which became known as the New Model Army. While this proved to be a war winning formula, the New Model Army, being organized and politically active, went on to dominate the politics of the Interregnum and by 1660 was disliked; the New Model Army was paid off and disbanded at the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. For many decades the excesses of the New Model Army under the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell was a horror story and the Whig element recoiled from allowing a standing army.
The militia acts of 1661 and 1662 prevented local authorities from calling up militia and oppressing their own local opponents. Calling up the militia was possible only if the king and local elites agreed to do so. Charles II and his Cavalier supporters favoured a new army under royal control; the first English Army regiments, including elements of the disbanded New Model Army, were formed between November 1660 and January 1661 and became a standing military force for Britain. The Royal Scots and Irish Armies were financed by the parliaments of Ireland. Parliamentary control was established by the Bill of Rights 1689 and Claim of Right Act 1689, although the monarch continued to influence aspects of army administration until at least the end of the nineteenth century. After the Restoration Charles II pulled together four regiments of infantry and cavalry, calling them his guards, at a cost of £122,000 from his general budget; this became the foundation of the permanent English Army. By 1685 it had grown to 7,500 soldiers in marching regiments, 1,400 men permanently stationed in garrisons.
A rebellion in 1685 allowed James II to raise the forces to 20,000 men. There were 37,000 in 1678. After William and Mary's accession to the throne England involved itself in the War of the Grand Alliance to prevent a French invasion restoring James II. In 1689, William III expanded the army to 74,000, to 94,000 in 1694. Parliament was nervous, reduced the cadre to 7000 in 1697. Scotland and Ireland had theoretically separate military establishments, but they were unofficially merged with the English force. By the time of the 1707 Acts of Union, many regiments of the English and Scottish armies were combined under one operational command and stationed in the Netherlands for the War of the Spanish Succession. Although all the regiments were now part of the new British military establishment, they remained under the old operational-command structure and retained much of the institutional ethos and traditions of the standing armies created shortly after the restoration of the monarchy 47 years earlier.
The order of seniority of the most-senior British Army line regiments is based on that of the English army
Pays de Caux
The Pays de Caux is an area in Normandy occupying the greater part of the French département of Seine Maritime in Normandy. It is a chalk plateau to the north of the Seine Estuary and extending to the cliffs on the English Channel coast. In the east, it borders on the Pays de Bray. Cauchois is a notable dialect of the Norman language; the Pays de Caux is one of the remaining strongholds of the Norman language outside the Cotentin. The principal settlements are Le Dieppe, Fécamp, Yvetot and Étretat. In the Norman language caux means lime, calcium carbonate. In French, for comparison, the word is chaux; the name of the neighbouring Pays de Bray comes from an Old French word of Gaulish origin for mud. They appear to be so named. In fact, according to something common in the former Gaul, the name derives from the Celtic tribe that lived here in ancient time: the Caletes and this land was their territory, they are sometimes considered as Armoricans. The word Caletes shifted to *Caltes *Calz, Cauz, to be spelled "Caux" in modern time.
The Pays de Caux is a plateau of Upper Cretaceous chalk, like that which forms the North and South Downs in southern England. Its surface is an undulating plateau but the seaward side has been eroded by the waves so that the coast is formed of high white cliffs in which the small valleys which inland, form the undulations, are truncated leaving what are known locally as valleuses, steep-sided notches in the face of the cliff, they are more or less cut and some form the sites of small towns such as Étretat. The formations left. See the photograph where Étretat lies to the right, in the valleuse beyond the first ridge; the main towns in the north are on Fécamp and Étretat. Dieppe, is towards the margin of the region, lying as it does on the same geological fault as formed the Pays de Bray; this fault gave rise to the deep harbour. The towns on the plateau are small. Of these, the larger, such as Yvetot and Lillebonne are towards the south, on the Rouen-Le Havre axis; the site of Le Havre was once of the Pays de Caux but the town has developed into an entity with a separate nature.
The population density of the Pays de Caux is a little above the French average having developed fisheries, on the coast, flax growing and weaving, on the plateau, as traditional industries. The estuarine ports to the south developed trade up-river towards Rouen, once hostilities between the Normans and the French had been settled, with Paris. In more recent times, urbanization has spread from Le Havre and more still, from the new industrial polder in the Seine Estuary; the plateau's exposure to the winds of the sea may account for one of the features of the rural architecture of the region. Pays de Bray to the East Vexin normand to the South-east Lower Seine valley to the South Julius Caesar’s account of his military campaigns gives details of the Caletes ancestors of the Cauchois Rescue archaeology undertaken on the line of the A29 autoroute revealed several Gallo-Roman villas. One of the most important is that of Sainte-Marguerite-sur-Mer, on the coast to the west of Dieppe; the archaeologists found a complex of several rooms, organised around a square court.
Several of the rooms had been furnished with mosaics. To the north, the baths and other rooms were heated by hypocausts; the materials used were pisé, cob and timber framing, typical materials of Normandy’s building tradition. Lillebonne is on the site of the main town of the Gaulish tribe of the region; the Gallo-Roman town was established with the name Juliobona, under Caesar Augustus and is famous for its Roman theatre. According to a common use in Roman Gaul, the bona was dedicated to the Roman emperor, like Augustodunum, Augustonemetum or Augustodurum, etc; the phonetic evolution from the element Julio- to Lille- can be explained by the analogy with the French word for island: île, with the article agglutination l' = the, that makes sense with the word bona > bonne, which means "good" in French, so "l'île bonne" = the good island. Their original main oppidum could have been Caudebec-en-Caux or Fécamp, according to the archeological excavations and the numerous Gaulish artefacts, that were discovered in both towns.
In the Merovingian period, the Pays de Caux became distinct from Talou: the ancient city of the Caletes separated into entities or ‘countries’ in the sense of the Latin pagus. From the creation of the county of Rouen and of the Duchy of Normandy in 911, the Vikings settled a great number of people in the region and left an enduring legacy in the Cauchois dialect but in the ethnic makeup of the Cauchois Normans. A manoir is in principle, the residence of a seigniorial lord though, in practice, the term now includes country houses of the gentry; as a ru
Estuary
An estuary is a enclosed coastal body of brackish water with one or more rivers or streams flowing into it, with a free connection to the open sea. Estuaries form a transition zone between river environments and maritime environments, they are subject both to marine influences—such as tides and the influx of saline water—and to riverine influences—such as flows of fresh water and sediment. The mixing of sea water and fresh water provide high levels of nutrients both in the water column and in sediment, making estuaries among the most productive natural habitats in the world. Most existing estuaries formed during the Holocene epoch with the flooding of river-eroded or glacially scoured valleys when the sea level began to rise about 10,000–12,000 years ago. Estuaries are classified according to their geomorphological features or to water-circulation patterns, they can have many different names, such as bays, lagoons, inlets, or sounds, although some of these water bodies do not meet the above definition of an estuary and may be saline.
The banks of many estuaries are amongst the most populated areas of the world, with about 60% of the world's population living along estuaries and the coast. As a result, many estuaries suffer degradation from a variety of factors including: sedimentation from soil erosion from deforestation and other poor farming practices; the word "estuary" is derived from the Latin word aestuarium meaning tidal inlet of the sea, which in itself is derived from the term aestus, meaning tide. There have been many definitions proposed to describe an estuary; the most accepted definition is: "a semi-enclosed coastal body of water, which has a free connection with the open sea, within which sea water is measurably diluted with freshwater derived from land drainage". However, this definition excludes a number of coastal water bodies such as coastal lagoons and brackish seas. A more comprehensive definition of an estuary is "a semi-enclosed body of water connected to the sea as far as the tidal limit or the salt intrusion limit and receiving freshwater runoff.
This broad definition includes fjords, river mouths, tidal creeks. An estuary is a dynamic ecosystem having a connection to the open sea through which the sea water enters with the rhythm of the tides; the sea water entering the estuary streams. The pattern of dilution varies between different estuaries and depends on the volume of fresh water, the tidal range, the extent of evaporation of the water in the estuary. Drowned river valleys are known as coastal plain estuaries. In places where the sea level is rising relative to the land, sea water progressively penetrates into river valleys and the topography of the estuary remains similar to that of a river valley; this is the most common type of estuary in temperate climates. Well-studied estuaries include the Severn Estuary in the United Kingdom and the Ems Dollard along the Dutch-German border; the width-to-depth ratio of these estuaries is large, appearing wedge-shaped in the inner part and broadening and deepening seaward. Water depths exceed 30 m.
Examples of this type of estuary in the U. S. are the Hudson River, Chesapeake Bay, Delaware Bay along the Mid-Atlantic coast, Galveston Bay and Tampa Bay along the Gulf Coast. Bar-built estuaries are found in place where the deposition of sediment has kept pace with rising sea level so that the estuaries are shallow and separated from the sea by sand spits or barrier islands, they are common in tropical and subtropical locations. These estuaries are semi-isolated from ocean waters by barrier beaches. Formation of barrier beaches encloses the estuary, with only narrow inlets allowing contact with the ocean waters. Bar-built estuaries develop on sloping plains located along tectonically stable edges of continents and marginal sea coasts, they are extensive along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the U. S. in areas with active coastal deposition of sediments and where tidal ranges are less than 4 m. The barrier beaches that enclose bar-built estuaries have been developed in several ways: building up of offshore bars by wave action, in which sand from the sea floor is deposited in elongated bars parallel to the shoreline, reworking of sediment discharge from rivers by wave and wind action into beaches, overwash flats, dunes, engulfment of mainland beach ridges due to sea level rise and resulting in the breaching of the ridges and flooding of the coastal lowlands, forming shallow lagoons, elongation of barrier spits from the erosion of headlands due to the action of longshore currents, with the spits growing in the direction of the littoral drift.
Barrier beaches form in shallow water and are parallel to the shoreline, resulting in long, narrow estuaries. The average water depth is less than 5 m, exceeds 10 m. Examples of bar-built estuaries are Barnegat Bay, New Jersey. Fjords were formed where pleistocene glaciers deepened and widened existing river valleys so that they become U-shaped in cross s
Provinces of France
The Kingdom of France was organized into provinces until March 4, 1790, when the establishment of the department system superseded provinces. The provinces of France were equivalent to the historic counties of England, they came into their final form over the course of many hundreds of years, as many dozens of semi-independent fiefs and former independent countries came to be incorporated into the French royal domain. Because of the haphazard manner in which the provinces evolved, each had its own sets of feudal traditions, taxation systems, etc. and the system represented an impediment to effective administration of the entire country from Paris. During the early years of the French Revolution, in an attempt to centralize the administration of the whole country, to remove the influence of the French nobility over the country, the entirety of the province system was abolished and replaced by the system of departments in use today. In some cases, several modern regions or departments share names with the historic provinces, their borders may cover the same territory.
The list below shows the major provinces of France at the time of their dissolution during the French Revolution. Capital cities are shown in parentheses. Bold indicates a city, the seat of a judicial and quasi-legislative body called either a parlement or a conseil souverain. In some cases, this body met in a different city from the capital. Île-de-France Berry Orléanais Normandy Languedoc Lyonnais Dauphiné Champagne Aunis Saintonge Poitou Guyenne and Gascony Burgundy Picardy Anjou Provence Angoumois Bourbonnais Marche Brittany Maine Touraine Limousin Foix Auvergne Béarn Alsace Artois Roussillon Flanders and Hainaut Franche-Comté Lorraine.
Neufchâtel-en-Bray
Neufchâtel-en-Bray is a commune situated in the Seine-Maritime department of the Normandy Region, northern France. The cheese of the same name is made in the area. Neufchâtel is a Brayonne commune which traversed by the Béthune River and its tributary the Philbert. Neufchâtel is situated about 10 miles from Londinières and Saint-Saëns, about 12 miles from Forges-les-Eaux, about 15 miles from Buchy, about 19 miles from Aumale, about 20 miles from Blangy-sur-Bresle and about 25 miles from Dieppe; the city is located near the intersection of Autoroute A28 which runs from Rouen to Abbeville and A29. Old forms: Drincurt, Druoncurt 1152, Driencourt was the most common form distorted as Lincourt, an old toponym that disappeared by the 15th century, it signifies “Drugo's farm”, the name of a Germanic person, always declined in the oblique case for names ending in -court and found in the patronym Druon. “Driencourt” has a homonym with Driencourt. Names ending in -court predate the formation of the Duchy of Normandy and correspond with the Frankish expansion.
The old parish of Nogent, from the Celtic Novientum “new establishment” has been linked to Neufchâtel. It received its current name from a castle built there by Henry Beauclerc in the 12th century. At that time, it began to be called by its Norman name Neufcastel and was referred to by both names until the 15th century. A French form replaces a dialectal form as is noted with large towns. North of the Joret line, the form of the name would be Neufcastel, like the small village of Radicatel. On the other hand, Bourg-Achard or Pont-de-l'Arche underwent the same Francization: they are Bourg-Acard and Pont-de-l'Arque, it is the former capital of a former fortress town. The fortress was dismantled in 1596; the city was sieged and destroyed several times during the wars between the 12th and 16th centuries. In 1463, Louis XI of France installed his chancery. Many letters and administrative acts refer to this place, he stayed here for a few months in 1463 and one month in 1464 with his wife Queen Charlotte of Savoy.
In July 1472, after the Siege of Beauvais, Charles le Téméraire destroyed the city. It was the seat of the district from 1790 to 1795; the town was occupied by the Prussian army during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. The Arrondissement of Neufchâtel was dissolved following the Poincaré Decree; the downtown area was bombarded on 19 and 24 May 1940 and again on Wednesday 7 June 1940 during the Battle of France in World War II, causing a fire that burnt for several days, destroying most of it. During the reconstruction, a political administration had been created by Robert Auzelle, which rebuilt the mayor's office, tax office and theater in the same place and style as before. On 9 April 1962, Neufchâtel changed its name to Neufchâtel-en-Bray. In 2011, the commune had 4,836 inhabitants; the population change has been recorded in censuses that have been conducted since 1793. At the start of the 21st century, communes with less than 10,000 people have had a census every five years, while larger communes has population sampling done annually.
Gervais Dairy Danone Cheese manufacturing Branch office of the Rouen Chamber of Commerce and IndustryIn terms of employment, the city is marked by a preponderance of public sector jobs. As of 2010, the hospital had the high school, the commune and the middle school; the private sector is represented by the Leclerc Center and the industrial zone enterprises. A former arrondissement seat, Neufchâtel-en-Bray has a number of public amenities, including a local hospital and a public secondary school divided into three departments; until 2010, there was victims of the Dati reform. The community lost a station on the Paris-Saint-Lazarre – Dieppe line when the line from Serqueux and Dieppe was removed. Today, Neufchâtel-en-Bray is served by Transport Express Régional Upper Normandy buses connecting Dieppe to Gare de Gisors via Serqueux; the Neufchâtel-en-Bray station, rebuilt after World War II in a local style, is now a venue while the railroad bed is a hiking trail. The town has sports facilities and renovated cinema and theater.
A supermarket and two hard-discounters are located in the Grand Flandre zone and another hard-discounter is located downtown. Eglise Notre Dame, a church built in the 12th, 13th, 15th centuries. Mathon-Durand Museum, a museum of art and culture created in 1823, housed in a building from the early 17th century with a facade in the Henry IV style with decorative half timbering set in masonry. Jehan de Launay: Captain of the Kortrijk garrison in 1380 and captain of the Ghent rebels in 1381. Commanding several thousand men, he was defeated at the Battle of Nevele on 13 May 1381 by the troops of Louis of Male, Count of Flanders. After that defeat, he found refuge in the Bray Country in the lands of his materna
German military administration in occupied France during World War II
The Military Administration in France was an interim occupation authority established by Nazi Germany during World War II to administer the occupied zone in areas of northern and western France. This so-called zone occupée was renamed zone nord in November 1942, when the unoccupied zone in the south known as zone libre was occupied and renamed zone sud, its role in France was governed by the conditions set by the Second Armistice at Compiègne after the blitzkrieg success of the Wehrmacht leading to the Fall of France. For instance, France agreed that its soldiers would remain prisoners of war until the cessation of all hostilities. Replacing the French Third Republic that had dissolved during France's defeat was the "French State", with its sovereignty and authority limited to the free zone; as Paris was located in the occupied zone, its government was seated in the spa town of Vichy in Auvergne, therefore it was more known as Vichy France. While the Vichy government was nominally in charge of all of France, the military administration in the occupied zone was a de facto Nazi dictatorship.
Its rule was extended to the free zone when it was invaded by Germany and Italy during Case Anton on 11 November 1942 in response to Operation Torch, the Allied landings in French North Africa on 8 November 1942. The Vichy government remained in existence though its authority was now curtailed; the military administration in France ended with the Liberation of France after the Normandy and Provence landings. It formally existed from May 1940 to December 1944, though most of its territory had been liberated by the Allies by the end of summer 1944. Alsace-Lorraine, annexed after the Franco-Prussian war in 1871 by the German Empire and returned to France after the First World War, was re-annexed by the Third Reich The departments of Nord and Pas-de-Calais were attached to the military administration in Belgium and Northern France, responsible for civilian affairs in the 20-kilometre wide zone interdite along the Atlantic coast. Another "forbidden zone" were areas in north-eastern France, corresponding to Lorraine and about half each of Franche-Comté, Champagne and Picardie.
War refugees were prohibited from returning to their homes, it was intended for German settlers and annexation in the coming Nazi New Order. The occupied zone consisted of the rest of northern and western France, including the two forbidden zones; the southern part of France, except for the western half of Aquitaine along the Atlantic coast, became the zone libre, where the Vichy regime remained sovereign as an independent state, though under heavy German influence due to the restrictions of the Armistice and economical dependency on Germany. It constituted a land area of 246,618 square kilometres 45 percent of France, included 33 percent of the total French labor force; the demarcation line between the free zone and the occupied zone was a de facto border, necessitating special authorisation and a laissez-passer from the German authorities to cross. These restrictions remained in place after Vichy was occupied and the zone renamed zone sud, placed under military administration in November 1942.
The Italian occupation zone consisted of small areas along the Alps border, a 50-kilometre demilitarised zone along the same. It was expanded to all territory on the left bank of the Rhône river after its invasion together with Germany of Vichy France on 11 November 1942, except for areas around Lyon and Marseille, which were added to Germany's zone sud, Corsica; the Italian occupation zone was occupied by Germany and added to the zone sud after Italy's surrender in September 1943, except for Corsica, liberated by the landings of Free French forces and local Italian troops that had switched sides to the Allies. After Germany and France agreed on an armistice following the defeats of May and June, Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and General Charles Huntzinger, representatives of the Third Reich and of the French government of Marshal Philippe Pétain signed it on 22 June 1940 at the Rethondes clearing in Compiègne Forest; as it was done at the same place and in the same railroad carriage where the armistice ending the First World War when Germany surrendered, it is known as the Second Compiègne armistice.
France was divided into an occupied northern zone and an unoccupied southern zone, according to the armistice convention "in order to protect the interests of the German Reich". The French colonial empire remained under the authority of Marshall Pétain's Vichy regime. French sovereignty was to be exercised over the whole of French territory, including the occupied zone and Moselle, but the third article of the armistice stipulated that French authorities in the occupied zone would have to obey the military administration and that Germany would exercise rights of an occupying power within it: In the occupied region of France, the German Reich exercises all of the rights of an occupying power; the French government undertakes to facilitate in every way possible the implementation of these rights, to provide the assistance of the French administrative services to that end. The French government will direct all off
Seine
The Seine is a 777-kilometre-long river and an important commercial waterway within the Paris Basin in the north of France. It rises at Source-Seine, 30 kilometres northwest of Dijon in northeastern France in the Langres plateau, flowing through Paris and into the English Channel at Le Havre, it is navigable by ocean-going vessels as far as Rouen, 120 kilometres from the sea. Over 60 percent of its length, as far as Burgundy, is negotiable by commercial riverboats, nearly its whole length is available for recreational boating. There are 37 bridges within dozens more spanning the river outside the city. Examples in Paris include the Pont Alexandre III and Pont Neuf, the latter of which dates back to 1607. Outside the city, examples include the Pont de Normandie, one of the longest cable-stayed bridges in the world, which links Le Havre to Honfleur; the Seine rises in the commune of Source-Seine, about 30 kilometres northwest of Dijon. The source has been owned by the city of Paris since 1864. A number of associated small ditches or depressions provide the source waters, with an artificial grotto laid out to highlight and contain a deemed main source.
The grotto includes a statue of a nymph, a dog, a dragon. On the same site are the buried remains of a Gallo-Roman temple. Small statues of the dea Sequana "Seine goddess" and other ex voti found at the same place are now exhibited in the Dijon archaeological museum; the Seine can artificially be divided into five parts: the Petite Seine "Small Seine" from the sources to Montereau-Fault-Yonne the Haute Seine "Upper Seine" from Montereau-Fault-Yonne to Paris the Traversée de Paris "the Paris waterway" the Basse Seine "Lower Seine" from Paris to Rouen the Seine maritime "Maritime Seine" from Rouen to the English channel. The Seine is dredged and ocean-going vessels can dock at Rouen, 120 kilometres from the sea. Commercial craft can use the river from 516 kilometres to its mouth. At Paris, there are 37 bridges; the river is only 24 metres above sea level 446 kilometres from its mouth, making it slow flowing and thus navigable. The Seine Maritime, 123 kilometres from the English Channel at Le Havre to Rouen, is the only portion of the Seine used by ocean-going craft.
The tidal section of the Seine Maritime is followed by a canalized section with four large multiple locks until the mouth of the Oise at Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. Smaller locks at Bougival and at Suresnes lift the vessels to the level of the river in Paris, where the junction with the Canal Saint-Martin is located; the distance from the mouth of the Oise is 72 km. The Haute Seine, from Paris to Montereau-Fault-Yonne, has 8 locks. At Charenton-le-Pont is the mouth of the Marne. Upstream from Paris seven locks ensure navigation to Saint Mammès, where the Loing mouth is situated. Through an eighth lock the river Yonne is reached at Montereau-Fault-Yonne. From the mouth of the Yonne, larger ships can continue upstream to Nogent-sur-Seine. From there on, the river is navigable only by small craft to Marcilly-sur-Seine. At Marcilly-sur-Seine the ancient Canal de la Haute-Seine used to allow vessels to continue all the way to Troyes; this canal has been abandoned since 1957. The average depth of the Seine today at Paris is about 9.5 metres.
Until locks were installed to raise the level in the 1800s, the river was much shallower within the city most of the time, consisted of a small channel of continuous flow bordered by sandy banks. Today the depth is controlled and the entire width of the river between the built-up banks on either side is filled with water; the average flow of the river is low, only a few cubic metres per second, but much higher flows are possible during periods of heavy runoff. Special reservoirs upstream help to maintain a constant level for the river through the city, but during periods of extreme runoff significant increases in river level may occur. A severe period of high water in January 1910 resulted in extensive flooding throughout the city; the Seine again rose to threatening levels in 1924, 1955, 1982, 1999–2000, June 2016, January 2018. After a first-level flood alert in 2003, about 100,000 works of art were moved out of Paris, the largest relocation of art since World War II. Much of the art in Paris is kept in underground storage rooms.
A 2002 report by the French government stated the worst-case Seine flood scenario would cost 10 billion euros and cut telephone service for a million Parisians, leaving 200,000 without electricity and 100,000 without gas. In January 2018 the Seine again flooded. An official warning was issued on January 24 that heavy rainfall was to cause the river to flood. By January 27, the river was rising; the Deputy Mayor of Paris, Colombe Brossel, warned that the heavy rain was caused by climate change, that "We have to understand that climatic change is not a word, it's a reality." The basin area is 78,910 square kilometres, 2 percent of, forest and 78 percent cultivated land. In addition to Paris, three other cities with a population over 100,000 are in the Seine watershed: Le Havre at the estuary, Rouen in the Seine valley and Reims at the northern limit—with an annual urban growth rate of 0.2 percent. The population density is 201 per square kilometer. Periodically
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