Lille in the context of "Lens, Pas-de-Calais"

A prefect (French: préfet, plural préfets, both [pʁefɛ]) in France is the State's representative in a department or region. Regional prefects are ex officio the departmental prefects of the regional prefecture. Prefects are tasked with upholding the law in the department they serve in, including controlling the actions of local authorities. Prefects are appointed by decree by the President of France when presiding over the government's Council of Ministers, following a proposal by the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Interior. They serve at the government's discretion and can be replaced at any meeting of the Council of Ministers.

To uphold the law, they are authorised to undertake a wide variety of actions, such as coordinating police forces, enforcing immigration rules, controlling authorities' finances, as well as suing local collectivities in the name of the State. The prefects in Lille, Rennes, Bordeaux, Marseille, Lyon and Strasbourg each have additional tasks as heads of their regional defence and security zone (zone de défense et de sécurité). In the Paris area, the prefect of police is the head of the local zone. Overseas France has a similar zones system.

Communauté urbaine (French pronunciation: [kɔmynote yʁbɛn] ; French for "urban community") is the second most integrated form of intercommunality in France, after the Metropolis (French: métropole). A communauté urbaine is composed of a city (commune) and its independent suburbs (independent communes).

The first communautés urbaines were created by the French Parliament on 31 December 1966. Originally there were only four, found in the metropolitan areas of Bordeaux, Lille, Lyon and Strasbourg. Later, others were created in other metropolitan areas. The purpose of the communautés urbaines was to achieve cooperation and joint administration between large cities and their independent suburbs. This step often followed failed attempts to merge the communes within a metropolitan area. The status of the communauté urbaine was modified by the Chevènement Law of 1999. Since the creation of the métropoles in 2011, several former communautés urbaines have become métropoles, for instance Nice, Strasbourg, Marseille, Nancy and Dijon.

Boulogne-sur-Mer (French: [bulɔɲ syʁ mɛʁ] ; Picard: Boulonne-su-Mér; Dutch: Bonen; Latin: Gesoriacum or Bononia), often called just Boulogne (UK: /bʊˈlɔɪn/, US: /buːˈloʊn, buːˈlɔɪn/), is a port city in Northern France. It is a sub-prefecture of the department of Pas-de-Calais. Boulogne lies on the Côte d'Opale, a touristic stretch of French coast on the English Channel between Calais and Normandy, and the most visited location in the region after the Lille conurbation. Boulogne is its department's second-largest city after Calais, and the 183rd-largest in France. It is also the country's largest fishing port, specialising in herring.

Boulogne is an ancient town and was the main Roman port for trade and communication with its Province of Britain. After a period of Germanic presence following the collapse of the Empire, Boulogne was integrated into the County of Boulogne of the Kingdom of France during the Middle Ages. It was occupied by the Kingdom of England numerous times due to conflict between the two nations. In 1805 it was a staging area for Napoleon's troops for several months during his planned invasion of the United Kingdom.

Jan van Eyck (/væn ˈaɪk/ van EYEK; Dutch: [ˈjɑɱ vɑn ˈɛik]; c. before 1390 – 9 July 1441) was a Flemish painter active in Bruges who was one of the early innovators of what became known as Early Netherlandish painting, and one of the supreme figures of the Early Northern Renaissance. Such was his legacy, that he has been called “the inventor of oil-painting” by Vasari, Ernst Gombrich, and others, although this claim is now considered an oversimplification.

Surviving records date his birth at around 1380 or 1390, in Maaseik (then Maaseyck, hence his name), Limburg, which is located in present-day Belgium. He took employment in The Hague around 1422, when he was already a master painter with workshop assistants, and was employed as painter and valet de chambre to John III the Pitiless, ruler of the counties of Holland and Hainaut. Some time after John's death in 1425, he was appointed as court painter to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, and worked in Lille before moving to Bruges in 1429, where he lived until his death. He was highly regarded by Philip, and was dispatched on several diplomatic visits abroad, including one to Lisbon in 1428 to discuss the possibility of a marriage contract between the duke and Isabella of Portugal.

Bordeaux (/bɔːrˈdoʊ/ bor-DOH; French: [bɔrdo] ; Gascon Occitan: Bordèu [buɾˈðɛw]; Basque: Bordele) is a city on the river Garonne in the Gironde department, southwestern France. A port city, it is the capital of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, as well as the prefecture of the Gironde department. Its inhabitants are called "Bordelais" (masculine) or "Bordelaises" (feminine). The term "Bordelais" may also refer to the city and its surrounding region.

The city of Bordeaux proper had a population of 259,809 in 2020 within its small municipal territory of 49 km (19 sq mi), but together with its suburbs and exurbs the Bordeaux metropolitan area had a population of 1,376,375 that same year (Jan. 2020 census), the sixth-most populated in France after Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Lille, and Toulouse.

Picard (/ˈpɪkɑːrd/ PIK-ard, also US: /pɪˈkɑːrd, ˈpɪkərd/ pih-KARD, PIK-ərd, French: [pikaʁ] ) is a langue d'oïl of the Romance language family spoken in the northernmost of France and parts of Hainaut province in Belgium. Administratively, this area is divided between the French Hauts-de-France region and the Belgian Wallonia along the border between both countries due to its traditional core being the districts of Tournai and Mons (Walloon Picardy).

The language or dialect is referred to by different names, as residents of Picardy call it simply Picard, but in the more populated region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais it is called Ch'ti or Ch'timi (sometimes written as Chti or Chtimi). This is the area that makes up Romance Flanders, around the metropolis of Lille and Douai, and northeast Artois around Béthune and Lens. Picard is also named Rouchi around Valenciennes, Roubaignot around Roubaix.

Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle (22 November 1890 – 9 November 1970) was a French general and statesman who led the Free French Forces against Nazi Germany and Vichy France in World War II and chaired the Provisional Government of the French Republic from 1944 to 1946 to restore democracy in France. Following the Algiers putsch, he came out of retirement at the request of President René Coty, who appointed him Prime Minister. He commissioned a new constitution which was approved by voters in a referendum, establishing the Fifth Republic. He was subsequently elected President of France later that year, a position he held until his resignation in 1969. He is widely considered the greatest Frenchman of the 20th century.

Born in Lille, he was a decorated officer of World War I, wounded several times and taken prisoner of war by the Germans. During the interwar period, he advocated mobile armoured divisions. During the German invasion of May 1940, he led an armoured division that counterattacked the invaders; he was then appointed Undersecretary for War. Refusing to accept his government's armistice with Germany, de Gaulle fled to England and exhorted the French to continue the fight in his Appeal of 18 June. He led the Free French Forces and later headed the French National Liberation Committee and emerged as the undisputed leader of Free France. He became head of the Provisional Government of the French Republic in June 1944, the interim government of France following its liberation. As early as 1944, de Gaulle introduced a dirigiste economic policy, which included substantial state-directed control over a capitalist economy, which was followed by 30 years of unprecedented growth, known as the Trente Glorieuses. He resigned in 1946, but continued to be politically active as founder of the Rally of the French People. He retired in the early 1950s and wrote his War Memoirs, which quickly became a staple of modern French literature.

The Métropole Européenne de Lille (French pronunciation: [metʁɔpɔl øʁɔpeɛn də lil], MEL; English: "European Metropolis of Lille") is the métropole, an intercommunal structure, composed by a network of big cities (Lille, Roubaix, Tourcoing, Villeneuve d'Ascq, Armentières etc.) whose major city is the city of Lille. It is located in the Nord department, in the Hauts-de-France region, northern France – bordering both the Flemish and Walloon regions of Belgium. It was created in January 2015, replacing the previous Communauté urbaine de Lille, and covers that part of the Lille metropolitan area that lies in France. Its area is 671.9 km. Its population was 1,179,050 in 2019, of which 234,475 in Lille proper. The annual budget of the métropole is €1,865 billion (2018).

Nord (French pronunciation: [nɔʁ] ; officially French: département du Nord; Picard: départémint dech Nord; Dutch: Noorderdepartement, lit. 'northern department') is a department in Hauts-de-France region, France bordering Belgium. It was created from the western halves of the historical counties of Flanders and Hainaut, and the Bishopric of Cambrai. The modern coat of arms was inherited from the County of Flanders.

Nord is the country's most populous département. It had a population of 2,608,346 in 2019. It also contains the metropolitan region of Lille (the main city and the prefecture of the département), the fourth-largest urban area in France after Paris, Lyon and Marseille. The department is the part of France where the French Flemish dialect of Dutch has historically been spoken as a native language. Similarly, the distinct French Picard dialect Ch'ti is spoken there.