Electoral law

The sixteenth entry is la commission de découpage, and its last word will send an English reader to the wrong room. In English « decoupage » is a craft: paper motifs cut out, glued onto a box or a tray and varnished over until they look painted. That is one narrow corner of the French noun, and the smallest. Le découpage is simply the act of découper, cutting something up along lines: le découpage d’une volaille is carving a bird, le découpage d’un texte en chapitres is dividing a text, and le découpage administratif is the way a country is parcelled out into regions and départements. In an election it means drawing the constituency map, le découpage électoral, and the commission in this list is the body that redraws it when the population shifts. The English for that work is « boundary review » or « redistricting », and a « boundary commission » is the nearest institution. Nothing about the word is decorative, and nothing about it is pejorative either: it is the neutral term, and a French journalist who suspects that the lines were drawn to suit somebody has to reach for a different noun.