France is the country with the most time zones in the world. The French Republic has twelve time slots, followed by the United States and Russia, with eleven. This is because the 1958 Constitution recognizes eleven overseas populations with different legal statuses as part of the State, concentrated especially in the Caribbean Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. The Magna Carta also incorporates a portion of Antarctica within its sphere of influence, as well as Clipperton Island, near Mexico in the North Pacific.
A colonial heritage
France’s territorial extension comes from its colonizing past. The overseas towns derive from the conquests of the French colonial Empire from the 16th century until its dissolution in the mid-20th century, when these regions began to enjoy a legal regime different from that of the colonies. The territories comprise more than 120,000 square kilometers of land area and more than ten million square kilometers of exclusive economic zone, making the French Republic the second maritime power in the world behind the United States. France’s territorial claims extend to the eastern tip of Antarctica, where it claims sovereignty over Adélie Land. However, the international community does not recognize this claim, which would grant the country an additional time zone.
All that vast portion of territory explains why France is the country with the most time zones. The metropolitan part is governed by a single time zone that coincides with Central European Time (UTC+01:00), while the overseas territories encompass time zones that range from the majority of French Polynesia (UTC-10:00) to Wallis and Futuna (UTC+12:00), in the South Pacific.
Time zones: a unified system that was difficult to implement
The origin of the time zone system dates back to the end of the 19th century. Its author, the British engineer Sandford Fleming, proposed in 1879 an international unification method to know the time accurately in any corner of the planet. Until then, the position of the Sun and the arbitrary designation of reference points had served as mechanisms to estimate it. However, the appearance of the railway and the globalization of trade forced its regulation to be standardized.
In this way, Fleming designed a division of the world into twenty-four time zones defined by meridians, imaginary lines that run across the Earth from north to south. The zero meridian would serve as the starting point of this partition. For each time zone east of the base meridian, one hour would be added to Delimited Universal Time (UTC), that is, the time corresponding to the area delimited by the zero meridian. On the contrary, the strips located to the west would subtract.
Fleming’s project arrived at the International Meridian Conference of October 1884 in Washington DC at the proposal of US President Chester Alan Arthur. In the North American capital, twenty-five countries decided that the zero meridian would pass through the Royal Observatory in the London district of Greenwich, in the United Kingdom. Despite this, political disputes made the implementation of the agreement difficult, and France maintained for twenty-five years the use of the Paris meridian that it had supported at the Conference.
Other countries, such as Franco’s Spain, changed their time zones during World War II to align with German time. There are also cases such as the People’s Republic of China, which uses only one of its five time zones as a symbol of national unity. Venezuela even decided to abandon the unified international system in 2007 and delayed its traditional time by thirty minutes to make better use of sunlight, although it reversed this in 2016.