The fire service in France is organised into local fire services which mostly cover the Departments of France, with a few exceptions. There are two types of fire service:
- The Paris Fire Brigade (Army) and Marseille Naval Fire Battalion (Navy) are military units providing fire protection to Paris and Marseille.
- The rest of France has civilian fire services organized, supervised and trained by the French Ministry of the Interior; specifically, they fall under the Civil Defence and Security Directorate (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Civile et de la Gestion de Crise, DGSCGC).
There are approximately 246,900 fire service personnel in France operating 15,642 emergency vehicles out of 6,894 emergency centres.[1] In addition to providing fire protection and rescue, the French fire service is also one of the providers of emergency medical services.[2]
In French, firefighters are known as sapeurs-pompiers or informally as pompiers. The former originally refers to the military-based Paris Fire Brigade. Pompier (pumper) comes from the word for "pump", referring to the manual pumps originally used for firefighting. Sapeur means "sapper" and refers to the first official firefighting unit created by Napoleon I which was part of the military engineering arm. Firefighters in the Marseille Marine Fire Battalion are known as marins-pompiers (sailor-firefighters). The usual name of a civilian fire services is a service départemental d'incendie et de secours (SDIS) (Departmental Fire and Rescue Service). Young French citizens can fulfill the mandatory service Service national universel (SNU) in one of the fire brigades.[3][4]
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
:0was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ "French Fire-based VPS". Archived from the original on March 14, 2008. Retrieved 2008-09-18.
- ^ "France begins trial of compulsory civic service for teens". 16 June 2019.
- ^ "France's raw recruits sign up for return of national service". BBC News. 25 June 2019.