180 taxable homesteads, indicating significant recovery from the depopulation that characterised the middle part of the seventeenth century, and by the 1760s the population had probably risen to between 800 and 900. It is fair to point out that these population trends echoed the experience of many towns and villages in Lorraine between 1618 and he region's eventual formal incorporation into France when the last duke died in 1766. During the nineteenth century, until 1870, Provenchères-en-Vosges, was one of the many communes in the Canton of Saales. The annexation by Germany of Alsace and a large chunk of Lorraine left the Canton of Saales arbitrarily split down the line of a mountain ridge. Separated from Saales, Provenchères-en-Vosges found itself promoted to the status of an administrative centre of its own commune. Frontier town status seems to have benefited the local economy. Ten years later, in 1881, the name of the town was changed to Provenchères-sur-Fave. In 1919, in the aftermath of another war, France recovered Alsace-Lorraine, but there was no appetite to recreate the departmental boundaries as they had been before 1870. The Canton of Saales and the Canton of Provenchères-sur-Fave retained their separate identities, and it is for these historical reasons that until 2015 Provenchères-sur-Fave remained the administrative centre of one of the smallest cantons in France. See also Communes of the Vosges department References Former communes of Vosges (department)