I recommend Quid.fr for town /village info in France

Are you aware of the Quid.fr online encyclopedia? I believe it's no longer appearing in print, but they seem to be keeping it up to date online.

The part I use most often in planning is their info on French cities, towns, and villages. They cover 36,860 of them, most of which are neglected by the big guidebooks.

http://www.quid.fr/communes.html

Their info starts with a quickie history of the place, then lists the local prehistoric and Gallo-Roman sites, civil architecture of note, religious buildings, museums, panoramas and bridges, the market day, what the local businesses and industries and agriculture are, when the annual local fete is. Population, altitude, postal code, departement, region. Which sites are IMH, MH, SI, SC. Whether there are signed walking trails. Even a tiny village gets some coverage.

Note: it does not give open hours or locations for any of these places. It doesn't list restaurants. It might link to hotels, but not obtrusively. (Since I'm always using this to look up tiny places, the hotel info is usually not relevant. ) But it tells you many things worth knowing about the kinds of places that guidebooks can't cover and even the local tourist office doesn't think are worth mentioning.

When we zero in on an area during our trip planning, I look at Quid to see what smaller places might be worth a visit. There's usually something I didn't know I'd be interested in. Now that we travel with a netbook, I am going to use Quid at night to find out what were those unexpected, unsigned "Wow!" places we saw on back roads.

The overall site, quid.fr, is a general encylopedia.

The France part of the site--beside the town and village coverage--has maps, a list of the regions and departments, links to old maps and photos and postcards, and of course hotels and real estate. There's a lot of information useful for visitors collected here on one site.