Hi,

I am not a historian and I can't offer you anything on USSR, but I think I can give a partial answer on France.

I am not sure what you refer to with Napoleonic administrative divisions. There are currently two levels of administrative divisions in France: the larger are the regions, created after WW2 and recently redrawn, and the smaller are the departments, which indeed date from the revolution, but were created in 1790 before Napoleon, in fact, before the end of the monarchy. While their creation was possibly facilitated by the abolition of privileges (removing the possibility of conflict between the new administrative entity and old régime provinces and ecclesiastic divisions), such a reform had already been proposed before the revolution by ministers such Necker and Condorcet. The idea was to have local relays of the centralized power close enough so that every subject/citizen could reach the department capital in less than a day on a horse, and could reach one of the subcapitals in less than a day on foot. Napoleon did create prefects, which are basically appointed relays of the (national) executive power on the department level (as opposed to the locally elected conseil de département), maybe that's what you're thinking of.

Because the departments were created with size (as opposed to, say, population or culture) in mind, the limits of the departments did not exactly match the limits of the old régime provinces because of this fact (for example, some provinces such as Artois were too small to be a full department, so Pas-de-Calais also included a chunk of Picardie as well as the historic Artois province, whereas others such as Languedoc and Guyenne were huge and had to be cut into many pieces), but they did not either go out of their way to not match them. It is worth noting that the names, however, were chosen to not match: most of the departments are named after geographical features (rivers, mostly) which had not been used historically to designate the area. Amusingly, when the regions were created in 1959 the old régime names were used. Sadly (in my opinion), after the 2015 merge most of the old names are now gone as most regions now contain three or four old régime provinces, which would make a lot of hyphenation...

You may also be thinking of the fact that Napoleon added a lot (but not all, for examples he created vassal kingdoms in Italy and Spain) of territories he conquered to the Republic, and the the Empire. Therefore he did create departments in Belgium, Nothern Italy, Croatia, Netherlands, Catalonia and Northern Germany, when he integrated those territories to France. But those were created using the same principle and generally respected existing cultural/linguistic divisions. For example, the 1790 departments that touched a border did not change under Napoleon: everything South of the 1790 Spanish border became part of a new department, similarly everything east of the 1790 Italian border.

There were some changes on the borders between 1790 and 1815, but those also happened before Napoleon took power in 1799. In 1791, the papal enclave around Avignon was integrated to France and (roughly) became Vaucluse, although there was some border-shifting with the neighbouring departments. This does not however match what you describe, as these were culturally close areas. In 1793, the Ardennes departments, which contained a French enclave in the Austrian Netherlands (present-day Belgium), was enlarged to become connected. After Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, both the pre-1790 enclave and the added territories would be returned to Netherlands. I guess it would count as a cultural break-up, but considering that the enclave already existed it seems implausible that drawing a department that did not match existing cultural divisions was the purpose.