The oldest recorded cultures are those of the Paleolithic (50000-8000 BC), which left a rich artistic heritage of cave paintings, such as those of Lascaux.
The Greeks, in the 7th century BC, established a colony in Marseilles and traded inland through the Rhône valley. In the 5th century BC La Tène's culture extended from eastern Gaul to the rest of the Celtic world.
In 121 BC, the Romans occupied Marseilles, which they called Massilia, and founded other settlements in the interior, which constituted the territorial base of the Roman province of Gaul Narbonensis. Julius Caesar conquered the rest of Gaul between 58 and 51 BC, consolidating Roman power.
Throughout the fourth century AD, small groups of Germans had settled in Gaul through pacts with the Roman authorities. In 406, this movement turned into an invasion when the Vandals, Suebi and Alans crossed the border and spread through Gaul. In 412 the Visigoths settled in the south and in 440 the Burgundians in eastern Gaul.
In the last quarter of the 5th century, when Roman imperial authority in the western part of the Empire waned, the Salian Franks conquered Gaul. Its king, Clodoveu I, when converting to Christianity in 496, was able to consolidate his dominion over the country.
The Clodoveus dynasty, the Merovingians, ruled until the year 751. According to French custom, all the king's possessions, including the royal title, were divided, on his death, among his sons. Due to this practice, Merovingian France was characterized by continuous disunity that culminated in the civil war of the 6th century. In the late 7th century, a palace butler, Pepin of Herstal, proving himself superior to his rivals, successfully extended his authority over the Frankish duchies of Neustria and Burgundy. In 751 Pepin the Short deposed the last Merovingian king and was crowned King of the Franks.
The new dynasty — later called Carolingian, after its most prominent member, Charlemagne — was consolidated with the alliance established by Pepin with the Papacy. In exchange for the Franks' help against the Lombards, who were invading papal territory in Italy, Pope Stephen II approved the Carolingian claim to the throne. With the death of Pepin (768), Charlemagne became king until the year 800, when he was crowned by Pope Leo III with the title of Emperor of the Romans.
The Viking raids and the troubles that followed the reign of his son Louis I the Pious meant the beginning of the decline of the Carolingian Empire.
Louis decreed in 817 that his eldest son Lothair I would inherit the Empire and that his three younger sons, Pepin of Aquitaine, Louis II the German, and Charles the Bald, would have subordinate kingdoms. The division gave rise to a series of conflicts that were only resolved in 843, with the Treaty of Verdun.
The disunity of the Franks facilitated the incursions of the Vikings who, in 911 and under the command of Rollon, obtained from Charles III, the Simple, the territory of the lower course of the Seine, which received the name of Normandy.
With the death of Louis V, the last Carolingian king, Hugh I Capet started the Capetian dynasty. From the year 987 until 1328, the crown was transmitted uninterrupted in the male direct line.
Chartres Cathedral is one of the most famous Gothic buildings in the world thanks in large part to its sculptural decoration and its windows, which retain most of the original stained glass. Construction began in 1194, after the fire that destroyed the old cathedral located on the same site. The two towers on the west facade were built three hundred years apart and have different shapes and heights, due to modifications in the architectural style. The capital, from the late Romanesque period, in the foreground, dates from the 13th century and the north needle, from the late Gothic period, in the background, is from the 16th century.
Louis VI the Fat consolidated royal power on the Île-de-France, a region centered on Paris, which was the family's hereditary fief. Philip II Augustus, through his first marriage, gained new territories in northern France—Artois, Valois, and Vermandois. He also secured royal control over the Vexin, a small but vital area on the River Seine as it formed the border between Normandy and the Île-de-France.
In 1204 Philip undertook the military conquest of Normandy and Anjou. Ten years later, the French monarch secured the conquered territories by winning a coalition formed by England, Flanders and the Holy Roman Empire in the battle of Bouvines.
Louis VIII the Lion led a campaign that ended with the expansion of the royal domain towards the Mediterranean coast.
Philip IV, who reigned between 1285 and 1314, was the last of the great Capetian kings and greatly strengthened the royal powers. The king successfully annexed Frankish, Lyon and parts of Lorraine, but failed in his aim to control Flanders.
Philip IV's intervention in Flanders was quite onerous, which led him to try to tax the clergy, provoking a sharp conflict with Pope Boniface VIII.
Between 1314 and 1328, three sons of Philip IV — Louis X (and his son John I the Postumus, who only lived a few months), Philip V and Charles IV the Fair — ascended to the throne successively and all died without leaving any heirs. man. With the death of Charles IV, the crown passed to Philip IV's nephew, Philip of Valois, who reigned as Philip VI from 1328 to 1350, beginning the Valois dynasty. The English king Edward III, in 1337, claimed the condition of heir to the French throne, as he was the grandson of Philip IV, and the two kingdoms came into conflict, initiating the Hundred Years' War.
The second half of the 14th century was a period marked by various manifestations of social unrest. With a depressed economy, the costs of war continued to mount. During this period the General States, summoned for the first time by Felipe V, obtained great power.
During the reign of Charles VI (1380-1422), the English King Henry V invaded France, defeated the French army at the Battle of Agincourt, and took control of most of France north of the Loire.
The French revitalization under Charles VII (reigned from 1422 to 1461) began with the figure of Joan of Arc. The war continued for over 20 years and in 1453 the English had to cede all their mainland territories, with the exception of Calais.
Louis XI, who reigned from 1461 to 1483, consolidated royal authority, incorporated most of the Duchy of Burgundy into his kingdom, and used royal revenues to protect, facilitate, and stimulate economic development.
Charles VIII, king from 1483 to 1498, married Anne, Duchess of Brittany. Thanks to this marriage, the last independent feudal principality was incorporated into the French Crown.
At just 13 years old, Joan of Arc convinced a council of theologians that God had commissioned her to save France during the Hundred Years' War with England. She led France to several military victories over the English in 1429. A year later, while leading a battle without authorization, she was taken prisoner, accused and convicted of heresy, for pretending to deal with God without regard to the Catholic Church. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in 1431, but after 25 years the Church modified her condemnation and later canonized her.
By the end of the 15th century, France had overcome the territorial divisions of its feudal past and became a national monarchy that incorporated most of the territories between the Pyrenees and the English Channel. In the middle of the next century, internal peace and the growth of the economy raised the social position of great merchants, bankers and tax collectors, while the nobility, dependent on fixed income and with rising debts, saw how inflation threatened its economic and social power.
The first three monarchs of the period — Charles VIII, Louis XII and Francis I — took advantage of the nation's strong growth and internal stability to claim by arms the Kingdom of Naples and the Duchy of Milan. In the 1520s, the Italian wars turned into a wide-ranging dispute between France and the Habsburg dynasty, reigning in Spain and Austria, a confrontation that continued intermittently for a century and a half. The Italian wars ended with the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559), negotiated by Francis I's son Henry II.
The increase in population, without a corresponding increase in production, and monetary inflation, drove the majority of the people into poverty. The Protestant Reformation, which spread from Germany during the reign of Francis I, had attracted many followers; but in the 1540s and 1550s, John Calvin's postulates and doctrines won the support of many supporters among the nobility and common people. Henry II considered Calvinism a threat to royal authority and tried to end it. Under the reign of the three sons who succeeded him, the wars of religion (where religious, political and dynastic conflicts were mixed) tore the country apart.
In 1584 Henry of Navarre, a descendant of Louis IX and chief of the Huguenots (the name given to French Protestants), became the heir to the throne, to which he ascended with the name of Henry IV of France, establishing the Bourbon dynasty on the throne. French.
In 1598, Henry IV tried to ensure internal peace in his domains through the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes, which guaranteed freedom of conscience.
Henry was succeeded by his son, Louis XIII. In 1624, he chose Cardinal de Richelieu as prime minister, who was the effective ruler of France for the next 18 years. Richelieu's main goals were to eliminate all rivals to royal power and contain threats from abroad.
The Palace and Gardens of Versailles, near Paris, are famous for their beauty and luxury. Nearly 101 hectares of meticulously planned gardens surround the impressive Baroque palace of more than 1,300 rooms. Construction of the palace began in 1661, during the reign of Louis XIV, and was completed 40 years later. It was the royal residence until the French Revolution of 1789.
When Richelieu became the king's prime minister, the Thirty Years' War was in its first decade. In 1635, Richelieu introduced France into the war, as an ally of the Swedish and Dutch Protestants against the Catholic Habsburgs. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) granted most of Alsace to the kingdom of France and ensured the continued division and weakness of German territories. Through the Peace of the Pyrenees (1659), signed with Spain, France got Artois in the north and Roussillon on the Spanish frontier.
Louis XIV initially ruled with Richelieu's protege, Cardinal Giulio Mazarino, as prime minister, who victoriously concluded the war with the Habsburgs and defeated in the interior the first coordinated effort of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie to change the concentration of power in the hands of the king performed by Richelieu. In 1648, the Parliament of Paris and the city's bourgeois, united, protested against the high taxes and, with the support of the artisans, provoked a rebellion against the Crown, called The Fronde.
With the death of Cardinal Mazarin in 1661, Louis XIV ruled France personally and established himself as a model of the absolutist monarch who ruled by divine right. The monarch was God's representative on earth, and the obedience of the clergy provided him with the theological justification of his divine right. A dissident movement, Jansenism, which developed in the 17th century, became a political threat, which is why Louis XIV fought against it from its very beginnings.
Finance Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert was the great exponent of the era of mercantilism. Before the end of his reign, however, war expenses had ruined most of Colbert's economic work. In 1685, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which caused most Huguenots to leave France, causing great economic losses.
Charles II, King of Spain, had no direct heir, which led him to name Louis XIV's grandson Philip of Anjou to succeed him. The other European states feared the consequences of the great increase in power of the Bourbons and formed a coalition to prevent it. The War of the Spanish Succession lasted thirteen exhausting years. In the end, Louis achieved his main objective and his grandson became King of Spain with the name Felipe V.
Louis XIV died in 1715 and was succeeded by Louis XV. Both he and his successor, Louis XVI, lacked the ability to adapt national institutions to the changing conditions of the 18th century. Nevertheless, it was one of the most important epochs in the history of the country. France was the richest and most powerful nation on the continent. The century was characterized by extraordinary economic growth and cultural development.
The nobility led the opposition to royal initiatives in the parliaments (courts) of the provinces, demanding that royal decrees be submitted for parliamentary approval, with the aim of controlling the government.
Intellectual opposition to the monarchy was driven by philosophers, who held that the entire population had certain natural rights—life, liberty, and property—and that governments existed to guarantee these rights. These ideas were especially appreciated by the bourgeoisie, which had increased in numbers, wealth and ambition and was eager to extend its outstanding socio-economic position to the political sphere, participating in government decisions. Through the bourgeoisie, ideas penetrated the lower strata of society and came to form part of popular culture before the revolution.
The government's financial problems were accentuated after 1740 due to the resumption of war. The Austrian War of Succession (1740-1748) and the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) were European conflicts in which hegemony in central Europe and the colonies was decided. France lost its vast colonial empire in America and India. In 1778, the French intervened in the American War of Independence, supporting the colonists' rebellion, thereby weakening Great Britain and recovering the lost colonies. However, French hopes did not materialize, despite the success of the insurgents, and their participation in the war added to the already growing and onerous national debt.
The responsibility to face the financial crisis fell on the young and indecisive Louis XVI. After provincial parliaments blocked all reform programs put forward by ministers and improvised an Assembly of Notables in 1788, Louis forced the Parlement of Paris to accept royal edicts that deprived parliamentarians of their political powers. Judges, nobles and clerics resisted and tried to avoid the application of the royal decree; they got the support of the army and a population affected by high unemployment and the price of bread. In July, the assembly of one of the southern provinces voted to annul the collection of taxes until the king convened a session of the Estates General, inactive since 1615. Louis agreed to assemble the Estates General in May 1789. The aristocracy had triumphed in the first stage of the French Revolution, which ended with the election of a new constituent assembly, the National Convention, established by universal male suffrage, which in 1792 created the First French Republic.
The Convention allowed executive power to be concentrated on the Committee of Public Safety. The latter, dominated by the radical Jacobin faction, inaugurated the so-called regime of Terror, to eliminate the enemies of the Revolution. The King was tried and executed in January 1793.
In 1794, there was a reaction against the Jacobin regime, which was eliminated after a coup d'état. The following year, the National Convention adopted a Constitution that provided for a republican regime consisting of a Directory, which exercised executive power, and a legislative power divided into two indirectly elected chambers.
The Directory ruled France for four difficult years, due to the upheavals caused by the revolution and the ongoing war. Inland, the Directory was threatened on the right by the monarchists, keen to restore the monarchy, and on the left by the Jacobins, determined to establish a democratic republic. General Napoleon Bonaparte conducted a coup d'état in 1799 and, together with his followers, overthrew the Directory and established the Consulate.
Napoleon appointed himself head of state. The new Constitution established the essential powers of the office he held, that of First Consul. He put himself at the head of an army that penetrated Italy and sent another to southern Germany, and his victories forced Austria to sign peace in 1801. Great Britain, without allies and without trade with an increasingly dominated Europe for France, he agreed to sign the Peace of Amiens (1802), which ended hostilities between the two countries.
The legislation gathered in the Napoleonic Code confirmed the main victories achieved by the Revolution, such as the abolition of feudal privileges, equality before the law and freedom of conscience.
Napoleon established the French Empire in 1804 and crowned himself emperor. This confirmed their ambitions to extend beyond the borders of Bourbon France and, in 1805, the Napoleonic Wars resumed. In a short time, he became the owner of most of Europe. But the very extent of his conquests made them difficult to maintain.
After the definitive defeat of the Empire in 1815, at the Battle of Waterloo, the monarchy was restored in the figure of Louis XVIII, brother of the beheaded king.
Louis XVIII guaranteed the fulfillment of a Constitution, the Charter of 1814, which established a parliamentary monarchy and social reforms expressed in Napoleonic law codes. The regime was representative but not democratic.
The years of moderate rule led, after the assassination of the Duke of Berry, heir to the throne, in 1820, to the rule of the ultra-royalists with the coronation of its greatest exponent in 1824, with the name of Charles X.
In 1830 he issued a series of decrees to call new elections, reduce the number of voters and restrict freedom of the press. This led to a series of protests and Charles X, abandoned by all but a minority of monarchists, abdicated. The deputies offered the throne to Louis Philippe, Duke of Orléans, belonging to a branch of the Bourbon family. They revised the Constitution to eliminate the king's legislative power and moderately expanded suffrage.
The July Monarchy, the name given to the regime of Luís Felipe, was dominated by the comfortable landowners and some businessmen and bankers, transforming itself into a benefactor of the big bourgeoisie.
The rigidity of the government and the serious economic depression of 1846 and 1847 undermined the regime's foundation and led to a new republican regime being proposed as an alternative. Luís Felipe abdicated in 1848. A provisional government was formed and the Second French Republic was proclaimed.
The Constitution of the Second Republic, promulgated in 1848, established a presidential and unicameral regime, in which both the President of the Republic and the Assembly were chosen by universal male suffrage. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was elected president by a majority, while parliamentary elections gave victory to the monarchists, who were against the Republic. Louis Napoleon took power with a coup d'état in 1851 and a year later restored the Empire and took the name Napoleon III.
The Pont des Arts, pedestrian bridge, crosses the Seine in central Paris. The Seine is the most important river in France, as it provides connections between Paris, the country's economic, political and cultural center, and other cities, including the port of Le Havre on the Atlantic coast.
Louis Napoleon's achievements in domestic politics do not match his failures abroad. The victory over Russia in the Crimean War (1853-1856) had as a counterpart the failure of the attempt to prevent the rise of Prussia and of the project to obtain compensation for France to face the increase in Prussian territory and power.
After the defeat, the National Assembly, established to be able to sign a peace treaty, had to resist a serious internal conflict. The radical republicans of Paris rebelled and established an independent municipal government, the Paris Commune, in 1871.
The monarchist majority of the National Assembly tried to restore the monarchy, but failed to resolve the differences between the Bourbon and Orléans claimants to the throne, which is why the republicans managed to pass a republican constitution in 1875.
After the Franco-Prussian War, national security was a constant concern. Following Bismarck's predictions, the French government oriented its objectives towards overseas expansion and established a colonial empire in Africa and Asia, the second in extent after the British Empire. In 1894, France and Russia entered into a defensive alliance that provided mutual aid against German or Austro-Hungarian attacks. A decade later, the common fear, Germany, spurred France and Britain to resolve their colonial differences and begin negotiations to unify their military and naval operations in Europe. By 1907, Britain and Russia had also resolved their differences and, together with France, formed the Triple Entente, in response to the Triple Alliance, made up of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy.
The assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne by Serbian nationalists in 1914 precipitated a new crisis. French interests were not directly involved in the Balkan dispute between Austria-Hungary and Russia, but the government supported its Russian ally. Germany, supporting Austria-Hungary, declared war on Russia and, after the French refusal to remain neutral, declared war on France.
In 1918, the unification of the Allied forces, the entry of the United States into the war and the exhaustion of the German war machinery allowed the Allies to develop an offensive that forced the German government to sue for peace. On November 11, 1918, the newly established Weimar Republic in Germany accepted the armistice and peace was signed at the Treaty of Versailles.
The most acute domestic problem after the war was the stabilization of the franc. The devaluation severely damaged the bourgeoisie, which had been the core of social support for the Republic and which depended on its economies. The late 1920s and early 1930s meant a brief interlude of prosperity and calm, which ended with the arrival of the effects of the Great Depression in Europe and the resurgence, after 1933, of an aggressive Germany.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, national security remained the government's primary concern. Great Britain and the United States offered no guarantees of avoiding German rearmament, which is why France tried to achieve some security by establishing alliances with Belgium and with eastern European states that could threaten Germany with a two-front war, if France were attacked. Adolf Hitler ascended to power in Germany in 1933 and began the process of rearmament. In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and France and Great Britain declared war on it, which started World War II.
After the war, the French National Liberation Committee became the provisional government of the French Republic. Charles de Gaulle dominated the government for the next 15 months, but resigned in 1946 when the newly elected Constituent Assembly disagreed with his views on the need for a unicameral presidential regime.
The Fourth Republic was established after the promulgation of a new Constitution at the end of 1946. The great achievements of the regime were social reform and economic development. In 1957, France joined five other Western European countries to found the European Economic Community.
Colonial problems (the loss of Indochina and Algeria's war of independence) ended the Fourth Republic. In 1958, the National Assembly granted De Gaulle full powers to govern the country for six months and to draft the Constitution of the Fifth Republic, approved by popular referendum.
Under the new French Constitution, the colonies achieved autonomy of government within the French Community, but the nationalists of each colonial enclave were keen to achieve independence and in 1960 the Constitution was revised to allow for the friendly separation of France from the former colonies.
The events of the French May, which took place in 1968, led to the resignation of De Gaulle, in 1969. In the elections, Georges Pompidou was chosen president of the Republic.
Pompidou's death happened suddenly in 1974. The candidate of the independent republicans, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, won the elections.
In 1981, after the Socialist victory at the polls, François Mitterrand replaced Giscard as President of the Republic. The government nationalized most banks and industrial firms, raised taxes and expanded social benefits. In 1982 and 1983, an economic recession caused the government to impose austerity measures. As a consequence, in 1986 Mitterrand had to live with Jacques Chirac as prime minister. This was the first time since 1958 that opposing parties ruled together, in the so-called cohabitation government. After several changes of government, the presidential elections of 1995 brought Jacques Chirac to the presidency of the Republic, at the same time that the socialist Alain Juppé assumed the head of government.
French Civilization