Origins

France has been one of Europe’s major powers since medieval times. In the 1600s, with the establishment of absolute royal authority under Louis XIII and Louis XIV, the kingdom reached the zenith of its power. During the eighteenth century the country was progressively weakened by numerous foreign wars and, after 1789, a series of internal crises culminated in the French Revolution. The revolution transformed France into a republic, but within a decade the country was being led by an ambitious general, Napoleon Bonaparte, who became supreme dictator (1799) and then Emperor Napoleon I (1804–15). As a result of Napoleon’s military campaigns, France came to control directly or through surrogate rulers most of continental western and central Europe.

By 1814, the Napoleon’s empire was crushed in war, and for the rest of the nineteenth century the country changed its form of government several times, from a restored constitutional monarchy (1815) to the Second Republic (1848), the Second Empire (1852), and finally the Third Republic (1871). This same period also witnessed the development of industrialization and the expansion of France’s overseas colonies, especially in Africa and southeast Asia. Consequently, by the outset of the twentieth century, France was once again a major world power challenged only by Great Britain overseas and by Germany on the European continent.

It was, in fact, the desire to regain from Germany its “lost” eastern territories of Alsace and Lorraine (ceded in 1870) that led France to sacrifice millions of soldiers along the “western front” during World War I. Victory in 1918 did bring with it the return of Alsace and Lorraine and, for at least a decade, the subjection of its rival Germany. But with the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany during the 1930s, France was faced with a new and even more serious threat. When World War II broke out in September 1939, France and Germany were once again on opposing sides. In the spring of 1940, German troops easily invaded the country. As a result of the fall of France, the northern two-thirds of the country were occupied by Nazi Germany, while the southern third became a pro-German French state based in the resort town of Vichy.

With the liberation in 1945, the country was restored to its pre-war boundaries. In contrast to their behaviour in the past, France and Germany worked hard to overcome their historic differences in the interest of reconstructing a peaceful and economically prosperous Europe. To this end, France became in 1957 one of the six original members of the European Economic Union, and since that time it has been a leading force behind the drive for greater integration within the European Union.

Historically, France has included within its boundaries inhabitants who have spoken a wide variety of French dialects or other languages. By the sixteenth century, the dialect spoken in the Île-de-France, around Paris, had supplanted numerous related dialects to become the basis for the literary French language. Regional languages were spoken (and to some extent still are) by many other inhabitants: Basques, dwelling in the Pyrenees; Alsatians and Lorrainers, people of Germanic origin in the east; the Celtic Bretons of Brittany; Catalans living in the region bordering the Spanish province of Catalonia; Flemings in French Flanders; and Corsicans on the island of Corsica who speak an Italian dialect. There are also many people throughout southern France (the Midi) who call themselves Occitans and still speak or use in writing one of the Occitan dialects, the most developed of which is Provençal. Since the French Revolution, government policy has actively promoted the extension of literary French throughout the country, and this policy together with internal migration has contributed to a steady weakening in the legal status and usage of regional languages.

Since the early Middle Ages, Roman Catholicism has been the dominant religion in France. Protestantism gained an important foothold after the Reformation but, because of persecution, survived among only a small portion of the population. Jews also formed a significant minority, although many perished in Nazi death camps during World War II. In recent years, with substantial immigration from North Africa, Islam has become the second religion of France.