From the 11th century, the House of Plantagenet, the rulers of the County of Anjou, succeeded in establishing its dominion over the surrounding provinces of Maine and Touraine, then progressively built an "empire" that spanned from England to the Pyrenees and covering half of modern France. Tensions between the kingdom of France and the Plantagenet empire would last a hundred years, until Philip II of France conquered, between 1202 and 1214, most of the continental possessions of the empire, leaving England and Aquitaine to the Plantagenets. Around 390 BC, the Gallic chieftain Brennus and his troops made their way to Roman Italy through the Alps, defeated the Romans in the Battle of the Allia, and besieged and ransomed Rome. [31] The Gallic invasion left Rome weakened, and the Gauls continued to harass the region until 345 BC when they entered into a formal peace treaty with Rome. [32] But the Romans and the Gauls would remain adversaries for the next centuries, and the Gauls would continue to be a threat in Italy. [33] In the August 1791 Declaration of Pillnitz, the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia threatened to restore the French monarch by force. In September 1791, the National Constituent Assembly forced Louis XVI to accept the French Constitution of 1791, thus turning the French absolute monarchy into a constitutional monarchy. In the newly established Legislative Assembly (October 1791), enmity developed and deepened between a group later called the ' Girondins', who favoured war with Austria and Prussia, and a group later called ' Montagnards' or ' Jacobins' who opposed such a war. A majority in the Assembly in 1792 however saw a war with Austria and Prussia as a chance to boost the popularity of the revolutionary government and thought that such a war could be won and so declared war on Austria on 20 April 1792. a b c "Bilan démographique 2022 – Composantes de la croissance démographique, France". Insee. 17 January 2023 . Retrieved 27 January 2022. Human Development Report 2021/2022" (PDF). United Nations Development Programme. 8 September 2022 . Retrieved 8 September 2022.

The final victory in the Hundred Years' War marked an important stage in the evolution of French architecture. It was the time of the French Renaissance and several artists from Italy were invited to the French court; many residential palaces were built in the Loire Valley, from 1450 as a first reference the Château de Montsoreau. [316] Examples of such residential castles include the Château de Chambord, the Château de Chenonceau, or the Château d'Amboise. France generally has a positive reputation regarding LGBT rights. [136] Since 1999, civil unions for homosexual couples have been permitted, and since 2013, same-sex marriage and LGBT adoption are legal. [137] Laws prohibiting discriminatory speech in the press are as old as 1881. Some consider hate speech laws in France to be too broad or severe, undermining freedom of speech. [138] French Land Register data, which exclude lakes, ponds and glaciers larger than 1 km 2 (0.386 sq mi or 247 acres) as well as the estuaries of rivers Faith of the Eldest Daughter– Can France retain her Catholic heritage?". Wf-f.org. Archived from the original on 22 July 2011 . Retrieved 17 July 2011. History of France". Discoverfrance.net. Archived from the original on 24 August 2011 . Retrieved 17 July 2011.a b Nadeau, Jean-Benoit; Barlow, Julie (2008). The Story of French. St. Martin's Press. pp.34ff. ISBN 978-1-4299-3240-0. Originally applied to the whole Frankish Empire, the name France comes from the Latin Francia, or "realm of the Franks". [20] Modern France is still named today Francia in Italian and Spanish, while Frankreich in German, Frankrijk in Dutch and Frankrike in Swedish and Norwegian all mean "Land/realm of the Franks". On 10 August 1792, an angry crowd threatened the palace of Louis XVI, who took refuge in the Legislative Assembly. [60] [61] A Prussian army invaded France later in August 1792. In early September, Parisians, infuriated by the Prussian Army capturing Verdun and counter-revolutionary uprisings in the west of France, murdered between 1,000 and 1,500 prisoners by raiding the Parisian prisons. The Assembly and the Paris City Council seemed unable to stop that bloodshed. [60] [62] The National Convention, chosen in the first elections under male universal suffrage, [60] on 20 September 1792 succeeded the Legislative Assembly and on 21 September abolished the monarchy by proclaiming the French First Republic. Louis XVI was convicted of treason and guillotined in January 1793. France had declared war on Great Britain and the Dutch Republic in November 1792 and did the same on Spain in March 1793; in the spring of 1793, Austria and Prussia invaded France; in March, France created a " sister republic" in the " Republic of Mainz" and kept it under control.

The etymology of *Frank is uncertain. It is traditionally derived from the Proto-Germanic word * frankōn, which translates as "javelin" or "lance" (the throwing axe of the Franks was known as the francisca), [24] although these weapons may have been named because of their use by the Franks, not the other way around. [22] French literature and poetry flourished during the 18th and 19th centuries. Denis Diderot's best-known works are Jacques the Fatalist and Rameau's Nephew. He is best known, however, as the main editor of the Encyclopédie, whose aim was, to sum up all the knowledge of his century (in fields such as arts, sciences, languages, and philosophy) and to fight ignorance and obscurantism. During that same century, Charles Perrault was a prolific writer of children's fairy tales including Puss in Boots, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Bluebeard. At the start of the 19th century, symbolist poetry was an important movement in French literature, with poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé. [326]Crémieux-Br Facing financial troubles, Louis XVI summoned the Estates-General (gathering the three Estates of the realm) in May 1789 to propose solutions to his government. As it came to an impasse, the representatives of the Third Estate formed a National Assembly, signalling the outbreak of the French Revolution. Fearing that the king would suppress the newly created National Assembly, insurgents stormed the Bastille on 14 July 1789, a date which would become France's National Day.

a b c d "World Economic Outlook Database, October 2023 Edition. (France)". IMF.org. International Monetary Fund. 10 October 2023 . Retrieved 10 October 2023. Source gives area of metropolitan France as 551,500 km 2 (212,900 sq mi) and lists overseas regions separately, whose areas sum to 89,179 km 2 (34,432 sq mi). Adding these give the total shown here for the entire French Republic. The World Factbook reports the total as 643,801 km 2 (248,573 sq mi). During the May 1958 crisis, the weak and unstable Fourth Republic gave way to the Fifth Republic, which included a strengthened presidency. [74] In the latter role, de Gaulle managed to keep the country together while taking steps to end the Algerian War. The war was concluded with the Évian Accords in 1962 which led to Algerian independence. Algerian independence came at a high price: it resulted in between half a million and one million deaths and over 2million internally displaced Algerians. [75] Around one million Pied-Noirs and Harkis fled from Algeria to France upon independence. [76] A vestige of the colonial empire are the French overseas departments and territories. Wells, John C. (2008). Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (3rded.). Longman. ISBN 978-1-4058-8118-0. ; Collins, Beverley; Mees, Inger M. (1990). "The Phonetics of Cardiff English". In Coupland, Nikolas; Thomas, Alan Richard (eds.). English in Wales: Diversity, Conflict, and Change. Multilingual Matters Ltd. p.96. ISBN 978-1-85359-032-0. France has a mixed market economy, characterised by sizeable government involvement, and economic diversity. For roughly two centuries, the French economy has consistently ranked among the ten largest globally; it is currently the world's ninth-largest by purchasing power parity, the seventh-largest by nominal GDP, and the second-largest in the European Union by both metrics. [176] France is considered an economic power, with membership in the Group of Seven leading industrialised countries, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the Group of Twenty largest economies.From the 16th to the 19th century, France was responsible for 11% of the transatlantic slave trade, [55] second only to Great Britain during the 18th century. [56] While the state began condoning the practice with letters patent in the 1630s, Louis XIII only formalized this authorization more generally in 1642 in the last year of his reign. By the mid-18th century, Nantes had become the principal French slave-trading port. [55] Louis XIV, the "Sun King", was the absolute monarch of France and made France the leading European power.