The history of France

France has one of the longest continuous histories of any European state. Its caves hold some of the oldest art in the world, its Celtic inhabitants, the Gauls, were conquered by Rome, and after the fall of Roman rule the Franks built the kingdom that gave the country its name. Under the Capetian kings and their successors, Paris became the centre of a powerful monarchy that reached its peak under Louis XIV, before the Revolution of 1789 overthrew it and spread ideas of citizenship and rights across Europe. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought empire, a vast colonial domain, revolutions, three wars with Germany and the trauma of occupation, followed by decolonisation, European integration and the Fifth Republic, which has governed France since 1958.

Early humans lived in what is now France hundreds of thousands of years ago: the remains of Tautavel Man in the eastern Pyrenees date from around 450,000 years ago, and Neanderthals later occupied the land for a long period. Modern humans arrived during the last Ice Age, with traces at the Mandrin cave in the Rhône valley dated to more than 50,000 years ago. These Ice Age hunters left an extraordinary legacy of art. The paintings of the Chauvet cave in the Ardèche, which show lions, rhinoceroses and horses, are more than 30,000 years old, and those of Lascaux in the Dordogne were made around 17,000 years ago.

Farming spread into France from the southeast and along the Danube corridor from about 6000 BCE. Neolithic communities in Brittany raised huge stone monuments, most famously the thousands of standing stones arranged in rows at Carnac, put up over many centuries from around 4500 BCE. Bronze working arrived in the second millennium BCE, and in the first millennium BCE the Celtic cultures known to archaeologists as Hallstatt and La Tène spread across the country.

Around 600 BCE Greek settlers from Phocaea in Asia Minor founded Massalia, today Marseille, which became a major trading port and introduced vines, olives and writing to the south. Inland lived the Gauls, Celtic peoples (the Celts) organised into dozens of tribes with fortified towns, a priestly class of druids and fine metalwork. Gallic warriors sacked Rome around 390 BCE and settled in northern Italy.

The Roman Republic took the southern coast in the late second century BCE, creating the province later called Gallia Narbonensis. Between 58 and 50 BCE Julius Caesar conquered the rest of Gaul in a brutal campaign that, by ancient accounts, killed or enslaved huge numbers. The Gauls united under the Arverni chief Vercingetorix, but he was besieged and defeated at Alesia in 52 BCE.

Under the Roman Empire, Gaul became one of the most prosperous parts of the Roman world. Lugdunum, today Lyon, was its administrative centre, and Roman roads, aqueducts and amphitheatres such as those at Nîmes and Arles still stand. Gaulish gradually gave way to spoken Latin, the ancestor of French. Christianity spread from the second century, with martyrs at Lyon in 177. In the third-century crisis a breakaway Gallic Empire ruled the region from 260 to 274, and from the early fifth century Germanic peoples crossed the Rhine. Visigoths settled in the southwest, Burgundians in the east and Franks in the north, while a combined Roman and Germanic army halted Attila on the Catalaunian Plains in 451.

The Franks, a Germanic people from the lower Rhine, gave France its name. Their king Clovis, of the Merovingian dynasty, defeated the last Roman ruler in northern Gaul at Soissons in 486, beat the Visigoths at Vouillé in 507 and made Paris his chief residence. His baptism as a Catholic Christian, around 500, won him the support of the Gallo-Roman bishops and set the Frankish kingdom apart from other Germanic kingdoms, whose rulers followed Arian Christianity. The kingdom was repeatedly divided among royal sons, and real power passed to the mayors of the palace.

One of them, Charles Martel, defeated an Umayyad army near Poitiers at the Battle of Tours in 732. His son Pepin the Short deposed the last Merovingian in 751 with the pope's approval. Pepin's son Charlemagne built an empire stretching from the Pyrenees to the Elbe and was crowned emperor in Rome on Christmas Day 800. The Carolingian Empire promoted learning and church reform, but it did not hold together. By the Treaty of Verdun in 843 his grandsons divided it, and the western portion, West Francia under Charles the Bald, became the core of the future France. Viking raids hit the river valleys, Paris was besieged in 885 and 886, and in 911 the king granted the lower Seine to the Norse leader Rollo, creating Normandy.

When the last Carolingian died in 987, the nobles elected Hugh Capet, Count of Paris, as king. His direct descendants held the throne until 1328, and their branches until 1848. The early Capetians directly ruled little more than the area around Paris and Orléans, while great vassals such as the dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine were often more powerful. After the Duke of Normandy, William the Conqueror, won England at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, and Henry II of England acquired Aquitaine through his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152, the English kings held more of France than the French king.

The medieval kingdom was the heartland of monastic reform, centred on the abbey of Cluny, founded in 910, and of the Crusades, which Pope Urban II launched at Clermont in 1095. Gothic architecture emerged at the abbey of Saint-Denis in the 1140s and in cathedrals such as Notre-Dame de Paris and Chartres, and the University of Paris became the leading centre of theology in Europe. Philip II Augustus took Normandy from King John in 1204 and defeated a coalition of his enemies at Bouvines in 1214. The Albigensian Crusade, launched in 1209 against the Cathar movement in the south, brought great bloodshed and ultimately extended royal power to the Mediterranean. Louis IX, canonised as Saint Louis, gave the monarchy moral prestige and died on crusade at Tunis in 1270. Philip IV the Fair clashed with the papacy, suppressed the Knights Templar and summoned the first Estates General in 1302, and from 1309 the popes lived at Avignon.

When the direct Capetian line ended in 1328, the crown passed to the Valois branch, but Edward III of England, a grandson of Philip IV through his mother, claimed it. The resulting Hundred Years' War between France and the Kingdom of England, fought from 1337 to 1453, brought English victories at Crécy in 1346, Poitiers in 1356 and Agincourt in 1415. Combined with the Black Death, which arrived in 1348 and killed perhaps a third of the population, and with peasant revolts and civil war between the Armagnac and Burgundian factions, it left the kingdom devastated. By the Treaty of Troyes in 1420 the English king was named heir to the French throne.

The turning point came in 1429, when Joan of Arc, a peasant girl from Lorraine, helped lift the siege of Orléans and brought the dauphin to Reims to be crowned Charles VII. She was captured, tried for heresy and burned at Rouen in 1431, but the French recovered Paris and Normandy and won the final battle at Castillon in 1453. Only Calais remained English, until 1558. Louis XI then broke the power of the dukes of Burgundy, and by 1532 Brittany too was united with the crown.

From 1494 French kings fought in Italy, and although the Italian Wars ended in 1559 without lasting conquests, they brought the Renaissance north. Francis I built châteaux in the Loire valley and invited Leonardo da Vinci, who died at Amboise in 1519. The Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts of 1539 made French the language of law and administration, and Jacques Cartier's voyages from 1534 laid the basis of French claims in Canada.

The teachings of the French reformer John Calvin, based in Geneva, won many followers, the Huguenots, especially among nobles and townspeople. Between 1562 and 1598 a series of civil wars, the Wars of Religion, tore the country apart. In the St Bartholomew's Day massacre that began in Paris on 24 August 1572, Catholic mobs and soldiers killed thousands of Protestants. The Protestant Henry of Navarre became Henry IV, the first Bourbon king, in 1589, converted to Catholicism to secure Paris, and in 1598 issued the Edict of Nantes, which granted Protestants freedom of worship in many places. He was assassinated in 1610.

Under Louis XIII, his chief minister Cardinal Richelieu weakened the Huguenots, taking their stronghold of La Rochelle in 1628, curbed the nobility and brought France into the Thirty Years' War against the Habsburgs. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 gave France much of Alsace. Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec in 1608, and France also established footholds in the Caribbean, Senegal and the Indian Ocean.

Louis XIV, who reigned from 1643 to 1715, became the model of the absolute monarch. Having lived through the noble revolts of the Fronde as a child, he governed personally from 1661, tamed the aristocracy by drawing it to his court at Versailles, where he moved in 1682, and built the largest army in Europe. His wars added territory in the north and east but drained the treasury, and the War of the Spanish Succession placed his grandson on the Spanish throne at great cost. In 1685 he revoked the Edict of Nantes, and some 200,000 Huguenots fled abroad. The same year he issued the Code Noir to regulate slavery in the colonies. In the eighteenth century the sugar islands, above all Saint-Domingue, made France rich on the labour of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans brought through the Atlantic slave trade.

French thinkers led the Enlightenment, building on the work of René Descartes and others. Voltaire attacked intolerance, Montesquieu argued for the separation of powers, Rousseau wrote of popular sovereignty, and Denis Diderot edited the Encyclopédie. Abroad, France lost most of its North American and Indian possessions to Britain in the Seven Years' War, ended by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, and took revenge by supporting the American Revolution, which added to a growing debt.

To deal with the financial crisis, Louis XVI summoned the Estates General in May 1789 for the first time since 1614. The deputies of the Third Estate proclaimed themselves a National Assembly, and on 14 July Parisian crowds stormed the Bastille. The French Revolution abolished feudal privileges, issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in August 1789, nationalised church lands and reorganised the country into departments. War with Austria and Prussia from 1792 radicalised it: the monarchy fell in August 1792, the First Republic was proclaimed in September, and the king was executed in January 1793, followed by Marie Antoinette in October.

Under the Committee of Public Safety, dominated by Robespierre, the Terror of 1793 and 1794 sent about 16,000 people to the guillotine after formal sentences, and many more died in prison or in the suppression of revolts. The war in the Vendée in the west killed well over 100,000 people. In 1794 the Convention abolished slavery in the colonies, following the slave uprising in Saint-Domingue that became the Haitian Revolution. Robespierre fell in July 1794, and a more conservative Directory governed from 1795.

The Directory relied increasingly on the army, and in November 1799 the general Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in a coup. As First Consul he made peace with the Church, created the Bank of France and the prefect system, and issued the Civil Code of 1804, which established legal equality among men and secured property rights. In December 1804 he crowned himself emperor. He also restored slavery in the colonies in 1802, but his army failed to reconquer Saint-Domingue, whose revolution, begun under Toussaint Louverture, produced independent Haiti in 1804.

In the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon defeated Austria, Prussia and Russia and redrew the map of Europe, and at its height the First French Empire and its satellite states covered most of the continent. The guerrilla war in Spain and the disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812 broke his power. He abdicated in 1814, returned from exile on Elba for the Hundred Days, and was finally defeated at Waterloo in June 1815.

The Bourbons returned under Louis XVIII and then Charles X, whose attempts to restore the old order provoked the July Revolution of 1830. The new king, Louis-Philippe of the Orléans branch, ruled a constitutional monarchy dominated by the wealthy. The same year France invaded Algeria, beginning a conquest that lasted decades and killed hundreds of thousands of Algerians through war, famine and disease. Another revolution in February 1848 created the Second Republic, which introduced universal male suffrage and finally abolished slavery in the colonies. Its first president, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, the emperor's nephew, staged a coup in December 1851 and became Emperor Napoleon III in 1852.

The Second Empire brought rapid industrialisation, railways and the rebuilding of Paris under Baron Haussmann. Napoleon III fought in the Crimea and Italy, gaining Nice and Savoy in 1860, began the conquest of Indochina and failed in an attempt to install an emperor in Mexico. Novelists such as Victor Hugo, who spent the period in exile, and painters who would found Impressionism shaped the cultural life of the century. In 1870 Bismarck provoked war, and the Prussian-led armies captured the emperor at Sedan. The war completed the unification of Germany, whose empire was proclaimed at Versailles in January 1871, and France lost Alsace and much of Lorraine. In Paris, the radical Commune rose against the new government in March 1871 and was crushed in May in a week of street fighting and executions that killed thousands.

The Third Republic, proclaimed in September 1870, lasted until 1940, longer than any French regime since the Revolution. It made primary education free, compulsory and secular in the 1880s, and its science produced figures such as Louis Pasteur and Marie Curie. The Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish army officer was falsely convicted of treason in 1894 and only cleared in 1906, divided the nation and exposed deep antisemitism. A law of 1905 separated church and state, founding the French principle of laïcité.

France built the second-largest colonial empire in the world. In the Scramble for Africa it took vast areas that were organised as French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, along with Tunisia, Morocco and Madagascar, while French Indochina brought together Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Colonial rule depended on forced labour and the violent suppression of resistance, while a small number of colonial subjects gained French citizenship.

In the First World War the Western Front ran through northern France. The French army stopped the German advance on the Marne in 1914 and held Verdun through the long battle of 1916. About 1.4 million French soldiers died, around 4 percent of the population, and the northeast was devastated. The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 returned Alsace-Lorraine. The interwar years brought political division, the economic strains of the Great Depression and the Popular Front government of Léon Blum in 1936, which introduced paid holidays and the forty-hour week.

In the Second World War, Germany invaded in May 1940 and defeated France within six weeks. Marshal Philippe Pétain signed an armistice in June, and the parliament voted him full powers. His regime, based at Vichy, governed the unoccupied south until Germany occupied the whole country in November 1942, and it collaborated actively with Nazi Germany. From London, Charles de Gaulle called for resistance on 18 June 1940 and led the Free French, while resistance networks grew inside France.

Vichy passed its own antisemitic laws, the Statut des Juifs of October 1940 and June 1941, and French police carried out roundups of Jews, including the arrest of about 13,000 people in Paris on 16 and 17 July 1942, who were held at the Vélodrome d'Hiver before deportation. Of around 350,000 Jews in France in 1940, some 77,000 died in the Holocaust, most of them at Auschwitz. Allied forces landed in Normandy on 6 June 1944 and in Provence in August, and Paris was liberated on 25 August 1944. Women voted for the first time in 1945.

The Fourth Republic, founded in 1946, presided over rapid recovery and the beginning of three decades of strong economic growth. Under the Schuman Declaration of 1950, France proposed pooling coal and steel with West Germany, leading to the European Coal and Steel Community and, in 1957, the Treaty of Rome. But the republic was weakened by unstable coalitions and colonial wars. Uprisings were met with mass killings at Sétif in Algeria in 1945 and in Madagascar in 1947. In Indochina, France fought the Viet Minh of Ho Chi Minh from 1946 until its defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

The war of independence in Algeria, which began in 1954, was the most painful. Algeria was legally part of France and home to about a million European settlers, and the French army used torture and mass internment against the National Liberation Front, which itself used terror against civilians. Estimates of the dead range from about 500,000 to over a million. In May 1958 the crisis brought de Gaulle back to power.

De Gaulle's new constitution of October 1958 created the Fifth Republic with a strong presidency. He recognised Algerian independence through the Évian Accords of 1962, after which around a million pieds-noirs and harkis, Algerians who had served with the French army, fled to France. Most of France's colonies in sub-Saharan Africa became independent in 1960, part of the wider decolonisation of Africa, though France kept close economic and military ties with many of them, and several overseas territories remained French. De Gaulle developed nuclear weapons, withdrew from NATO's integrated command in 1966 and pursued an independent role during the Cold War. The student and worker revolt of May 1968 shook his government, and he resigned in 1969.

His successors, Georges Pompidou and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, deepened European integration. François Mitterrand, elected in 1981 as the first Socialist president of the Fifth Republic, abolished the death penalty that year and worked closely with West Germany on the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which created the European Union. France adopted the euro in 1999, with notes and coins in 2002. Jacques Chirac, president from 1995 to 2007, opposed the Iraq War in 2003, and voters rejected a proposed European constitution in 2005. Questions of immigration, integration and secularism became central to political debate, while terrorist attacks struck the country: gunmen attacked the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, and the coordinated attacks in Paris on 13 November 2015 killed 130 people.

Emmanuel Macron, a centrist, was elected president in 2017 and re-elected in 2022, while the far-right National Rally became the largest single opposition force. His camp lost its majority in the National Assembly in the 2022 legislative elections. After the National Rally won the European Parliament elections in June 2024, Macron dissolved the Assembly. The snap elections of 30 June and 7 July 2024 produced a hung parliament divided between the left-wing New Popular Front, Macron's centrist alliance and the National Rally, with no bloc near a majority.

Governing became difficult. Michel Barnier, appointed prime minister in September 2024, was brought down by a vote of no confidence on 4 December. His successor, François Bayrou, lost a confidence vote on 8 September 2025, and Sébastien Lecornu was appointed the next day. Lecornu resigned on 6 October 2025, hours after naming his cabinet, but was reappointed four days later, and in early 2026 his government pushed the budget through parliament by using the constitution's Article 49.3, surviving the no-confidence motions that followed. France, with a population of about 69 million including its overseas departments, remains a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, a nuclear power and, with Germany, one of the two leading states of the European Union.