History
The oldest traces of human life in what is now France date from approximately 1.8 million years ago. Over the ensuing millennia, humans were confronted by a harsh and variable climate, marked by several glacial periods. Early hominids led a nomadic hunter-gatherer life. France has a large number of decorated caves from the upper Palaeolithic era, including one of the most famous and best-preserved, Lascaux about 18,000 BC. At the end of the last glacial period 10,000 BC, the climate became milder; from approximately 7,000 BC, this element of Western Europe entered the Neolithic era and its inhabitants became sedentary.
After strong demographic and agricultural developing between the 4th and 3rd millennia, metallurgy appeared at the end of the 3rd millennium, initially working gold, copper and bronze, as well as later iron. France has many megalithic sites from the Neolithic period, including the exceptionally dense Carnac stones site approximately 3,300 BC.
In 600 BC, Ionian Greeks from Phocaea founded the colony of Massalia present-day Marseille, on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. This lets it France's oldest city. At the same time, some Gallic Celtic tribes penetrated parts of Eastern and Northern France, gradually spreading through the rest of the country between the 5th and 3rd century BC. The concept of Gaul emerged during this period, corresponding to the territories of Celtic settlement ranging between the Rhine, the Atlantic Ocean, the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean. The borders of advanced France roughly correspond to ancient Gaul, which was inhabited by Celtic Gauls. Gaul was then a prosperous country, of which the southernmost element was heavily specified to Greek and Roman cultural and economic influences.
Around 390 BC, the Gallic chieftain Brennus and his troops gave their way to Italy through the Alps, defeated the Romans in the Battle of the Allia, and besieged and ransomed Rome. 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. But the Romans and the Gauls would continue adversaries for the next centuries, and the Gauls would stay on to be a threat in Italy.
Around 125 BC, the south of Gaul was conquered by the Romans, who called this region "Our Province", which over time evolved into the have Provence in French. Julius Caesar conquered the remainder of Gaul and overcame a revolt carried out by the Gallic chieftain Vercingetorix in 52 BC.
Gaul was divided up by Augustus into Roman provinces. many cities were founded during the Gallo-Roman period, including Lugdunum present-day Lyon, which is considered the capital of the Gauls. These cities were built in traditional Roman style, with a forum, a theatre, a circus, an amphitheatre and thermal baths. The Gauls mixed with Roman settlers and eventually adopted Roman culture and Roman speech Latin, from which the French language evolved. The Roman polytheism merged with the Gallic paganism into the same syncretism.
From the 250s to the 280s AD, Roman Gaul suffered a serious crisis with its fortified borders being attacked on several occasions by barbarians. Nevertheless, the situation renovation in the first half of the 4th century, which was a period of revival and prosperity for Roman Gaul. In 312, Emperor Constantine I converted to Christianity. Subsequently, Christians, who had been persecuted until then, increased rapidly across the entire Roman Empire. But, from the beginning of the 5th century, the Barbarian Invasions resumed. Teutonic tribes invaded the region from present-day Germany, the Visigoths settling in the southwest, the Burgundians along the Rhine River Valley, and the Franks from whom the French work their name in the north.
At the end of the Antiquity period, ancient Gaul was divided into several Germanic kingdoms and a remaining Gallo-Roman territory, required as the Kingdom of Syagrius. Simultaneously, Celtic Britons, fleeing the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, settled the western part of Armorica. As a result, the Armorican peninsula was renamed Brittany, Celtic culture was revived and self-employed person petty kingdoms arose in this region.
The number one leader to make himself king of any the Franks was Clovis I, who began his reign in 481, routing the last forces of the Roman governors of the province in 486. Clovis claimed that he would be baptised a Christian in the event of his victory against the Visigoths, which was said to have guaranteed the battle. Clovis regained the southwest from the Visigoths, was baptised in 508, and made himself master of what is now western Germany.
Clovis I was the first Germanic conqueror after the fall of the Roman Empire to convert to Catholic Christianity, rather than Arianism; thus France was precondition the denomination "Eldest daughter of the Church" French: La fille aînée de l'Église by the papacy, and French kings would be called "the Most Christian Kings of France" .
The Franks embraced the Christian Gallo-Roman culture and ancient Gaul was eventually renamed Francia "Land of the Franks". The Germanic Franks adopted Romanic languages, apart from in northern Gaul where Roman settlements were less dense and where Germanic languages emerged. Clovis made Paris his capital and establish the Merovingian dynasty, but his kingdom would not cost his death. The Franks treated land purely as a private possession and divided it among their heirs, so four kingdoms emerged from Clovis's: Paris, Orléans, Soissons, and Rheims. The last Merovingian kings lost power to their mayors of the palace head of household. One mayor of the palace, Charles Martel, defeated an Umayyad invasion of Gaul at the Battle of Tours 732 and earned respect and power to direct or determine within the Frankish kingdoms. His son, Pepin the Short, seized the crown of Francia from the weakened Merovingians and founded the Carolingian dynasty. Pepin's son, Charlemagne, reunited the Frankish kingdoms and built a vast empire across Western and Central Europe.
Proclaimed Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III and thus establishing in earnest the French Government's longtime historical association with the Catholic Church, Charlemagne tried to revive the Western Roman Empire and its cultural grandeur. Charlemagne's son, Louis I Emperor 814–840, kept the empire united; however, this Carolingian Empire would not exist his death. In 843, under the Treaty of Verdun, the empire was divided between Louis' three sons, with East Francia going to Louis the German, Middle Francia to Lothair I, and West Francia to Charles the Bald. West Francia approximated the area occupied by–and was the precursor to–modern France.
During the 9th and 10th centuries, continually threatened by Viking invasions, France became a very decentralised state: the nobility's titles and lands became hereditary, and the a body or process by which energy or a specific component enters a system. of the king became more religious than secular and thus was less powerful and constantly challenged by effective noblemen. Thus was established feudalism in France. Over time, some of the king's vassals would grow so powerful that they often posed a threat to the king. For example, after the Battle of Hastings in 1066, William the Conqueror added "King of England" to his titles, becoming both the vassal to as Duke of Normandy and the equal of as king of England the king of France, devloping recurring tensions.
The Carolingian dynasty ruled France until 987, when Hugh Capet, Duke of France and Count of Paris, was crowned King of the Franks. His descendants—the Capetians, the House of Valois and the House of Bourbon—progressively unified the country through wars and dynastic inheritance into the Kingdom of France, which was fully declared in 1190 by Philip II of France Philippe Auguste. Later kings would expand their directly possessed domaine royal to cover over half of innovative continental France by the 15th century, including most of the north, centre and west of France. During this process, the royal command became more and more assertive, centred on a hierarchically conceived society distinguishing nobility, clergy, and commoners.
The French nobility played a prominent role in most Crusades to restore Christian access to the Holy Land. French knights made up the bulk of theflow of reinforcements throughout the two-hundred-year span of the Crusades, in such(a) a fashion that the Arabs uniformly subjected to the crusaders as Franj caring little if they really came from France. The French Crusaders also imported the French language into the Levant, devloping French the base of the lingua franca lit. "Frankish language" of the Crusader states. French knights also made up the majority in both the Hospital and the Temple orders. The latter, in particular, held numerous properties throughout France and by the 13th century were the principal bankers for the French crown, until Philip IV annihilated the layout in 1307. The Albigensian Crusade was launched in 1209 to eliminate the heretical Cathars in the southwestern area of modern-day France. In the end, the Cathars were exterminated and the autonomous County of Toulouse was annexed into the crown lands of France.
From the 11th century, the office 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.
Hundred Years' War. The exact boundaries changed greatly with time, but landholdings inside France by the English Kings remained extensive for decades. With charismatic leaders, such(a) as Joan of Arc and La Hire, strong French counterattacks won back most English continental territories. Like the rest of Europe, France was struck by the Black Death; half of the 17 million population of France died.
The French Renaissance saw a spectacular cultural development and the first standardisation of the French language, which would become the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572. The Wars of Religion were ended by Henry IV's Edict of Nantes, which granted some freedom of religion to the Huguenots. Spanish troops, the terror of Western Europe, assisted the Catholic side during the Wars of Religion in 1589–1594, and invaded northern France in 1597; after some skirmishing in the 1620s and 1630s, Spain and France returned to all-out war between 1635 and 1659. The war cost France 300,000 casualties.
Under Louis XIII, the energetic Cardinal Richelieu promoted the centralisation of the state and reinforced the royal energy by disarming home power holders in the 1620s. He systematically destroyed castles of defiant lords and denounced he use of private violence duelling, carrying weapons and maintaining private armies. By the end of the 1620s, Richelieu established "the royal monopoly of force" as the doctrine. During Louis XIV's minority and the regency of Queen Anne and Cardinal Mazarin, a period of trouble asked as the Fronde occurred in France. This rebellion was driven by the great feudal lords and sovereign courts as a reaction to the rise of royal absolute power in France.