France

The state that invented the modern nation and then exported it by force. Frankish kingdoms under Clovis and then Charlemagne organised the space after Rome, and when Hugh Capet was elected in 987 the royal domain was a strip around Paris and Orleans while the dukes of Normandy, Aquitaine and Burgundy held far more — and after 1066 one of those vassals was also king of England. The Capetians won by outlasting everyone: male heirs in unbroken succession for over three centuries, sons crowned in their fathers' lifetimes to make the throne hereditary in practice, and feudal law used patiently against their own vassals. Philip Augustus took Normandy, Anjou and Poitou from King John in 1204 by declaring his fiefs forfeit and then enforcing it. Louis IX added a reputation for justice that got him canonised; Philip IV humiliated the papacy and destroyed the Templars for their money; the Albigensian Crusade brought the south under northern control. Paris grew into the largest city in Europe, its university was founded around 1200, and French cathedrals and Gothic architecture set the European standard. When the direct Capetian line failed in 1328 the English claim to the throne produced the Hundred Years War, which ran intermittently for 116 years and at one point left the English holding Paris; Joan of Arc turned it at Orleans in 1429 and was burned two years later. France emerged with a standing army and permanent taxation. Louis XIV centralised everything at Versailles, revoked the toleration of Protestants and fought four major wars. The revolution of 1789 abolished feudalism, executed the king, invented the terms left and right, produced the Terror, and then Napoleon, whose civil code was carried across Europe and still underlies the law of dozens of countries. The nineteenth century ran through two more empires and three republics. France built the second largest colonial empire and lost it in Indochina and Algeria. It lost nearly a million and a half men in the First World War and was occupied in the Second. The European Coal and Steel Community of 1951 was a French proposal to make war with Germany materially impossible. The Fifth Republic dates from 1958. Reims was the coronation city and Paris has been the capital since the tenth century. The country has about sixty-eight million people and is the largest in the European Union by area. French is official and is spoken across five continents. It has fifty-three World Heritage sites and receives more tourists than any other country. Nuclear power supplies around two-thirds of its electricity, the highest share anywhere. Overseas departments put French territory in the Caribbean, South America and the Indian and Pacific oceans.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history