France

The land that became France was Celtic Gaul when Julius Caesar conquered it in the 50s BCE. Five centuries of Roman rule left the Latin that grew into French, and the road network, arenas and aqueducts still standing across the south: the Pont du Gard, the arenas of Nîmes and Arles, the theatre at Orange. As Rome faded, Germanic Franks took over; their king Clovis converted to Catholicism around 500, and Charlemagne was crowned emperor in 800. His empire split among his grandsons, and the western part became the kingdom of France.

For most of the Middle Ages the French king controlled little beyond the Paris basin. Great lords, above all the dukes of Normandy — who also became kings of England after 1066 — held much of the country. The Hundred Years' War (1337–1453) was at root a fight over those English-held lands; Joan of Arc turned the tide at Orléans in 1429 and was burned at Rouen two years later. Victory left the crown stronger, and over the next two centuries kings absorbed Brittany, Burgundy, Provence and more, building the châteaux of the Loire as the court moved between them.

Louis XIV (reigned 1643–1715) made the monarchy absolute and the palace of Versailles its stage, turning the nobility into courtiers and French into the language of European diplomacy. The costs of his wars and those of his successors, a rigid tax system and bad harvests brought bankruptcy, and in 1789 the Estates-General became a revolution. The monarchy fell, Louis XVI was executed in 1793, and the Terror followed. Napoleon Bonaparte took power in 1799, crowned himself emperor, spread the Civil Code across Europe, and fell in 1815 after Waterloo.

The 19th century swung between restored kings, a second empire under Napoleon III — who rebuilt Paris with Baron Haussmann — and the Third Republic proclaimed after defeat by Prussia in 1870. That republic built schools in every village, separated church and state in 1905, and led France through the First World War, which killed about 1.4 million French soldiers on the Western Front. In 1940 Germany overran the country in six weeks; the Vichy regime collaborated while the Resistance and de Gaulle's Free French fought on until liberation in 1944.

After 1945 France rebuilt fast in the 'thirty glorious years', fought and lost colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria, and in 1958 adopted de Gaulle's Fifth Republic with its strong presidency. It co-founded the European Community, built nuclear power and the TGV, and absorbed large immigration from North and West Africa. The student and worker revolt of May 1968, the euro in 2002, the terror attacks of 2015–16 and the gilets jaunes protests of 2018–19 are the reference points people still argue about.

Around 68 million people live in France, including about 2 million in the overseas departments of the Caribbean, South America and the Indian Ocean. For centuries the state treated the French language as the glue of the nation: 19th-century schools punished children for speaking Breton, Occitan or Alsatian, and the constitution still names French as the only language of the Republic. Regional languages survive in signs, songs and a network of immersion schools, and a Marseillais and a Lillois still sound very different.

The Republic officially sees citizens, not communities. It collects no census data on ethnicity or religion, and the idea of 'communautarisme' — groups living by their own rules — is treated as a threat. Laïcité, the strict separation of religion from public institutions under the 1905 law, is a founding principle: no crucifixes in schools, no headscarves for pupils in state schools since 2004, and no face-covering veils in public since 2010. Visitors meet these debates in newspapers and on television more than in daily life.

Modern France is multi-ethnic. Waves of Italians, Spaniards, Poles and Portuguese came in the 20th century, followed by North Africans (Maghrébins) and West Africans from former colonies, and more recently people from across the world. Paris, Marseille and Lyon have large neighbourhoods where Arabic, Wolof and Portuguese are heard as often as French. The banlieues — the suburban estates built in the 1960s and 70s — are where tensions over jobs, policing and identity are sharpest.

Daily life keeps rituals that visitors notice quickly: the bonjour on entering any shop, the long lunch, dinner at eight, the family Sunday, the five weeks of paid holiday that empty cities in August. Politeness is formal — vous before tu, titles before first names — and debate is a pleasure rather than a threat. Strikes and demonstrations are part of political culture, not a sign of crisis; unions and students have toppled reforms in the street more than once.

French cooking has two traditions that meet on every menu. Haute cuisine grew out of aristocratic kitchens and was codified by chefs like Carême in the early 19th century and Escoffier around 1900, who gave the world the brigade system, the mother sauces and the à la carte menu. Cuisine du terroir is the regional home cooking of butter or olive oil, duck or pork, cider or wine, that varies from valley to valley. UNESCO listed the 'gastronomic meal of the French' as intangible heritage in 2010 — the ritual of courses, pairing and conversation rather than any single dish.

The restaurant itself is a French invention of the late 18th century, and the Paris bistro and the Lyon bouchon are its everyday forms. Nouvelle cuisine in the 1970s lightened sauces and shortened cooking times; since the 2000s the 'bistronomie' movement has brought chef-level food to small, cheaper rooms. The Michelin Guide, started by a tyre company in 1900 to get drivers on the road, still shapes careers, though many French people choose their restaurant by the quality of its lunch formule.

Bread and cheese are daily rather than special. The baguette became the everyday loaf in the 20th century and was added to UNESCO's list in 2022; a law defines what may be sold as 'pain de tradition française'. France makes several hundred cheeses, many under protected designations (AOP) that fix the milk, the breed and the region: Comté from the Jura, Roquefort from ewe's milk aged in caves, Camembert de Normandie from raw milk.

Wine is regional geography you can drink. Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne, the Rhône, the Loire and Alsace each have their grapes, rules and classifications; the AOC system born in the 1930s ties a name to a place and a method. Consumption has halved since the 1960s and vineyards are pulling out vines, but wine is still the default with a meal. Aperitifs (pastis in the south, kir in Burgundy) and digestifs (Calvados, Cognac, Armagnac) frame dinner.

Gothic architecture was born in the Île-de-France: the rebuilt choir of the abbey of Saint-Denis in the 1140s used pointed arches and ribbed vaults to open walls to glass, and within a century Chartres, Notre-Dame, Reims and Amiens had taken the style to its height. The Sainte-Chapelle, built by Louis IX to hold relics, is almost all stained glass. After the 2019 fire, Notre-Dame was restored with original techniques and reopened in December 2024.

Royal patronage made France Europe's arbiter of taste from the Renaissance to the Revolution. Francis I brought Leonardo da Vinci to Amboise and Italian builders to Chambord and Fontainebleau; Louis XIV founded the academies of painting and architecture and staged his power at Versailles. The Louvre, a royal palace turned public museum in 1793, grew out of that collection and the loot of Napoleon's campaigns.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries Paris was the capital of modern art. Realists and Impressionists — Courbet, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas — broke with the official Salon; Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin worked in Provence and Brittany; Picasso, Matisse and Braque invented Cubism and Fauvism; and Montmartre and Montparnasse drew artists and writers from everywhere. The Musée d'Orsay, a converted railway station, holds the core of that story, and the Riviera has museums dedicated to Matisse, Chagall, Picasso and Léger.

The state still builds big cultural projects: the Centre Pompidou (1977), the Louvre pyramid (1989), the Fondation Louis Vuitton (2014) and regional branches such as the Louvre-Lens and Pompidou-Metz. France also counts cinema as an art to protect: the Lumière brothers screened the first films in 1895, the New Wave of Godard and Truffaut remade film in the 1960s, and a quota system still funds French production. The Cannes festival each May is the industry's main event.

Mainland France is the largest country in the EU, about 550,000 km², shaped like a hexagon — 'l'Hexagone' is the everyday name for it. Three coasts (the Channel, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean) and three mountain ranges (the Alps, the Pyrenees and the Jura, with the old volcanic Massif Central in the middle) give it more variety than most European countries. Mont Blanc, at about 4,805 m, is the highest point in Western Europe.

The north and the Paris basin are flat farmland and forest, with chalk cliffs at Étretat and the tidal bay of Mont-Saint-Michel on the Channel. Brittany is granite coast, standing stones and Celtic place names. The Loire, France's longest river, runs through the châteaux country before reaching the Atlantic at Nantes. The south-west mixes the Bordeaux vineyards, the pine forest and dune of the Landes, and the Basque country's green hills.

The east is wine country and old borderland: Champagne, Burgundy's Côte d'Or, and Alsace, which changed hands between France and Germany four times between 1871 and 1945 and still shows it in its half-timbered towns, dialect and food. The Rhône valley links Lyon to the Mediterranean, where Provence brings limestone hills, lavender, olive groves and the mistral, and the Riviera runs from Cannes past Nice and Monaco to Italy. Corsica, an island of granite mountains, has its own language and a strong nationalist movement.

Climate change is visible across these regions. Alpine glaciers such as the Mer de Glace have retreated fast, low ski stations are closing, summer heatwaves regularly reach 40 °C, wildfires have spread beyond the Mediterranean into Brittany and the Gironde, and vineyards are harvesting weeks earlier than a generation ago. Water restrictions in summer are now routine in many departments.

The Fifth Republic gives the president unusual power: he names the prime minister, leads foreign and defence policy, and can dissolve parliament. Emmanuel Macron, elected in 2017 and re-elected in 2022, dissolved the National Assembly in 2024; the snap election produced a parliament split into three blocs — the left, the centre and the far-right National Rally — with no majority, and governments have since fallen or survived vote by vote. The next presidential election is due in spring 2027 and Macron cannot run again.

The economy is large and diverse: aerospace (Airbus assembles in Toulouse), luxury (LVMH, Kering, Hermès), energy, pharmaceuticals, farming and tourism. Nuclear plants produce about two-thirds of the country's electricity. High public spending pays for generous health care, pensions and public services, and public debt above 110% of GDP drives the budget fights that bring down governments. Pension reform, which raised the retirement age to 64 in 2023, remains the most contested issue.

France welcomes about 100 million foreign visitors a year, more than any other country, and tourism is managed as a national industry. Paris has responded to overcrowding and the 2024 Olympics with new metro lines, bike lanes, Seine swimming spots and higher prices for non-EU visitors at some national museums; Mont-Saint-Michel, the Calanques and Étretat use quotas or reservations at peak times.

For visitors, the politics shows up in practical ways: strikes on trains and flights, demonstrations on Saturdays, armed soldiers on patrol under the Vigipirate security plan, and heated debates on television about immigration, secularism and the cost of living. None of it makes France unsafe to visit, but it rewards checking the news and the SNCF app before a travel day.