I.

Introduction

France, officially French Republic (in French, République Française), country in western Europe, bounded on the north by the English Channel, the Strait of Dover, and the North Sea (which separate it from Great Britain); on the north-east by Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany; on the east by Germany, Switzerland, and Italy; on the south-east by the Mediterranean Sea; on the south by Spain; and on the west by the Bay of Biscay (an arm of the Atlantic Ocean). France is approximately hexagonal in shape, with an extreme length from north to south of about 965 km (600 mi) and a maximum width of about 935 km (580 mi). The capital and largest city is Paris. The republic of France includes ten overseas possessions. These include the overseas departments of French Guiana, in South America; Martinique and Guadeloupe, in the Caribbean; and Réunion, in the Indian Ocean. Territorial collectivities and dependencies include St Pierre and Miquelon, Mayotte, New Caledonia, French Polynesia, the French Southern and Antarctic Territories, and Wallis and Futuna Islands. The total area of metropolitan France, which also includes the island of Corsica in the Mediterranean, is 543,965 sq km (210,026 sq mi).

II.

Land and Resources

The chief physiographical features of France are its natural eastern and southern boundaries, a south-central plateau, and, contiguous to the plateau, a vast region of rolling plains. A series of massive mountain ranges, including a number of ranges of the Alps and the Jura, form natural boundaries at the Franco-Italian and most of the Franco-Swiss borders. With flanking chains and foothills, these ranges dominate the area east of the south-central plateau. Many of the Alpine mountains extending across and along the French border are more than 3,962 m (13,000 ft) above sea level; Mont Blanc (4,810 m/15,781 ft) is the second highest peak on the continent. The Jura, which have a maximum elevation, on the Franco-Swiss boundary, of about 1,710 m (5,600 ft), delineate the eastern frontier of France from the eastern extension of the Rhône Valley to the Belfort Gap, the broad depression linking the basins of the Rhine and the Saône rivers. From the edge of the Belfort Gap to the north-eastern corner of France, the Franco-German border is formed by the River Rhine. The Vosges mountains, extending north from the Belfort Gap, dominate the region between the Moselle and the Rhine. The highest elevations in the Vosges Mountains reach about 1,435 m (4,700 ft). The Pyrenees, which extend along the Franco-Spanish frontier from the Mediterranean Sea to the Bay of Biscay, form the other mountain boundary of France. Pic de Vignemale (3,298 m/10,820 ft) is the highest French peak in the Pyrenees. The Pyrenees are traversed by few passes, a circumstance that has traditionally hampered commerce between France and Spain. The Alpine and other ranges in the east are, however, broken by gaps and passes, notably the passes of St Bernard.

The south-central plateau, known as the Massif Central, is separated from the eastern highland region by the valley of the River Rhône. This elevated region has an irregular relief and conformation. The plateau, rising gradually from the plains region on the north and west, is characterized by volcanic outcroppings; by deeply eroded limestone tablelands to the south of the region of extinct volcanoes; and, farther to the south, by the Cévennes, a series of highlands rising from the Mediterranean coastal depressions.

The plains region, by far the most extensive section of the terrain of France, is a projection of the Great Plain of Europe. Except for a few hilly outcroppings, chiefly in the west-central portion, the French plains consist of gently undulating lowlands, with an elevation of about 200 m (650 ft) above sea level.

The coastline of France, about 3,140 km (1,950 mi) long, has relatively few natural harbours. The northern coast, along the English Channel and the North Sea, is about 1,130 km (700 mi) long and is broken by a number of promontories, river estuaries, and minor indentations, few of which provide safe anchorages. Le Havre is the outstanding exception. As at Cherbourg, a number of harbours have been formed in this region by the construction of breakwaters. The western coastline of France along the Atlantic, including the Bay of Biscay, is about 1,390 km (865 mi) long. From the Brittany peninsula to the Gironde, the Atlantic coastline of France is irregular in outline, and, except in Brittany, is low and sandy. The principal harbours on this part of the coast are those of Brest, Lorient, and Saint-Nazaire. Bordeaux is inland on the Gironde. South of the Gironde, the coastline consists of an almost continuous stretch of dunes, bordered by arid moors. The best natural harbours of France, including those of Marseille, Toulon, and Nice, are on the Mediterranean. A major part of the French Mediterranean coast, which is about 620 km (385 mi) long, is bounded, however, by rocks or shallow water.

A.

Rivers and Lakes

The outstanding features of the plains region, the most fertile in France, are the valleys of the Seine, Loire, and Garonne rivers. Together with numerous tributaries, these rivers drain the Atlantic watershed of France. The River Rhône is the largest in the country in terms of volume of discharge. With its tributaries, particularly the Saône, Isère, and Durance, it drains the French Alpine region. Among the principal tributaries of the River Seine, which is the main artery of the national inland waterway system, are the Aube, Marne, Oise, and Yonne. France has only a few lakes. Lake Geneva, situated on the Franco-Swiss frontier, lies mainly in Switzerland.

B.

Climate

The climate of France is generally temperate, but wide regional contrasts occur, as in the Mediterranean coastal area, where semi-tropical conditions prevail, and in the plateau and eastern highlands regions, where the climate is uniformly bleak. Temperatures along the Atlantic seaboard are equalized by ocean currents and the prevailing south-western winds. In the interior, particularly the north-eastern region, severe winters and hot summers are usual. The mean temperature in Paris is 3° C (37° F) in January and 18° C (64° F) in July. At Lyon, the January average is the same as in Paris, and the July temperature is 20° C (68° F). Precipitation is 573 mm (22y in) per year in Paris, and 764 mm (30 in) annually in Lyon. The heaviest rainfalls occur in June and October. Regional variations in precipitation range between 1,397 mm (55 in) annually in the mountainous areas and 254 mm (10 in) annually in certain northern lowland areas. One of the meteorological peculiarities of southern France is the mistral, a violent north wind of the Mediterranean region, originating in the central plateau region.

C.

Natural Resources

France is richly endowed with an excellent balance of both mineral (particularly iron ore and coal) and agricultural resources. In addition, France has sizeable deposits of antimony, bauxite, magnesium, pyrites, tungsten, salt, potash, radioactive materials, lead, and zinc. Production of natural gas, petroleum, and sulphur is being developed.

France has extensive tracts of fertile soils, the richest of which are the marine sediments of the Paris Basin and the well-watered alluvial soils of the lower valleys of the Seine and Somme rivers.

D.

Plants and Animals

The native plant life of France shows the variety characteristic of continental Europe. It ranges from arctic-alpine lichens and mosses to such semi-tropical species as olive and orange trees. Various species of both coniferous and deciduous trees are found in the forests, which cover about 14.7 million hectares (36.3 million acres), or about 27 per cent of the area of France. The principal forest trees are the chestnut, beech, oak, cork, walnut, fir, and pine. Like that of western Europe generally, the fauna of France includes few specimens of the larger mammals; the most common of these are the deer and the fox. The chamois is found in the higher Alpine regions, and the wolf and wild boar survive in remote forest areas. Among the smaller animals found in the region are the porcupine and several carnivores of the weasel family. France has a wide variety and abundance of bird life, including both indigenous and migratory species. Reptiles are rare, and the only venomous reptile in France is the adder. Carp are the most characteristic freshwater fish found in the country. The Atlantic and Mediterranean coastal waters contain numerous species of fish, including cod, herring, whiting, mackerel, flounder, sardine, and tuna.

E.

Environmental Concerns

Some of the rivers in France are polluted by sewage, industrial waste, and agricultural run-off. Major efforts to improve water quality include building more treatment plants and imposing pollution charges. Air pollution, caused by vehicle exhaust and combustion of fossil fuels, is a significant environmental problem in the major cities. France derives 76 per cent of its electricity from 58 operating nuclear power plants (1998) and the remainder from coal, oil, and hydroelectric power. The country has one of the lowest levels of carbon dioxide emissions among industrialized countries because of its heavy reliance on nuclear energy.

The history of land conservation in France dates from the Middle Ages, when the management of certain forests was prescribed. The government of France approved the first environmental legislation in 1930, and has since enacted various laws establishing the authority and duty of the state in protecting different types of habitats. There are national parks, regional reserves, and also coastal, lakeside, and marine sanctuaries in various parts of the country. France has established seven biosphere reserves as part of its commitment to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Man and the Biosphere Program. Five of these are in France itself, and two lie within French territories. Forests and woodlands cover about one-quarter of the country, and nearly 11.7 per cent (1997) of the total land area of the country is protected. Some forests have been damaged by acid rain. France accepted the World Heritage Convention in 1975 and ratified the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands in 1986. Other international agreements to which France is party include those on air pollution, climate change, ozone layer, hazardous wastes, marine dumping, ship pollution, marine life, endangered species, tropical timber, and whaling.

III.

Population

About 94 per cent of the French are native-born, and the population is mostly white. The largest foreign-born groups are North Africans (mainly Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians), Portuguese, Italians, Spanish, and Turks.

A.

Population Characteristics

The population of France is 64,420,073 (2009 estimate), giving the country an overall population density of about 101 people per sq km (261 people per sq mi). About 77 per cent of the population is classified as urban.

B.

Political Divisions

Metropolitan France, including Corsica, is composed of 22 regions, which are subdivided into 96 departments. The regions are Alsace, Aquitaine, Auvergne, Basse-Normandie, Brittany, Burgundy, Centre, Champagne-Ardenne, Corsica (which became a territorial collectivity in 1991), Franche-Comté, Haute-Normandie, Île-de-France, Languedoc-Roussillon, Limousin, Lorraine, Midi-Pyrénées, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, Pays de la Loire, Picardy, Poitou-Charentes, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, and Rhône-Alpes.

C.

Principal Cities

The capital and largest city of France is Paris, which has a population of 2,153,600 (2005 estimate)/metropolitan area 9,794,337 (2003 estimate). Marseille, 820,900 (2005 estimate)/1,349,772 (1999), is a chief port, and Lyon, 466,400 (2005 estimate)/1,348,832 (1999), is an industrial centre, specializing in textiles. Other major cities include Toulouse, 435,000 (2005 estimate)/761,090 (1999), an industrial and trade centre; Nice, 347,900 (2005 estimate)/888,784 (1999), a resort; Strasbourg, 272,700 (2005 estimate)/427,245 (1999), a Rhine port and industrial and commercial centre; Nantes, 281,800 (2005 estimate)/544,932 (1999), noted for sugar-refining, shipbuilding, and a variety of other industries; Bordeaux, 230,600 (2005 estimate)/753,931 (1999), a seaport and wine and industrial centre; and Montpellier, 244,300 (2005 estimate)/287,981 (1999), a commercial and manufacturing centre.

D.

Religion

Roman Catholicism is the faith of more than 90 per cent of French churchgoers. Islam, Protestantism, and Judaism are the next most important religions. During the 19th century, the Christian and Jewish religions were subsidized by the State. In 1905, because of popular opposition to the political influence of the Roman Catholic Church and to Catholic control of public education, legislation prohibited the payment of public funds to the Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish clergy. By the provisions of that and subsequent legislation, the French government withdrew official recognition of religious denominations.

E.

Language

French, the official language, is spoken by the great majority of people in France. Regional languages remain in some areas. For example, Breton is the language of daily interaction for many in Brittany, and there is a call for it to be officially recognized. Basque and Catalan are spoken in the Pyrénées mountain region near to the Spanish border. Provençal is used in south-eastern France, particularly Provence; Flemish is spoken in Flanders; and Gascon in the Gascogne Province, from Médoc to the Pyrénées, and from the Atlantic to the Spanish border. Alsatian is spoken by quite large numbers in north-eastern France, particularly Alsace and Lorraine. Other regional languages include Auvergnat, Franco-Provençal, Languedocien, Limousin, and Picard.

Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch are mother tongues for some minorities. Many non-indigenous languages are spoken by certain immigrant groups, including Algerian Spoken Arabic, Moroccan Spoken Arabic, Central Khmer, Lesser Antillean Creole French, Kabyle, and Central Atlas Tamazight.

F.

Education

French centres of learning, beginning with the French universities of the Middle Ages, particularly in the University of Paris, founded in the 12th century, and continuing down to the modern universities and technical schools, have served as academic models throughout the world. Among the French educators who had notable influence are Peter Abelard in the 12th century, Michel de Montaigne in the 16th century, François Fénelon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century, and Victor Cousin in the 19th century.

The centralization of school administration, with the state as the fundamental power in education, evolved under the leadership of Napoleon between 1806 and 1808. The modern educational system is based on laws enacted between 1881 and 1886 under the influence of Jules Ferry, Minister of Education. These laws provided for free, compulsory public education entirely under government control. Among later modifications were the establishment of free tuition in secondary and technical schools; the separation of Church and State in education in 1905; the legislation of aid to private schools, including those with religious affiliations, in 1951 and 1959; and, in 1959, the extension of compulsory school attendance to the age of 16. In response to strong student demands, educational reforms were approved in 1968 by President Charles de Gaulle and his Cabinet. Specifically, the new system did away with the control of budgets, curricula, and employment of teachers throughout the nation by the Ministry of Education. Instead, it established educational units at various levels, gave faculties control of staff, and gave students a greater voice in university life. The authority of university professors occupying lifetime chairs to vote on new appointments was abolished, and the establishment of more democratic departmental structures on a subject basis was indicated for universities. Several of the large universities were restructured into smaller units, and the number of French universities increased from 23 to about 70 in the 1990s. Around 5.7 per cent of the country’s gross national product (GNP) was spent on education in 2005.

For administrative purposes, the country is divided into 25 educational districts called académies. In 2006 4,051,861 pupils attended about 41,244 primary schools. In addition, about 5,993,897 students attended around 11,212 secondary schools.

Some 2,201,201 students were enrolled at university and college facilities in France in 2006. Besides the Universities of Paris I-XIII, noted French institutes of higher education include the Universities of Aix-Marseille I-III, the Universities of Lille I-III, the Universities of Lyon I-III, the Universities of Nancy I-II, and the Universities of Strasbourg I-III.

G.

Culture

The culture of France has profoundly influenced that of the entire Western world, particularly in the areas of art and letters, and Paris has long been regarded as the fountainhead of French culture. France first attained cultural pre-eminence in Europe during the Middle Ages; later, the wealth of the French Crown in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries provided subsidies for art on a scale comparable to that of the papacy in Rome, attracting to Paris many of Europe’s most talented artists and craftsmen. Wealth also created a leisured class, which had both the time and the means for developing elegance in dress, manners, architecture, and design. French styles still pervade much of Western culture. In the 20th century French cinema assumed a leading world position.

H.

Literature

See French Literature.

I.

Art and Architecture

See French Art and Architecture.

J.

Music

France has a long and distinguished musical tradition. From the 11th to the 13th century, chansons de geste (“songs of deeds”), epic poems sung by minstrels, were produced in northern France, and the troubadours, aristocratic poet-musicians who wrote eloquent songs dealing with courtly love, war, and nature, were active in southern France.

The most influential French composer of the 14th century was Guillaume de Machaut, an outstanding practitioner of polyphonic vocal music, both sacred and secular. In the 15th and 16th centuries, songs, motets, and settings of the Mass were among the most important French musical compositions.

In the second half of the 17th century, the Italian-born Jean-Baptiste Lully created a French operatic style by combining traditional court spectacle with the plots of contemporary French dramas, set to musical forms that blended dance with Italian opera. In the early 18th century volumes of suites for harpsichord were composed by François Couperin and Jean Philippe Rameau; the latter is also known for such operas as Castor et Pollux and Les Indes Galantes.

In the late 18th and 19th centuries, many foreign-born opera composers were active in Paris; these included Gluck, Cherubini, Grétry, Meyerbeer, and Offenbach. French-born opera composers of the 19th century included Jacques Halévy, Charles Gounod, Georges Bizet, and Jules Massenet.

The chief French composer of orchestral music in the early 19th century was Hector Berlioz. Camille Saint-Saëns first became active in the 1850s; he in turn taught Gabriel Fauré. Towards the end of the 19th century Claude Debussy composed a wide variety of works in new styles influenced by trends in literature and painting.

In the early 20th century Maurice Ravel produced works with more formal outlines. Les Six, a group of Neo-Classic composers formed in 1918-1919, included Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Georges Auric, whose work was influenced by that of the eccentric Erik Satie. Igor Stravinsky worked in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s; while more recent French composers include Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez.

K.

Libraries and Museums

Most provincial cities in France have municipal libraries and museums. The largest concentration of such facilities is, naturally, in Paris. Major libraries in Paris include the Bibliothèque Nationale, with more than 10 million books, and the libraries of the Universities of Paris. The Louvre, also in Paris, contains one of the largest and most important art collections in the world. Another Parisian museum, the Pompidou Centre (Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges-Pompidou), also contains major collections, notably of 20th-century painting and design. Many of the great masterpieces of French architecture, such as churches, cathedrals, castles, and châteaux, are maintained as national monuments.

IV.

Economy

France, once primarily agricultural, has become increasingly industrialized since World War II. However, agriculture is still a major part of the economy and France is one of the leading agricultural producers in Western Europe. France has a long history of considerable State control in its economy.

During the post-war period, the government instituted a series of wide-ranging plans designed to foster national recovery and increase governmental direction of the economy. Included in the so-called Monnet plans was the principle of nationalization of certain industries, notably rail and air transport systems, major banks, and coal mines. The government, in addition, became a major shareholder in the motor, electronics, and aircraft industries, as well as the primary investor in the development of both oil and natural-gas reserves. Partly as a result of such plans and programmes, the national product of France increased by nearly 50 per cent between 1949 and 1954, by 46 per cent between 1956 and 1964, and at an average annual rate of 3.8 per cent during the 1970s. In 1981 the new Socialist government began a major programme of nationalizing industries; the election of a conservative government in 1986, however, led to a reduction of the state role in the economy. In 1989 and 1993 the government privatized a number of state companies, including Air France and several banks. After a series of public-sector strikes in 1996, the government shelved its austerity measures (including cuts to the welfare budget), which were intended to cut the public debt and allow France to meet the Maastricht criteria for European monetary union. Unemployment in France remained relatively high and reached 12.4 per cent in June 1996. In 2004 France’s GNP totalled an estimated US$1,888 billion (World Bank figure), or about US$38,810 per capita. The national budget included US$1,084 billion in revenues and US$1,151 billion in expenditures in 2007.

A.

Agriculture, Forestry, and Fishing

About 34 per cent of the total area of France is arable, and about 4 per cent of the workforce (2004) is engaged in agriculture, along with forestry and fishing. Under normal conditions French farms, which are mainly small-scale enterprises averaging about 15 hectares (37 acres) each, produce sufficient cereal grains and other basic foodstuffs for national domestic needs. A valuable product of the soil is the wine grape. France and Italy lead the world in the production of wine: yearly French output in the mid-1990s was around 5,300,000 tonnes.

Production of the principal field crops in 2007 included sugar beet (32 million tonnes), wheat (33.2 million), potatoes (6.27 million), and barley (9 million). Other important field crops include rye, oats, turnips, artichokes, flax, hemp, and tobacco. In some parts of the country silk culture is important. Fruit-growing figures prominently in the economy of the French countryside, and large crops of eating and cider apples, pears, plums, peaches, apricots, berries, cherries, olives, citrus fruit, and nuts are harvested. Animals are also a key source of farm income. In 2007 livestock on the farms of France included about 19.4 million cattle, 8.50 million sheep, 14.7 million pigs, 1.25 million goats, and 419,500 horses, as well as 213 million poultry.

From a total of about 15 million hectares (37 million acres) of forest and woodland, more than three quarters are privately owned. About 70 per cent of the forests consist of oak, beech, and poplar. Timber production was about 44 million cu m (1.55 billion cu ft) in 1994. Resin, turpentine, and cork are also important products.

About 18,400 fishers are employed on the 12,940 French fishing craft that ply coastal waters and the high seas. In 2007 the fish catch totalled about 831,450 tonnes annually. Pollack, cod, hake, whiting, and tuna are the most important commercial fish.

B.

Mining

France has a broad diversity of mineral resources. French iron-ore deposits are among the richest in the world, and in the early 1990s annual production totalled about 3.5 million tonnes. Coal production, concentrated mainly in the north, totalled about 1.74 million tonnes in 2003. Deposits of petroleum are located in the Landes region in the south-west. In 1994 annual production of petroleum totalled about 2.8 million tonnes and of natural gas about 33 billion cu m (1.2 trillion cu ft). Potash salts, salt, and zinc are also mined in France in significant quantities.

C.

Manufacturing

The manufacturing industries of France compare favourably in volume, variety, and quality of output with those of other nations of Western Europe. About 25 per cent of the workforce is employed in manufacturing and industry. Among industries producing durable goods (other than metals), the manufacture of motor vehicles ranks high; the output of passenger cars was about 3.1 million in 1994. The largest manufacturer of cars in France is the nationalized Renault firm. Other durable goods produced in significant quantities in France are aircraft, television and radio sets, tyres, non-electrical machinery, and chemicals. Crude steel production was about 18.2 million tonnes in 1994. The French spinning and textile industry is one of the largest in the world: the production of yarn and cloth from wool, cotton, silk, and synthetic fibres was more than 377,000 tonnes in 1994. Sugar-beet refining is another important industry, as are food processing, distilling, and the manufacture of various specialized products. In the last-named field, several branches of French industry are internationally renowned for the quality of the articles produced, such as perfumes, gloves, lace, millinery, women’s clothing, tapestry, shawls, clocks, china, glassware, pottery, furniture, and numerous other luxury items.

D.

Tourism

France has a thriving tourist industry, which capitalizes on both the country’s many natural beauties, and its rich history and culture. Paris is one of Europe’s most popular tourist destinations, and other favoured areas include the resort coastline of the French Riviera, rural Provence, the Dordogne, the Loire valley, and Brittany. Income from tourists amounted to some US$36.7 billion in 2007. Visitor arrivals totalled around 81.9 million.

E.

Energy

Only about 10 per cent of France’s electricity output is generated in thermal installations using coal, petroleum products, or natural gas. About 10 per cent is produced by hydroelectric facilities. No nation is more dependent on atomic power: about 79 per cent of France’s electricity is generated by nuclear power plants. A tidal power facility makes use of the tides of the English Channel in the lower Rance, near St-Malo, in Brittany. In the early 1990s France had an installed electricity-generating capacity of about 105.3 million kW, and production in 2006 was approximately 542.4 billion kWh.

F.

Currency and Banking

The basic monetary unit was formerly the franc of 100 centimes, but as part of France’s commitment to the European single currency it adopted Euro notes and coins as from January 1, 2002. As at early 2009, 0.76 Euros equalled US$1. The Banque de France, which was founded in 1800, nationalized in 1946, and given independence in 1994, is the bank of issue. Among other leading banks are Crédit Agricole, Banque Nationale de Paris, Crédit Lyonnais (state-owned), Société Générale, and Banques Populaires. About 10 per cent of the French workforce is employed in business and finance.

G.

Commerce and Trade

Paris is at the centre of France’s domestic and foreign trade, but other large cities, such as Marseille and Lyon, also play an important role in the country’s commercial life. French commerce has long been characterized by a preponderance of small shops, and most stores are still of the privately owned, small-scale variety, despite a growing trend towards big department stores and supermarkets. About 71 per cent of the labour force is employed in trade and services.

France is one of the world’s great trading nations, and its foreign commerce includes a wide variety of goods. Throughout the 1980s the country imported more than it exported each year, mainly because of its heavy foreign purchases of crude petroleum, but by the mid-1990s it had managed to reverse the trend. In 2007 French imports cost US$611 billion and were made up chiefly of crude petroleum, food and live animals, machinery, chemicals, iron and steel, transport equipment, and other manufactured goods, such as precision instruments, clothing, and textiles. In the same year exports earned US$550 billion. They included machinery, transport equipment, chemicals, iron and steel, food and live animals, refined petroleum, clothing, textiles, and wine. More than half of France’s foreign trade is with the EU, especially Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Italy; while the United States, the successor republics of the USSR, and Japan are also important trade partners. France plays a leading role in the foreign commerce of some of its former overseas possessions, such as Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Côte d’Ivoire.

H.

Labour

The French workforce totalled about 28 million people in 2007. About 8 per cent of French workers were members of trade unions in 1995, compared with 18 per cent in 1980. The Force Ouvriére has about 1 million members and is the largest labour organization in France. Some 640,000 belong to the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), and the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT), a Roman Catholic-oriented organization, has some 570,000 members. Minimum wages are established by government decree, but pay scales are determined by collective bargaining. The government administers comprehensive insurance programmes for workers.

I.

Transport

France has one of the most highly developed transport systems in Europe. The country has more than 28,500 km (17,710 mi) of main roads, including some 9,000 km (5,593 mi) of limited-access autoroutes; in all, the road network measures more than 951,220 km (591,061 mi). In the mid-1990s, over 30 million motor vehicles were in use (1 for every 1.9 people); there were 495 passenger cars per 1,000 people in 2004. The French railways were partly nationalized in 1938. In 2007 there were 29,488 km (18,323 mi) of railway track, 13,572 km (8,434 mi) of which were electrified. France is particularly noted for the high-speed train à grande vitesse (TGV) which runs on several main lines and with a total track length of 1,200 km (746 mi). France has about 8,500 km (5,282 mi) of navigable inland waterways, including some 4,425 km (2,750 mi) of canals. The French merchant fleet comprises about 215 vessels of more than 100 gross registered tonnes. France has two main airlines: Air France, which was privatized in the early 1990s and operates flights to most parts of the world, and Air Inter, which offers service within the country. One large private international airline, Union de Transports Aériens (UTA), also operates, along with several small private companies offering national and international service. In 1990 Air France, Air Inter, and UTA merged. The chief airports are Charles de Gaulle and Orly, both near Paris. Other major international airports are at Bordeaux (Mérignac), Lille, Lyon (Satolas), Marseille-Provence, Nice-Côte d’Azur, Strasbourg (Entzheim), Toulouse (Blagnac), and Nantes (Atlantique).

J.

Communications

The French postal, telegraph, and telephone systems are state-owned, although the telephone and post systems are under autonomous management. Around 587 telephones per 1,000 people were in use in 2005. Radio and television services are conducted by independent, publicly financed organizations, as well as by private commercial operators. Three state-run television channels were in operation in the mid-1990s, along with satellite and cable services. About 55 million radios and some 37 million television sets were in use in 2000.

France has 103 daily newspapers, with a total circulation of about 2.5 million (2005). Sales of national dailies have fallen dramatically throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The most influential newspapers are published in Paris. These include Le Monde (circulation 307,000), Le Figaro (380,000), France-Soir (200,000), and Le Parisien (431,000). The country’s leading periodicals include Paris-Match (circulation 690,000), L’Express (544,750), Le Canard Enchaîné (520,000), and Le Nouvel Observateur (324,200).

V.

Government

The governmental system of France is a presidential republic, based on the constitution that was promulgated in October 1958. This document reduces the power of parliament to overthrow Cabinets and markedly enlarges the authority of the president. It vests the sovereignty of the republic in the French people, who can exercise their political power through a representative parliament as well as through referenda. The French parliament consists of the National Assembly (577 deputies) and the Senate (326 members). The former body is elected by direct universal suffrage, with each party’s representation proportionate to its showing in the popular vote: deputies serve terms of up to five years. Senators are elected to six-year terms by indirect popular suffrage—that is, by the membership of other representative bodies. The constitution of 1958 established a new body, the Constitutional Council, which has general power to supervise elections and referenda and to decide constitutional questions; the council consists of nine appointed members and all former presidents of the republic. France has a voting age of 18.

A.

Executive and Legislature

The president was formerly elected for a seven-year term by direct popular vote but, as the result of a referendum of September 2000, the term of office has been cut to five years. (The president was chosen by an electoral college of governmental bodies until 1962, when a constitutional amendment changed the method.) The president is commander of the armed forces and presides over the High Council of the Judiciary, the Committee of National Defence, and the Council of Ministers (Cabinet). The president designates the prime minister (premier) and appoints Cabinet ministers.

The prime minister and the Council of Ministers are responsible only to the National Assembly, although the premier has the right to ask the Senate for approval of a general declaration of policy. When the National Assembly adopts a motion of censure, or when it rejects the programme or a declaration of general policy of the Cabinet, the premier must resign.

The French parliament consists of two chambers with supreme legislative authority vested in the National Assembly. The Senate is an advisory body with the right to examine and render opinions on legislation and policies initiated in the National Assembly and to delay, but not prevent, the passage of legislation. If the two chambers disagree on a bill, final decision rests with the National Assembly, which may either accept the Senate’s version or, after a specified period, readopt its own. Acting in an advisory capacity on economic matters to the National Assembly and the Council of Ministers is the Economic and Social Council, consisting of representatives from groups of workers and employers, and from professional and cultural organizations. The Constitution of 1958 limits the National Assembly to two regular sessions annually, totalling five and one-half months, permits the adoption of votes of censure against the government by an absolute majority only (instead of a majority of those voting, as previously), and forbids sponsors of an unadopted motion of censure to introduce another such motion during the same session. Constitutional amendments may be adopted after approval by both chambers of the parliament and by a subsequent popular referendum, or merely by approval of three fifths of the parliament.

B.

Political Parties

France has often had numerous political groups, many of which differ from one another on only minor points of theory or policy. The legislative requirements of the Fifth Republic, however, have tended to force the merger or coalition of independent political parties. Four major groups—two centre-right organizations and two leftist parties—dominated French politics in the 1980s and early 1990s. The Rassemblement pour la République (Rally for the Republic), or RPR, founded in 1976 by Jacques Chirac, claimed affinity with the ideas of the former President Charles de Gaulle. The Union for French Democracy (UDF), a coalition built around the Republican Party, was closely tied to the former President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. On the left were the Socialist Party, led by French President François Mitterrand, and the French Communist Party, headed by Georges Marchais. In the 1993 parliamentary elections a coalition of the RPR and UDF drove the Socialists from power by winning more than 80 per cent of the seats in the National Assembly. With Mitterrand determined to remain in office until the presidential elections of 1995, France entered a period of “cohabitation” government. This first period of cohabitation came to an end with the election of Jacques Chirac as President in 1995, but the left and right parties were forced into another period of cohabitation after the Socialist Party, in alliance with the Communist and Green parties, won the parliamentary elections of June 1997. The success of the far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen in reaching the second round of the 2002 presidential election renewed concern about the extent of support for his National Front party, though it failed to win any seats in the subsequent June parliamentary elections. Since 2002 the major party of the right in France has been the UMP (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire), which was originally founded to support the policies of President Chirac (it incorporated the PRP as well as liberal democrats and Christian democrats). In 2004 Nicolas Sarkozy became leader of the UMP.

C.

Judiciary

Justice is administered in France in petty criminal and civil cases by local courts called Tribunals of Instance and Tribunals of Great Instance. Crimes punishable by prison terms of five years or less and major civil cases are tried in correctional courts. Appeals from all of these lower courts are heard by courts of appeal. Major criminal cases are tried before the courts of assizes. Appeals from decisions of the courts of assizes and the courts of appeal may be reviewed by the court of cassation, which is empowered to annul judgments and order new trials.

D.

Local Government

France’s 100 metropolitan departments are organized into 26 regions (including the territorial collectivity of Corsica, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Réunion). In 1981 the government of President Mitterrand introduced a plan that abolished the system of prefects appointed by the central government and increased the powers of elected departmental councils.

The departments are divided into communes, which are governed by municipal councils of between 10 and 36 members, who are elected for six-year terms. Each council elects, from its membership, a mayor, who represents the national government. Metropolitan France has more than 36,000 communes. The communes, differing greatly in area and population, are often identical with municipalities. Other units of local government are the arrondissement and the canton.

E.

Health and Welfare

Average life expectancy in France in 2009 was 78 years for men and 84 years for women. The infant mortality rate in the same period was around 3 deaths per 1,000 live births. French health insurance partially covers medical, pharmaceutical, and hospitalization costs in most cases, and the complete costs of such services for low-income groups, the unemployed, and children under ten years of age. Health and all other social insurance is under the jurisdiction of the Social Security Administration. Social insurance includes family allowances, workers’ compensation, maternity benefits, and disability and old-age insurance. Approximately 98 per cent of the total population of France is covered by the compulsory plan. In 1993, 9.4 per cent of France’s national budget was spent on health care.

F.

Defence

National service was previously compulsory for a period of 10 months for males between the ages of 18 and 35; however, conscription was phased out in June 2002. Military expenditure for 2006 totalled about US$53 billion. The army numbered about 133,500, the navy around 43,995, and the air force about 63,600. Although France is a full member of NATO, French military forces were withdrawn from the NATO command in October 1966, and remain outside the current NATO command structure. French attempts to secure a new position in NATO at the July 1997 summit, which admitted Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, failed. France has developed its own nuclear force, including nuclear submarines and ballistic missiles. In the early 1990s, French forces were stationed in Germany and several African countries, notably Chad. In 1990, France took part in the Gulf War, sending troops and warships to the Persian Gulf after Iraq took over Kuwait.

G.

International Organizations

France is a member of the United Nations (UN), the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Western European Union, and the Council of Europe. France has promoted policies such as European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and is a signatory of the Schengen Agreement on European border controls. France organized the Franc Zone for its former colonial territories.

VI.

History

Archaeological evidence indicates that human beings have lived in what is now France for at least 100,000 years.

A.

Prehistoric Cultures

The oldest identifiable cultures are those of the Old Stone or Palaeolithic Age (50,000 bc-8000 bc). These cultures left a rich artistic heritage of paintings on cave walls; the most famous of these cave paintings are at Lascaux in the Dordogne region of south-west France.

The Middle Stone or Mesolithic Age (8000-4000 bc) people were food gatherers like their ancestors but left relatively few remains. The peasants of the New Stone (Neolithic) Age (4000 bc-2000 bc), on the other hand, left several thousand remarkable stone monuments in France, including the menhirs in Brittany, the statue-menhirs of southern France, and the dolmens, or chamber tombs, of the Loire Valley, the Parisian Basin, and Champagne.

More sophisticated cultures emerged in the Bronze Age (2000-800 bc) and the Iron Age (8th-2nd century bc). By about 800 bc the techniques of working with iron had been introduced by the Hallstatt people—warriors and shepherds who had spread from their native Alpine region into much of France. In the period that followed, the Celts, or Gauls, became the dominant group.

Contact with Mediterranean culture began when the Greeks explored the western Mediterranean in the 7th century bc, established a colony at Marseille, and traded with the interior via the Rhône Valley. In the 5th century bc La Tène culture—characterized by finely crafted jewellery, weapons, and pottery—spread from eastern Gaul through the rest of the Celtic world.

B.

Roman Gaul

In 121 bc the Romans established a protectorate over the old Greek colony at Massilia (now Marseille) and then founded another settlement farther inland at Narbonne, which in turn became the centre of the flourishing province of Gallia Narbonensis.

Julius Caesar conquered the rest of Gaul several decades later, between 58 and 51 bc. The newly conquered lands were called Gallia Belgica, Gallia Lugdunensis, and Aquitania. The main centre of administration was Lugdunum (modern Lyon).

After the Romans consolidated control over Gaul, their main problem was the long, exposed north-east frontier with the Germanic peoples. Rome intended to conquer the German lands beyond the Rhine and make Colonia Agrippinensis (modern Cologne, Germany) a base somewhat equivalent to Lyon. After being defeated by the Germans in ad 9, however, the Romans limited themselves to defending the Rhine frontier. Many Gauls served in the frontier legions, and the first two centuries under Roman domination were generally peaceful and prosperous for Gauls and Romans alike.

In the 3rd century ad, as the Roman Empire began its decline, Gaul was afflicted by a variety of ills: political instability, a dwindling supply of slaves, plague, rising inflation and its complement of economic insecurity, mounting pressure from the Germanic peoples along the frontier, and a general breakdown of law and order. Temporary respite was gained in the time of the Emperor Diocletian, whose military and fiscal reorganization was carried out in part from an imperial residence in Gaul at Trier (now in Germany).

Christianity, which had been introduced as a persecuted sect in the 2nd century, flourished under imperial protection in this period of personal insecurity and political disorder. By the 5th century, even the Gallo-Roman aristocracy was converting: men from old senatorial families moved rather easily into episcopal positions.

Throughout the 4th century small groups of Germans had been settling in Gaul with the permission of the Roman authorities. In 406 this movement became an invasion when the Vandals, Suevi, and Alans broke through the frontier, moved rapidly across Gaul on a south-westerly course, and crossed into Spain. In 412 the Visigoths freely entered southern Gaul from Italy, and about 440 the Burgundians settled in eastern Gaul. In the north-west, Celtic refugees from Britain, which had also been invaded by Germanic peoples, sought and gained refuge and gave their name to the region of Brittany. In 451 Germans, Romans, and Gauls united to defeat a new horde of invaders—the Huns under Attila.

C.

The Emergence of France

In the last quarter of the 5th century, as Roman imperial authority collapsed in the West, Gaul was conquered by another Germanic group, the Salian Franks. Their leader Clovis was a tough warrior, unhesitatingly violent and, when he saw fit, treacherous. Married to a Christian Burgundian princess, he became a Christian himself in 496. By adopting the Catholic form of Christianity favoured by the Gallo-Romans instead of the Arian Christianity espoused by the Visigoths, he was able to strengthen his hold over the country.

C.1.

The Merovingians

Clovis’s dynasty, the Merovingian, named after its founder, Merovech or Merowig (reigned 448-458), ruled until 751. According to Frankish custom all the king’s possessions, including the royal title, were divided among his sons. Because of this practice, Merovingian France was beset by continual disunity and civil war in the 6th century. The kingdom was again unified in 613 under Clotaire II and Dagobert I. Thereafter it went into severe decline under a series of weak, incompetent kings. During this period power came to be concentrated in the hands of the mayors of the palace, royal officials who had charge of the king’s estates. Struggles broke out among the mayors that were reminiscent of those among earlier kings. Late in the 7th century, one palace mayor in particular, Pepin of Herstal, a member of the Arnulfung family of Austrasia (in eastern France and western Germany), achieved superiority over his rivals, successfully extending his authority over the Frankish kingdoms of Neustria and Burgundy to the west and south. He was succeeded by his son, Charles Martel, who rallied a Frankish army that repulsed a Muslim invasion from Spain in 732. In 751 Martel’s son and successor, Pepin the Short, deposed the last Merovingian ruler and had himself crowned King of the Franks.

C.2.

The Carolingians

The new dynasty—eventually named Carolingian, after its most famous member, Charlemagne, or Charles (Carolus) the Great—was strengthened by Pepin’s alliance with the papacy. In return for Frankish help against the Lombards, who were encroaching on papal territory in Italy, Pope Stephen II approved the Carolingian seizure of the throne.

In 754 the pope journeyed to France to anoint Pepin and his sons with holy oil as the biblical kings of Israel had been anointed by the prophets. Pepin in turn fought campaigns in Italy on the pope’s behalf in 754 and 756. The King then turned over the lands he conquered in Italy to Pope Stephen II and these became the Papal States—territory governed directly by the papacy. Pepin’s rule was divided, at his death in 768, between his sons Charles (the future Charlemagne) and Carloman. Carloman died three years later, however, and Charlemagne was the sole ruler of the Franks for more than four decades, until his death in 814.

Military campaigns occupied Charlemagne in the early years of his reign. Like his father, he fought in Italy, both on the pope’s behalf and on his own, conquering the Lombards and taking the Lombard royal title for himself. He campaigned in Spain against both the Muslims and the Basques and established a frontier territory called the Spanish March. In the east he fought the Bavarians and the Avars and absorbed them into his realm. For three decades he campaigned against the Saxons in Germany, eventually bringing them under his control and forcing them to convert to Christianity.

In the year 800, Charlemagne was crowned in Rome by Pope Leo III and received the title Emperor of the Romans. There had not been a Roman emperor in the western provinces since the late 5th century. He established a vast administrative system, divided into some 250 counties, for governing his empire. He assembled the leading scholars of Europe and initiated a programme of intellectual and religious reforms. Charlemagne established a principal royal residence at Aix-la-Chapelle, his favourite sulphur-spring spa (now Aachen, Germany).

Even before 800, Viking raiders from Scandinavia had begun to attack the coastal areas of the Carolingian realm. The full impact of these raids, however, was not felt until the reign of Charlemagne’s successor, Louis I (the Pious), whom Charlemagne himself crowned Emperor in 813. The Viking attacks and succession problems after Louis the Pious made a shambles of the Carolingian Empire.

Louis sought to provide for an orderly succession by decreeing in 817 that his eldest son, Lothair, would inherit the empire and that his two younger sons, Pepin of Aquitaine and Louis II (Louis the German), would hold subordinate kingdoms within the empire. The Emperor then had a fourth son, Charles, by his second wife, who was determined that her son would not be excluded from the royal inheritance.

The sons fought bitterly among themselves and sometimes against their father as well. One temporary settlement among three of the brothers is of particular historical interest. By the Treaty of Verdun (843), Lothair was to get the imperial title plus a long strip of territory stretching from the North Sea at the mouth of the Rhine all the way down to, and including, Rome. Louis the German received the lands east of the Rhine, and Charles the Bald those west of the Rhône, the Saône, the Meuse, and the Schelde. Louis’s territory was a forerunner of modern Germany, Charles’s a forerunner of modern France, and Lothair’s a forerunner of the lands in between that have been so often fought over by France and Germany in modern times. Although this particular division did not prove lasting, the separation of Francia Occidentalis (the West Frankish Kingdom, or France) from Francia Orientalis (the East Frankish Kingdom, or Germany) became permanent at this time.

C.3.

The Vikings and the Foundation of Normandy

The disunity of the Franks facilitated the raiding missions of the Vikings. Seaports, river towns, and monasteries situated near waterways became their victims. Rouen and Paris on the River Seine, Nantes, Tours, Blois, and Orléans on the Loire, Bordeaux on the Garonne, and many other towns were pillaged by the Vikings. The same was true for the abbeys of St Denis, St Philibert, St Martin, St Benoît, and others. One of the few effective defenders against these raids was Robert the Bold, a magnate in the Seine Valley in the mid-9th century.

The Vikings set up bases for their operations, usually at the mouths of rivers, but eventually they sought to make permanent settlements. In 911 a large company of Vikings (French Normands), under their leader Rollo, accepted from the West Frankish king Charles III (the Simple) the territory in the lower Seine Valley that became known as Normandy.

In 888 the West Frankish crown was offered to Count Odo, or Eudes, son of Robert the Bold. After his death it reverted to the Carolingians, but they had little influence. By the time of Louis V (967-987), effective power had filtered down to the level of the castellan, a strongman with a retinue of fighters who controlled a castle and its immediate surroundings.

D.

The Early Capetians, 987-1180

When Louis V died, the magnates turned to Hugh Capet, Duke of France, and descendant of Robert the Bold and of Odo. Hugh was elected King not because he was strong but precisely because he would not be strong enough to control the other magnates; in fact, he secured election only by giving much of his land to the electors.

The French nobles may have had no intention of installing the Capetians as a dynasty, but Hugh moved quickly to have his son Robert crowned. When Robert became King (as Robert II) in 996, he named his son Hugh as his successor, but due to Hugh’s death, another son, Henry, became King in 1031. The Capetians eventually passed the crown through a direct male line for more than three centuries, from 987 until 1328.

The earliest Capetians remained subservient to the feudal princes, but the rebuilding of a royal administration, indicated by a new importance of royal provosts, was evident by the 1040s. Nevertheless, in the late 11th century, William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, and Hugh the Great, abbot of the monastery of Cluny, although nominally vassals of the King, were far more powerful than the Capetian King Philip I (reigned 1060-1108).

Philip’s successor, Louis VI (reigned 1108-1137), consolidated royal power once and for all in the Île-de-France, a region centring on Paris that measures about 160 km (100 mi) from north to south and 80 km (50 mi) from east to west. Here he systematically suppressed all feudal opposition to the royal government. He had his son, the future Louis VII, brought up at the abbey of St Denis, north of Paris, and in 1137 arranged for him to marry Eleanor, heiress to the Duchy of Aquitaine.

Eleanor’s possessions were far larger than the Île-de-France, and by making her his wife, Louis VII won control of extensive territories between the River Loire and the Pyrenees. In 1147 Louis went on a Crusade to the Holy Land, taking Eleanor along with him. While they were in the East it was rumoured that she had committed adultery. Since the marriage had never been agreeable to Eleanor, and had not produced a male heir, both spouses wanted the papal annulment of the marriage, granted in 1152. Two months later Eleanor married Henry, Count of Anjou and Duke of Normandy, who in 1154 became King of England as Henry II. Thus, Aquitaine passed from the French Crown to the English Crown, and the lands controlled by Henry in France (the Angevin Empire) vastly exceeded in size those of his feudal lord, Louis VII.

E.

The Later Capetians

The fortunes of the Capetian dynasty improved under Louis VII’s successor, Philip II Augustus.

E.1.

The Reign of Philip Augustus, 1180-1223

Through his first marriage, Philip acquired new territories in northern France—Artois, Valois, and Vermandois. He also secured royal control of the Vexin, a small but critical area on the Seine at the juncture of Normandy and the Île-de-France. Philip served briefly in the Third Crusade (1190-1191).

His chance to move against the Angevin Empire came when King John of England married a princess already betrothed to another of Philip’s vassals. Philip summoned John to his court three times, and when John failed to appear, Philip was able to condemn John and declare his lands forfeit. In 1204 Philip undertook the military conquest of Normandy and Anjou. Ten years later he secured his conquests by defeating the combined armies of England and the Holy Roman Empire at the Battle of Bouvines.

An opportunity for northern French intervention in the south was furnished by the Cathari, or Albigenses, a dissident religious sect particularly strong in Provence and Languedoc. St Bernard and others had preached against the Cathars in the 12th century, but without much success. Pope Innocent III (reigned 1198-1216) encouraged new preaching missions until one of his representatives in the region, Peter of Castelnau, was assassinated in 1208. Innocent thereupon adopted the weapon of the Crusade, which until then had only been used against Muslims, as a means of fighting the Cathar heretics. Crusaders were promised the land they succeeded in taking from the heretics, and northern French knights under Count Simon de Montfort rushed to participate. Philip Augustus was too occupied with the English to join in the first phase of the Albigensian Crusade, but his son Louis VIII led a successful campaign that resulted in the extension of the royal domain south to the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. One price of this political integration of the south into the Kingdom of France was the destruction of the independent culture of Provence and Languedoc. Another was the life of Louis VIII, who was killed in the Crusade.

E.2.

Louis IX

Louis IX (reigned 1226-1270) ascended the throne at the age of 12, with his mother Blanche of Castile as regent. Some of the French barons, thinking this an appropriate moment to rebel against the royal government, joined forces with the English, who were eager to regain their lost territories, but Blanche was able to put down all their plots and rebellions.

Louis’s great accomplishment at home was to gain the loyalty of the conquered provinces by means of a just and humane administration. He was careful to guard against corruption or the abuse of authority by sending out investigators from his court to hear complaints from his subjects about royal officials. Under him, the royal government became larger, more professional, and more specialized.

A devoutly religious man, Louis wished to crown his career with a Crusade. He put his affairs in order in 1247 and left for the Middle East. He launched an attack in Egypt at Damietta, but his advance was soon halted by the Muslim defenders. He then went to the Holy Land to supervise the strengthening of the Christian fortifications there. In 1270 he again went on a Crusade: this time, along with many of his soldiers, he was struck down by disease and died while attacking Tunis. Despite these two ill-fated expeditions, Louis was loved and respected. After his death, miracles were attributed to him, and in 1297 he was officially declared a saint.

Philip III (reigned 1270-1285) was the fifth French king in a row to go on a Crusade—this one to fight the Moors in Spain—and the third in a row to die on one. He had, however, arranged for the marriage of his son to the heiress of the county of Champagne, thus adding to the possessions of the royal house.

E.3.

Philip IV, the Fair

Philip the Fair, last of the great Capetian kings, greatly strengthened the powers of the royal government. He chose capable and ambitious advisers to serve his late 13th-century administration, of whom the best known were William of Nogaret and Pierre Dubois. Together they sought to remove limitations on royal authority, a process that involved persistently chipping away at local practices, special privileges, or provincial prerogatives. Bishops, barons, and towns were compelled to cooperate with the King, whether in connection with the demands of royal justice or with those of the royal treasury. Philip successfully annexed the Franche-Comté, Lyon, and parts of Lorraine, but failed in his attempt to gain control of Flanders.

Philip’s intervention in Flanders was one of the costly policies that led him to try to tax the clergy, and this in turn brought him into sharp conflict with Pope Boniface VIII. In 1297 Boniface conceded that for the exceptional purposes of the “defence of the realm” a king might place a tax on the clergy without consulting the pope. The papacy continued, however, to deny the King’s right to arrest a priest on a secular charge. Legal arguments supplemented by slanderous propaganda attacks were exchanged. Nogaret led an expedition to Italy supposedly to arrest Boniface and bring him back to France for trial. A violent confrontation took place at Anagni, and shortly afterwards the elderly pope died. The dispute was essentially over the issue of sovereignty, although that term was not yet in use. In 1305 Philip’s influence secured the election of a French pope, Clement V, who moved the papal court from Rome to Avignon in 1309, and eventually cleared Philip and his counsellors of any charge of impropriety in their dealings with Boniface.

Philip’s insatiable hunger for money led him to expel the Jews from the kingdom and confiscate their wealth. For the same reason he persecuted and suppressed the Templars, a wealthy order of crusading knights.

Philip succeeded in strengthening the royal government, but by his high-handed methods he squandered much of the monarchy’s store of goodwill and respect. The administrative system continued to function well through the 14th and 15th centuries, but the prestige of the monarchy was much reduced and its prerogatives often challenged. This decline in prestige was accompanied by a break in the line of succession: between 1314 and 1328, three sons of Philip IV—Louis X, Philip V, and Charles IV—held the throne successively, and each died without male heirs (a posthumous child of Louis X reigned for a few days as John I in 1316).

F.

France Under the Early Valois

On the death of Charles IV, the crown passed to Philip IV’s nephew, Philip of Valois, who reigned as Philip VI from 1328 to 1350. The English King Edward II had married a daughter of Philip IV, and at first this marriage did not seem to pose any problem for the French succession. Later, however, Edward III (reigned 1327-1377) became the rival of Philip VI for control of Flanders, and Philip supported Scotland against Edward. In 1337 Edward put forward a claim to the French throne as the grandson of Philip the Fair. Philip VI replied by declaring the English claim to Gascony void, and the two kings began a war that was to last for more than a century.

F.1.

The Hundred Years’ War, 1337-1453

The English began by taking control of the English Channel with a crushing naval victory off Sluis in the Netherlands and then freely attacked northern France. The first major encounter on land took place near the channel coast at Crécy in 1346 and was a thorough victory for the English. The English subsequently undertook an exhaustive siege of Calais, which capitulated after two years.

F.2.

The Black Death

In 1348 the bubonic plague entered France from the Mediterranean via Marseille. The resulting pandemic engulfed the country in two years, killing as much as one-third of the population. The value of the labour of those who survived was notably enhanced. Prices and wages rose sharply, and the government tried to impose wage ceilings.

The second half of the 14th century was a dismal period marked by various manifestations of social unrest. The plague returned in 1361, 1362, 1369, 1372, 1382, 1388, and 1398. Children born after an outbreak were especially vulnerable in a new epidemic, which further exacerbated the already great decline in population. The psychological disruption wrought by these disasters was apparent in a pervading obsession with death, and in the proliferation of fanatical and aberrant religious movements. Social disruption included fierce rebellions by peasants caught between high prices, and landlords who tried to increase production and keep a lid on wages. The most famous and widespread peasant uprising was the Jacquerie of 1358. The countryside was also prey to French and English mercenary bands that lived off the land between battles. Urban unrest also resulted in violent uprisings, exemplified by the Parisian insurrection led by Étienne Marcel in 1358. In a depressed economy the costs of war continued to mount, including the ransom paid for King John II, who had been taken prisoner by the English at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. During this period the Estates-General, an assembly of clergy, nobles, and commoners first summoned by Philip IV, acquired great power.

F.3.

Joan of Arc and Recovery

France’s fortunes were not improved by the 42-year reign of the insane King Charles VI beginning in the late 14th century. The English King Henry V invaded France in 1415, crushed the French army at Agincourt, and took control of most of France north of the Loire.

The French revival under Charles VII (reigned 1422-1461) was begun by the inspired and charismatic peasant, Joan of Arc. She made her way to Charles’s court in 1429 and took the lead in lifting the English siege of Orléans. The war dragged on for more than 20 years, but the French never lost the momentum gained from the brief intervention of the dynamic young woman from Lorraine. In 1453 Charles entered Bordeaux, and the English lost the Hundred Years’ War and surrendered all their territory on the Continent except Calais.

Economic and social recovery accompanied the political recovery. During the middle and later years of the 15th century the strength of the economy and the size of the population returned to their pre-plague levels. Louis XI (reigned 1461-1483) consolidated royal authority to a greater extent than ever before, creating a paid standing army and acquiring the power to levy a tax—the taille—without the prior consent of those taxed. He incorporated most of the Duchy of Burgundy into the kingdom and used royal revenue to protect, facilitate, and stimulate economic development.

Charles VIII (reigned 1483-1498) succeeded to the throne at 13 years of age. His sister, who served as regent, arranged for his marriage to Anne, Duchess of Brittany. By this marriage, the last independent feudal principality was incorporated into the French royal domain. When his sister’s regency ended in 1492, Charles agreed to the Treaty of Étaples, which settled France’s outstanding difference with England.

G.

The Renaissance and Reformation

By the end of the 15th century France had emerged from the divisions of its feudal past and had become a national monarchy incorporating lands stretching from the Pyrenees to the English Channel. The social structure was still dominated by the landed aristocracy, and land remained the principal form of wealth. In the next half-century, however, domestic peace, growing population, an influx of gold and silver brought to Europe from America by the Spaniards, and the government’s public works and military orders stimulated economic growth, which raised wholesale merchants, bankers, and tax collectors to a more important place in society. The nobility, on the other hand, dependent on fixed monetary rents and dues, saw both their economic power and their social position threatened by inflation.

The first three monarchs of the period—Charles VIII, Louis XII (reigned 1498-1515), and Francis I (reigned 1515-1547)—took advantage of the nation’s growing strength and internal security to lead armies into Italy to enforce claims to the Kingdom of Naples and the Duchy of Milan. In the 1520s the Italian wars merged into a larger struggle between France and the Habsburg dynasty of Spain and Austria over conflicting territorial claims, a struggle that continued intermittently for a century and a half. The Italian wars were finally terminated by the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559), negotiated by Francis I’s son, Henry II (reigned 1547-1559). France gave up all claims to Italy but acquired three strategically located territories on its eastern frontier—the bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and Verdun.

G.1.

Francis I

Francis I significantly increased both the power and the prestige of the Crown. He imposed himself as the monarchy’s sole Lawmaker and never called the Estates-General. By the Concordat of Bologna (1516), negotiated with Pope Leo X, he won for the French King the power to fill all bishoprics and other benefices with people of his choice, thus assuring a manageable clergy. In 1539 he banned Latin, the language of the Church, from use in judicial acts and required the exclusive use of French. He was a generous and discerning patron of the arts and learning, and the flowering of the French Renaissance owed much to his support. Buildings surviving from his reign still attest to his influence and to the power and wealth of the monarchy.

G.2.

The Wars of Religion

The latter half of the century was a succession of difficult and agitated decades in France. Rising population, without a corresponding rise in productivity, and monetary inflation reduced much of the populace to poverty. The Protestant Reformation, spreading from Germany during the reign of Francis I, had attracted few followers, but in the 1540s and 1550s the French Protestant John Calvin created the doctrine and the institutions of a distinctively French form of Protestantism: it won many powerful followers in the nobility and thousands of lower rank. Henry II considered Calvinism a threat to royal authority, and he tried to stamp it out. Under his three sons, who succeeded him, the country was torn by the Wars of Religion, wars in which religious, political, and dynastic conflicts were inextricably mixed. The fanaticism of the religious combatants and the brutality of mercenaries made it a struggle in which pillage, cruelty, and atrocities were normal.

The death of Henry II in 1559 brought to the throne his sickly 15-year-old son Francis II (reigned 1559-1561), who succeeded his father for only two years. His successor was his 13-year-old brother, Charles IX (reigned 1561-1574). The Queen Mother, Catherine de Médicis, was the virtual ruler during most of their reigns and she continued to be influential in the reign (1574-1589) of her third son, Henry III. Catherine’s first concern was the defence of her sons’ royal authority. She repeatedly pressed the religious contenders to compromise on a settlement that would enable both to believe and worship as they pleased, but unfortunately for France she was powerless against their fanaticism. She herself became its tool in sanctioning the notorious St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris in August 1572, when Roman Catholics fell upon assembled Protestant leaders and their followers and murdered about 2,000 of them.

Henry III’s last surviving brother died in 1584, and Henry of Bourbon, King of Navarre, a descendant of Louis IX and the leader of the Protestant, or Huguenot, Party, became next in line to the throne. Repelled by the prospect of a heretic king, some members of the Roman Catholic party plotted to forestall his succession by replacing Henry III with Henry, Duke of Guise, the leader of the Catholic League. Warned of this, Henry III summoned Guise to a conference at Blois in 1588 and there had him assassinated. The following year King Henry himself—the last of the Valois dynasty—fell victim to an assassin’s blade.

Henry of Navarre, as the legal heir, took the title Henry IV of France, but he was, in fact, only King of the Huguenots. He had to defend his claim to the throne against the Catholic League and against their Spanish allies, who occupied Paris. Henry understood that, although he and his followers were Protestant by conviction, most of the French were faithful Roman Catholics, and in 1593 he publicly converted to Roman Catholicism. The next year he was crowned in Chartres Cathedral and soon after was welcomed into Paris, establishing the Bourbon dynasty on the French throne.

H.

France Under the Bourbons

In 1598, with the expulsion of the last Spanish troops from French territory, the long years of war were ended. In the same year Henry, seeking to assure the domestic tranquillity of his realm, issued the Edict of Nantes, which granted freedom of religious conscience to all his subjects; it guaranteed the Huguenots freedom of public worship in specified castles and towns and assured them equal access to public office. Never before had a European ruler formally accorded freedom of religious conscience and worship to his or her subjects.

The reign of Henry IV after 1598 was for France a period of recovery from the devastation and disruption of the Wars of Religion, and the beginning of renewed economic growth. During most of the period the country was at peace. The royal finances were restored. In aid of the peasantry, who made up 90 per cent of the population and who had suffered heavily from the pillage and devastation of war, Henry cancelled arrears in land taxes, forbade seizure of livestock or tools by creditors, made public lands available for purchase below market price, and restricted nobles’ hunting rights over cultivated fields. To promote commerce he built canals, dredged rivers, and restored and built bridges and roads. He brought foreign artisans to France to develop new industries and introduced the cultivation of mulberry trees, on which silkworms subsist, to ensure a domestic supply of raw silk for the silk industry.

By the close of the 17th century’s first decade, the economy was thriving and royal authority was again firmly established. The Catholic clergy, however, was united in opposition to the official toleration of the Huguenots. In 1610 a religious fanatic—or an agent of the Habsburgs (the record is not clear)—assassinated the King. Henry, rejected by his people as a heretic in 1589, was, in death, almost universally mourned. In succeeding decades and centuries he became the “good King Henry”, the most acclaimed and beloved of French kings.

H.1.

Louis XIII and Cardinal de Richelieu

Henry was succeeded by his 9-year-old son, Louis XIII. For the first decade and a half of his reign the country drifted or slipped backwards under the ineffectual direction of the Queen Mother, Marie de Médicis, and later under the irresolute leadership of the inexperienced young King.

In 1624 Louis chose as his first minister Armand du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu, who was the effective ruler of France for the next 18 years. Richelieu’s primary goals were to eliminate all rivals to royal power and to contain threats from abroad.

To break the political power of the nobility Richelieu executed several of its eminent and dangerous members and demolished castles that could be used as centres of resistance. To undermine their local authority and to ensure faithful execution of royal policies in the provinces, Richelieu divided the country into 30 new administrative districts and over each placed an intendant, a royal officer appointed from among loyal middle-class officials. The intendants gradually assumed enormous police, judicial, and financial powers in their districts. Huguenots were deprived of the privileges granted by the Edict of Nantes, but freedom of worship was reaffirmed.

Richelieu encouraged the development of a merchant fleet, chartered foreign-trade companies, and supported colonial expansion. Systematic colonization was begun in French Canada, and the first French trading posts were established in Africa and the West Indies. For the protection of trade and colonies he founded the French navy, building a galley fleet on the Mediterranean and a fleet of 40 sailing vessels on the Atlantic.

Inflation, mounting taxes, and, after 1635, the devastation wrought by invading armies reduced much of the peasantry to new depths of misery. Peasant revolts occurred in Burgundy in 1625-1630, in the south in 1636-1637, and in Normandy in 1639. All were mercilessly suppressed.

When Richelieu became the king’s first minister in 1624, the Thirty Years’ War, a German civil and religious conflict that was becoming a general European war, was in its first decade. In 1635, when it appeared that the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor might unite all Germany under his rule, Richelieu took France into the war as the ally of Protestant Sweden and the Netherlands against the Roman Catholic Habsburgs. The peace settlement in 1648 brought most of Alsace to the French Crown and ensured the continued division and weakness of Germany. In the peace with Spain in 1659 France acquired Artois in the north and Roussillon on the Spanish frontier. Habsburg ambitions had been blocked, and France emerged from the war as the great victor.

H.2.

The Reign of Louis XIV

Richelieu died in 1642 and Louis XIII died in 1643, leaving the throne to his 5-year-old son, Louis XIV.

Richelieu’s protégé and successor, Cardinal Jules Mazarin, continued his predecessor’s policies, bringing the war with the Habsburgs to a victorious conclusion and at home defeating the first concerted effort by disaffected aristocrats and bourgeois to reverse Richelieu’s concentration of power in the king.

In 1648 hereditary judges of the Parlement of Paris, the highest judicial court of the realm, in alliance with Parisian bourgeois protesting against heavy taxation, and with support from the city’s workers, set off a rebellion, called the Fronde, against the Crown. Soon after it was ended, mutinous nobles in the south rebelled, and again parts of France were ravaged by civil war before the revolt was suppressed. The Fronde failed to impede the centralization of power however, and not until the 1780s did the privileged orders again seriously challenge the authority of the Crown.

H.3.

Louis’s Absolutism

On the death of Cardinal Mazarin in 1661 Louis XIV announced that henceforth he would be his own first minister. For the next 54 years he ruled France personally and conscientiously and established himself as the model of the divine-right, absolutist monarch in the European Age of Absolutism.

Early in the period of his personal rule Louis established the structure of the absolute state. He organized a number of councils to advise him and to carry out his instructions, and he staffed them with able men, completely dependent on him for position and income. The claims of the parlements to a veto over royal decrees were effectively silenced. The potentially dangerous nobility (descendants of the old feudal nobility) were attached to the court in prestigious but ceremonial offices, which left them no time for political activity. The wealthy bourgeoisie was kept politically satisfied by the government’s assurance of order at home, its active promotion of commerce and industry, and by the opportunities to make fortunes exploiting state expenditure.

The power to appoint bishops gave the king a firm grip on the hierarchy of the Church. The king ruled as the representative of God on Earth, and the obedient clergy provided the theological justification of his divine right. A dissident movement, Jansenism, which developed in the 17th century, was politically threatening in its emphasis on the supremacy of individual conscience, and Louis fought it from the start.

The great palace that Louis built at Versailles was—and remains—unmatched in size and magnificence, and it stands as a monument to French architecture, painting, sculpture, interior design, landscape gardening, and building technology. Louis was a munificent patron of the arts. He sought to raise standards of taste by founding the Academy of Fine Arts and the French Academy in Rome. He supported authors with pensions and by performance of their works, appointed a surintendant of music to raise standards of composition and performance, and established the Academy of Science.

Louis’s minister for commerce and finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, was the age’s great exponent of mercantilism. He subsidized industries, raised barriers against foreign competition, established quality controls on industry, developed colonial markets closed to all but French traders, chartered overseas trading companies, rebuilt the navy, and at home built roads, bridges, and canals.

Before the end of his reign the costs of Louis’s wars had undone much of Colbert’s work of economic development, and in 1685 Louis struck a blow at the economy by revoking the Edict of Nantes. Convinced that most Huguenots had converted to Catholicism, he withdrew the edict granted by Henry IV. Public Protestant worship was forbidden; preachers were expelled from the country; and meeting houses were demolished. Despite the threat of heavy punishment, between 200,000 and 300,000 Huguenots left France. They were skilled craftsmen, intellectuals, army officers—valuable subjects whom France could ill afford to lose.

Louis led his country into four costly wars. In all of them he followed established national policies of containing and reducing the power of the Habsburgs, extending France’s frontiers to defensible positions, and winning economic advantages. His minister of war, the Marquis de Louvois, provided him with a powerful army of 300,000 trained, disciplined, and well-equipped men. In 1667 he used it to enforce a claim, based on his marriage in 1660 to Maria Theresa, daughter of Philip IV of Spain, to a province of the Spanish Netherlands. A hostile alliance of maritime powers induced him to negotiate a compromise peace in 1668. France’s reward was 11 strongholds on the north-east frontier.

In 1672 strategic and economic considerations moved Louis to attack the Dutch Republic, where he soon found himself confronted not only by the tenacious Dutch but also by a powerful coalition. France emerged from six years of war with two territorial gains—the Franche-Comté on the eastern frontier and a dozen fortified towns in the southern Netherlands.

In 1689 an alliance of European powers went to war with Louis to put a stop to his practice of annexing territories adjoining towns ceded by earlier treaties. Eight years of war ended in a settlement in which both sides returned their conquests, although France did retain the city of Strasbourg in Alsace.

The combatants had been disposed to settle their differences because a new international crisis loomed on the near horizon. The sickly Charles II, King of Spain, had no direct heir. A month before his death he willed his entire kingdom to Louis XIV’s grandson, Philip of Anjou. Although Louis had earlier advocated a division of the inheritance, he now chose to support his grandson’s claim to all of it. The other European states feared the consequences of so great an extension of Bourbon power and joined in a coalition to prevent it. The consequent War of the Spanish Succession went on for 13 exhausting years. In the end Louis achieved his primary objective—his grandson was confirmed in possession of Spain and the Spanish colonies.

The war, combined with a devastatingly cold winter in 1709 and poor harvests, brought to France crushing hardship, food riots, and angry demands for political and fiscal reform. A smallpox epidemic in 1711-1712 removed in quick succession three heirs to the throne, leaving a single surviving heir in the direct line, Louis’s 5-year-old great-grandson. Louis died at Versailles on September 1, 1715, in the 73rd year of his reign.

H.4.

France in the 18th Century

Louis XV (reigned 1715-1774) and his grandson, Louis XVI (reigned 1774-1792), were well-intentioned rulers, but both lacked the abilities needed to adapt their country’s institutions to the changing conditions of the 18th century. Louis XV was indolent, bored by affairs of state, and quick to seek escape in the pleasures that wealth and position opened to him. He discredited the monarchy, and at his death he was so unpopular that his body was buried secretly. Louis XVI, only 20 years old when he began his reign, was weak-willed and easily influenced by those around him. His young queen, Marie Antoinette, frivolous and extravagant, intervened with him to block needed reforms.

The 18th century was, nonetheless, one of the great ages of the country’s history. France was the richest and most powerful nation on the Continent. French taste and styles in architecture, design, fashion, and taste were imitated throughout the Western world. The political and social ideas of French writers influenced both thought and action throughout Europe and America, and French became the language of educated people around the world (see Enlightenment, Age of).

The century was a period of extraordinary economic growth. The population rose from 21 million in 1700 to 28 million in 1790. Agricultural income increased by 60 per cent. French economic historians place the beginnings of France’s industrial revolution in the 18th century, when the country was the leading industrial power in the world. The Corps des Ponts et Chausseés (Department of Bridges and Roads), founded in 1733, had by 1780 given France the best road system in Europe. The French merchant navy expanded to more than 5,000 ships, which engaged in lucrative trade with Africa, America, and India, and enriched the merchants of the French Atlantic ports. The income of urban labourers and artisans, however, barely kept pace with inflation; and most peasants, with little surplus to sell and heavily burdened by taxes, tithes, and feudal obligations, continued to eke out a miserable existence.

The government itself was excluded from the new prosperity. The tax system, which exempted the lands of the nobility and the clergy (about 35 per cent of the cultivated land) from the principal land tax, failed to tap all the nation’s wealth and put an unfair burden on the peasantry and the bourgeoisie. Successive ministries from the mid-century on attempted to establish a balanced taxation system of all wealth, but they were foiled by the opposition of privileged groups and by the failure of the King to support reforms against such opposition.

The nobility of the robe (whose titles were originally purchased from the Crown) in the parlements led the opposition to the royal initiatives. They proclaimed the doctrine that the King’s decrees were subject to their approval. They posed as defenders of public liberties against royal despotism, making their cause a popular one, but they were actually defending their own privileges and advocating a return to government by the aristocracy.

Intellectual opposition to the monarchy was led by the philosophes, French 18th-century writers on political, social, and economic problems. Rejecting custom and tradition as guides to action, they urged their compatriots to use reason to discover the natural laws governing human relations and then to shape new institutions of government and society in conformity with them. They also argued that all people had certain natural rights—life, liberty, and property—and that governments existed to guarantee these rights. Some, in the latter part of the century, advocated the right of self-government. These ideas were especially congenial to the bourgeoisie, which was growing in number, wealth, and ambition and coveted a voice in government. Through the bourgeoisie ideas filtered down to the lower levels of society and became part of the popular vocabulary of revolution.

The government’s financial problems were made worse after 1740 by the renewal of costly wars. The War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) and the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) were European wars over the domination of central Europe and colonial and commercial wars between France and Great Britain. At their end, in 1763, France lost almost all of its vast colonial empire in America and in India. In 1778 the French intervened against Britain in the American War of Independence, thereby hoping to weaken its old colonial rival and to recover lost colonies. The hopes of the French were not realized, however, and their participation in the war increased an already burdensome national debt.

The tasks of coping with the worsening financial crisis fell to the irresolute young Louis XVI. After all his ministers’ reform programmes had been blocked by the parlements and an improvised Assembly of Notables, in May 1788 Louis forced the Parlement of Paris to accept edicts depriving the parlements of their political powers. Judges, nobles, and clergy resisted and tried to prevent application of the king’s decree, winning support from the army and from the public, alienated by high unemployment and the highest bread prices of the century. In July the assembly of one of the southern provinces voted to withhold payment of taxes until the king called into session the Estates-General, dormant since 1615. On July 5, 1788, Louis agreed to summon the Estates-General and in August scheduled its opening for May 1789. The aristocracy had triumphed in the first stage of the French Revolution.

I.

The Revolution of 1789

On May 5, 1789, 1,200 deputies elected to the Estates-General met at Versailles. The government had no plan of action to meet the expectations of the deputies and the nation, and the members of the third estate, taking the initiative, on June 17 declared themselves the National Assembly of France. They invited the other estates to join them and took a solemn oath not to separate until they had given France a constitution.

I.1.

The End of the Old Regime

When the government moved to disperse the assembly by force in July, the people of Paris rebelled, seized the royal fortress of the Bastille, and forced the king to accept the National Assembly. A peasant revolt spread across the countryside and moved the alarmed assembly—in a single, all-night session on August 4-5—to abolish all feudal dues and privileges, hereditary nobility, and titles.

The National Assembly, sitting from 1789 to 1791, reorganized the institutional structure of France. To deal with the pressing financial problem it confiscated the property of the Church and issued paper money, using the lands as security. It reorganized the Church under the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. It established a new provincial administrative system and a new judicial system, which shifted control to locally elected officials and judges, reversing the centuries-long process of centralization. The constitution adopted in 1791 created a parliamentary government with an hereditary monarch and an assembly indirectly elected by tax-paying citizens.

The constitutional monarchy lasted only one year. Louis was unwilling to play the role of constitutional monarch, and the militant Republicans were determined to establish a French republic. Successive defeats in the war with Austria and Prussia, which began in April 1792, provided the occasion for the overthrow of the monarchy by a popular insurrection on August 10, 1792. A new constituent assembly—the National Convention—was elected by universal male suffrage, and in September 1792 it established the First French Republic.

I.2.

Jacobin Rule

In the crisis created by foreign invasion, domestic rebellion, food shortages, and uncertain loyalties among high officials, the convention permitted executive power to be concentrated in its Committee of Public Safety. The committee, dominated by the radical Jacobin faction, instituted the Reign of Terror to eliminate enemies and suspects and to coerce the undecided. The king was tried and executed in January 1793 and the queen in October, and thousands of nobles, priests, and commoners suffered the same fate. The committee instituted price controls, requisitioning, rationing, and conscription, and it also organized and equipped the new citizen armies.

I.3.

The Directory

In 1794, when the victorious French forces were moving into enemy territory and domestic rebellion had been brought under control, the coercive regime was relaxed. The following year the National Convention adopted a constitution providing for a republic with the executive power vested in a five-man Directory and legislative power divided between two houses, indirectly elected in a way that ensured control by citizens of substantial property.

The Directory governed France through four difficult years of adjustment to the upheaval of revolution and continuing war. At home it was threatened from the Right by Royalists eager to restore the monarchy and on the Left by Jacobins determined to establish a democratic republic. A number of men in key positions saw the need for a more effective government, and they selected the young general Napoleon Bonaparte to stage a coup d’état. In November 1799 he and his supporters overthrew the Directory and a month later established the Consulate.

J.

The Consulate and the Empire

After his overthrow of the Directory, Napoleon quickly made himself master of the state and country. The new constitution, which he shaped, placed all essential powers in the office he assumed, that of First Consul. He presented himself to the French as a man of peace who would end the long years of war, but once in power he insisted that the way to peace was through victory over the enemies of France still allied in the Second Coalition. He led an army into Italy and sent another into southern Germany, and their victories forced Austria to make peace in 1801. The coalition disintegrated, and Britain, without allies and losing trade with an increasingly French-dominated Europe, agreed to the Treaty of Amiens (1802), which ended hostilities between the two countries.

J.1.

Napoleon’s Internal Policies

First Consul Bonaparte sought to heal the wounds of the Revolution, to reconcile old enemies, and to create and consolidate the institutions of a stable government. He welcomed into his service all who would swear allegiance to him. He negotiated with Pope Pius VIII the Concordat of 1801, which re-established the Roman Catholic Church as a State Church and provided for its support by the State, but subjected it to strict governmental control. Napoleon’s great codification of the laws confirmed the principal advances achieved by the Revolution, such as abolition of feudal privileges, equality before the law, freedom of conscience, the individual’s free choice of occupation, and guarantees against arbitrary arrest and detention.

To ensure the administration’s control of the 83 departments, the administrative units into which the country had been divided by the National Assembly, Napoleon placed each of them under a prefect appointed by the Ministry of the Interior. He established a central bank, the Bank of France; created a new unit of currency, the franc; and organized the Imperial University, an administrative organization to direct and control the nation’s teaching corps.

J.2.

Napoleon as Master of Europe

Although Napoleon posed as the defender of the Republic, in 1804 he established the French Empire and crowned himself emperor. This action confirmed that his ambitions extended beyond the limits of Bourbon France, and in 1805 he again took up arms. In the next two years he defeated Austria, Prussia, and Russia and made himself master of most of Europe. Britain remained in arms against him, secure in its control of the seas after destruction of the French fleet in 1805 off Cape Trafalgar. Napoleon undertook to bring the British to terms by closing Europe to their trade. His efforts to enforce the continental blockade led him to actions that eventually proved fatal to the empire—the invasions of Spain and Russia.

J.3.

The End of the First Empire

After the destruction of his army in Russia in 1812, Napoleon’s enemies formed a new coalition against him. Driven from Germany in 1813, in the winter and spring of 1814 Napoleon fought and lost a final campaign to save the empire. He abdicated in April 1814 and surrendered to the allies. The allied rulers were convinced by their French contacts that restoration of the Bourbons to the French throne offered the best promise of a peaceful France, and in May the younger brother of the executed Louis XVI entered Paris as King Louis XVIII.

The Napoleonic epic was not finished. The policies of the new government aroused much popular resentment in France, and the allies fell out among themselves as they tried to redraw the map of Europe. Napoleon, informed of these developments, perceived the opportunity to recoup his fortunes. In March 1815 he escaped and returned to France from his exile on the island of Elba. The army rallied to his support, Louis fled to Belgium, and Napoleon re-established the empire. The quarrelling European rulers set aside their differences, reassembled their armies, and on June 18, 1815, at Waterloo, near Brussels, they decisively defeated the imperial army. Napoleon gave himself up to the British, who shipped him off to the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic, where he died in 1821. Louis returned to Paris, and the Bourbon monarchy was restored a second time. See also Napoleonic Wars.

K.

The Constitutional Monarchy

Louis XVIII understood that France could not be returned to the pre-revolutionary regime. He granted a constitution, the Charter of 1814, which established a parliamentary monarchy and reaffirmed the social reforms embodied in the Napoleonic legal codes. The regime was representative but not democratic, the right to vote being limited to fewer than 100,000 substantial property owners.

In the first difficult months the government’s own ineptitude alienated much of the population, and when Napoleon returned to France in March 1815, Louis found that he had little active support in his own realm. The country accepted Napoleon without enthusiasm, and after he was defeated at Waterloo, it accepted Louis back without protest. The allied rulers, less ready to forget the country’s return to the empire, imposed a military occupation of two-thirds of the country for five years and a heavy indemnity.

The Second Restoration in 1815 set off a wave of vengeance against Bonapartists and Republicans. Scores were killed and hundreds wounded, and many more were legally punished for their parts in Napoleon’s return. The first parliamentary elections, in 1815, returned an ultra-Royalist, reactionary chamber. Within a year Louis dissolved it under pressure from the allied powers, who feared that it might attempt to undo the changes wrought by the Revolution and thus set off a new upheaval. In the new elections voters chose a majority of moderate Royalists. Economic productivity recovered and expanded. The foreign occupation was ended in 1818, and France was again accepted into the councils of the great powers. The years of rule by the moderates gave way, however, after the assassination of the heir to the throne in 1820, to rule by the ultra-Royalists, and the accession of Charles X in 1824 brought an ultra-Royalist to the throne.

Liberals protested that French liberties were in danger, but the Bourbons gave France a stable, honest, reasonably efficient, and unoppressive government. They provided a milieu in which industry and commerce thrived and in which France recovered its intellectual and artistic primacy of the preceding century.

K.1.

The Revolution of 1830

After 1826 an economic slowdown, a general election that returned a liberal majority in 1827, and the imprudence of Charles X produced a political crisis. In August 1829 Charles appointed a ministry of ultra-Royalists repugnant to the liberal deputies and the press. When a majority of the Chamber of Deputies in March 1830 petitioned for their replacement, he dissolved the chamber and called new elections. The elections confirmed the majority, but Charles chose to defy it. On July 26, 1830, he issued ordinances ordering new elections, reducing the number of voters, and restricting freedom of the press. Liberal journalists and deputies protested a violation of the constitution, and Parisian workers rallied to their support. In three days of street fighting they drove the royal troops from the capital. Charles, deserted by all but a minority of Royalists, abdicated, and the deputies called to the throne Louis Philippe, Duke of Orléans, head of the younger branch of the Bourbon family. The charter was revised to eliminate the king’s power to issue ordinances, and the franchise was modestly extended.

K.2.

Louis Philippe

The July Monarchy, the regime of Louis Philippe, was dominated by the well-to-do landed proprietors and a few wealthy businessmen and bankers. The first five years were turbulent, disrupted by riots and revolts of disappointed Republicans and impoverished urban workers, but by 1835 the regime was firmly established.

The political life of the period is less significant than its economic and intellectual life. The growth of industrial production accelerated rapidly after 1840, transforming France in a few decades from an agrarian into an industrial state. The Railway Law of 1842 provided for construction of a national railway network, which accelerated industrialization and gave individuals unprecedented mobility. In the five years after 1846 rural population declined for the first time in the century, as the movement to towns and cities mounted. A school law passed in 1833 required every commune in France to maintain a primary school for boys, free to those who could not afford to pay for tuition. The curriculum emphasized reading and writing, and in the 1840s standard French was beginning to replace the many local dialects spoken throughout the country.

K.3.

The Revolution of 1848

Louis Philippe and his ministers resisted all pressures to adapt the nation’s political institutions to the changing economy and society, particularly resisting an extension of the suffrage. The government’s rigidity and the serious economic depression in 1846 and 1847 undermined the regime’s support and caused many to look to a republic as an alternative. In February 1848 the government’s clumsy effort to prevent a Republican rally in Paris led to a clash between troops and demonstrators that turned into a revolution. Louis Philippe abdicated on February 24. A group of Republican leaders formed a provisional government and proclaimed the Second French Republic.

L.

The Second Republic and Second Empire

During the first four months of the Second Republic, from February to June 1848, the moderate Republicans, who sought only political change, and radical Republicans, who wanted social reform as well, struggled for control of the Republic. Elections in April returned a majority of moderates and conservatives to the Constituent Assembly, and their measures against the radicals led to a new insurrection—the June Days, three days of bloody street fighting in Paris. The crushing of the insurrection ensured the conservative nature of the Republic and created among the bourgeoisie a fear of working-class radicalism that influenced French politics for the next quarter-century.

The constitution adopted in November 1848 established a presidential republic with a single assembly, both president and assembly to be chosen by universal male suffrage. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the former Emperor, won the presidency by an overwhelming vote, and parliamentary elections gave a majority to Monarchists hostile to the Republic and fearful of Louis Napoleon—a combination that made effective government difficult. Radical Republicans, who had won a third of the seats, alarmed property owners large and small by talk of winning control of the government in 1852, the year of the next presidential and parliamentary elections. Louis Napoleon, posing as the saviour of society from radical revolution, took power into his own hands in a coup d’état on December 2, 1851, and gave France a new constitution. A year later he restored the empire and took the title of Napoleon III (Napoleon I’s son, Napoleon II, never reigned).

Until 1860 Napoleon III governed France as an authoritarian ruler, but in 1860 he began voluntarily to shift authority from himself to the legislative houses. By 1870 France was again a parliamentary monarchy and had a responsible ministry.

L.1.

Napoleon III’s Regime

The Second Empire provided a climate congenial to economic development. The rapid industrial growth begun in the 1840s resumed. The railway system tripled in size. New banking institutions provided a much needed national credit system. Trade treaties with Great Britain and a dozen other countries exposed the nation’s overprotected industry to salutary competition. Extensive public works improved cities and ports. Paris was transformed by the cutting of broad boulevards through the central quarters, the laying out of spacious parks, and the construction of public buildings.

Louis Napoleon’s achievements in domestic affairs contrast with his failures in foreign affairs. Victory over Russia in the Crimean War (1853-1856) and the prestige of having the peace conference in Paris were glories not matched again. In 1859 war against Austria in support of Italian national independence made possible the unification of Italy, with Nice and Savoy as France’s reward, but at the price of having a new, more powerful neighbour on the south-eastern frontier. An attempt, supported by an expeditionary force of 30,000 men, to establish a conservative, Roman Catholic empire in Mexico between 1862 and 1866 ended in disaster. Prussia’s decisive victory over Austria in 1866 upset the European balance of power to France’s disadvantage. Napoleon had failed to forestall Prussia’s triumph and, after it was accomplished, failed to obtain for France compensations that would balance the great increase in Prussia’s territory and power.

L.2.

The Franco-Prussian War, 1870-1871

In July 1870, Prussian prime minister Otto von Bismarck provoked France into war in a dispute over the succession to the Spanish throne. The French armies were no match for those of Prussia and the other German states in troop strength, organization, or command. They were routed in the field and on September 2 Napoleon surrendered himself and his principal army at Sedan. When the news reached Paris on September 4, citizen groups proclaimed a republic under a Government of National Defence to carry on the war. For four months Paris held out against a German siege, and hastily organized armies engaged German forces in the Loire Valley. In January 1871, when Paris neared the end of its food supply and provincial military operations appeared hopeless, the French government capitulated. Bismarck granted a three-week armistice for the election of a national assembly with the authority to make peace. The assembly met in Bordeaux and on March 1 approved a settlement that required France to cede Alsace and a third of Lorraine to Germany, pay an indemnity of 5 billion francs, and submit to military occupation until the indemnity was paid. See Franco-Prussian War.

M.

The Third Republic

The National Assembly had no sooner ended the war with Germany than it was faced with civil war at home. In mid-March radical Republicans in Paris rebelled and set up an independent municipal government—the Commune of Paris, 1871. They held control of the capital until two months later, when government troops recaptured the city in a week of bloody street fighting, leaving a legacy of bitterness that poisoned French politics for a generation.

The Royalist majority in the assembly intended to restore the monarchy but could not resolve differences between the Bourbon and Orléanist pretenders to the throne, and in 1875 Republicans mustered enough votes to win approval for a republican constitution. The Monarchists hoped eventually to replace the republican president with a king, but a move in that direction in 1877 was blocked.

For the next three decades France dealt with recurring threats to the Republic. In the 1880s the ministry of Jules Ferry undertook to break the influence of the Catholic Church over the education of French children. The Ferry Laws made primary education free and compulsory and forbade religious education in state schools. In the mid-1880s the Republicans parried a threat from Monarchists, Bonapartists, and ultra-patriots who had rallied behind a popular general, Georges Boulanger.

M.1.

The Dreyfus Affair

In the next decade a more serious threat emerged. In 1894 an army court-martial condemned to deportation and life imprisonment a Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfus, convicted of espionage for Germany. His family and friends, convinced of his innocence, forced the reopening of the case, and in the late 1890s the impassioned dispute over it split the country. Dreyfus’s supporters, chiefly Republicans, held that an injustice had been done and that justice to the individual must take precedence over other considerations. The anti-Dreyfusards charged that the Dreyfusards were discrediting the army and undermining national security. Around them rallied the anti-Republican forces: Monarchists, ultra-patriots, and supporters of the Church. Republican deputies united in 1899 to form the Government of Republican Defence. It sought to defuse the case by pardoning Dreyfus and by dismissals and reassignments of compromised army officers, and in 1901 it resumed the attack on the influence of the Church. The Associations Law of that year was used to close some 1,500 Catholic religious houses and 3,000 Catholic schools. In 1904 members of all religious orders were forbidden to teach, and in 1905 Church and State were separated. See also Dreyfus Affair.

M.2.

The Economy and the Arts

The four decades after 1871 were years of steady although not spectacular economic growth and of prosperity for the bourgeoisie and peasantry. The industrial working class shared in the growing national product but was less privileged. Trade unions were legalized in 1884, and a revolutionary labour movement—syndicalism—emerged. It rejected political action, and called for direct action through strikes and sabotage to overthrow both the Republic and capitalism.

The decades of peace and prosperity after 1871 were one of the great creative ages of French art and literature. First the impressionist painters and then the avant-garde of Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and others made Paris the art capital of the world. A galaxy of writers including Émile Zola, Anatole France, Paul Verlaine, Guy de Maupassant, Victor Hugo, Charles Cros, Arthur Rimbaud, and Guillaume Apollinaire enriched French literature.

M.3.

Foreign Affairs, 1871-1914

In the decades after the Franco-Prussian War national security was a constant concern. A united Germany was outstripping France in heavy industry and in population, and France after 1871 was without allies. Following Bismarck’s example, the French government turned to expansion overseas and established a new colonial empire in Africa and Asia, larger than the empire lost in the 18th century and second in extent only to the British Empire. In the 1890s a cooling in relations between Russia and Germany gave the French a long-awaited opportunity to win an ally on Germany’s eastern frontier. In 1894 France and Russia concluded a defensive alliance providing for mutual military assistance against attacks by Germany or Austria-Hungary. A decade later a common fear of Germany moved France and Britain to settle their colonial differences and to begin consultations on joint military and naval operations in Europe. In 1907 Britain and Russia resolved their differences, and France, Russia, and Britain were then joined in the Triple Entente, facing the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. The threat of war hung ominously over the decade before 1914, and recurring crises brought its outbreak near in 1905, 1908, 1911, and 1913.

The assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne by Serbian nationalists in July 1914 precipitated a new crisis. France’s interests were not directly involved in a Balkan quarrel between Austria-Hungary and Russia, but the government backed its Russian ally, fearing that anything less would weaken the alliance on which French security depended. Germany, supporting its ally, Austria-Hungary, declared war on Russia on August 1, and two days later, after France had refused to promise to remain neutral, declared war on France.

M.4.

World War I

When France went to war in August 1914, the French people almost without exception rallied to the defence of their country, setting aside the bitter class and political conflicts of the preceding decades. The German armies marched across Belgium and into northern France and advanced to within a few kilometres of Paris before being turned back in the Battle of the Marne in early September. They withdrew some 50 to 100 km (30 to 60 mi) and entrenched themselves on a line running from the English Channel to the Swiss frontier, deep within French territory.

Over the next four years military operations on the Western Front were essentially efforts to break through the opposing trench lines and resume a war of movement. The use of machine-guns and heavy artillery favoured defence, and attacks usually gained only a few square kilometres at a frightful cost in human lives. By the end of 1914 France had lost 300,000 dead and another 600,000 wounded, captured, or missing. The defence of Verdun alone cost 270,000 French lives in 1916. After the bloody failure of the spring offensive in 1917, some French units refused to move into front-line positions, and the disobedience spread to more than half the French divisions. At the same time the security of the home front was threatened by war-weariness, strikes, and growing demands for a negotiated peace. General Philippe Pétain took command of the army, and by a combination of punishment and concession he managed to restore discipline and morale. At home a new ministry headed by Georges Clemenceau silenced defeatists and renewed the will to continue the war.

In July 1918 a unified Allied command, the entry of large numbers of American troops into combat, and the attrition of the German war machine enabled the Allies to mount an offensive that forced the German government to ask for peace. On November 11, 1918, the newly established German Republic accepted an armistice and on June 28, 1919, signed a formal peace treaty. France recovered Alsace and Lorraine. The German army was limited to 100,000 troops, a strip 50 km (30 mi) wide on the east bank of the Rhine was demilitarized, and Germany agreed to pay reparations for damage done to French civilian property. France was the great Continental victor in the war, but at a staggering cost. About 1,394,000 men, a quarter of all Frenchmen between the ages of 18 and 30, had been killed, and the north-eastern departments were devastated.

M.5.

Internal Affairs Between the Wars

The most pressing domestic problem after the war was the stabilization of the franc. When price controls were lifted at the war’s end, the value of the franc plummeted from 20 cents to 6 and eventually to 2. In 1926 it was stabilized at one-fifth of its pre-war value. The bourgeoisie, who had been the core of the Republic’s support and who were dependent on their savings, were especially hard hit by the devaluation. The late 1920s and early 1930s was a brief interlude of prosperity and calm. It was ended by the Great Depression, which, beginning in 1932 in France, brought new threats to the Republic, as did the resurgence after 1933 of a militant, aggressive Germany. In 1934 the threat of Fascism at home and abroad moved the Radical-Socialist, Socialist, and Communist parties to join in the Popular Front to defend the Republic and to press for overdue social legislation. Winning control of the Chamber of Deputies in 1936, the Popular Front government led by Léon Blum dissolved Fascist organizations and won the enactment of laws establishing holidays with pay, a 40-hour week, and compulsory collective bargaining. It had still not completed its programme when it foundered in 1938 in party quarrels and the growing threat of war.

M.6.

The Search for Security

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s national security continued to be a primary preoccupation of the government. Britain and the United States failed to give the expected guarantees of military support against Germany. France sought security, therefore, in armaments and in alliances with Belgium and eastern European states that could, like Russia before 1914, threaten Germany with a two-front war should it attack France. France’s army, however, lacked the mobility and offensive power to come to the aid of its eastern allies if they were attacked. Adolf Hitler won power in Germany in 1933 and began to rearm. When France failed to react against his aggressive moves, the eastern alliance system disintegrated. Britain again became France’s one dependable ally, and France’s policy was increasingly tied to Britain’s. Following the British lead, in 1938 the French consented to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, then in 1939 joined Britain in a guarantee to aid Poland against German aggression. In September 1939 Germany attacked Poland, and France and Britain declared war on Germany, but without either an offensive army or a strategic air force they were powerless to save the Poles from quick defeat.

N.

World War II and the Fourth Republic

On May 10, 1940, German forces invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. The main weight of their armoured forces struck at a weakly defended position in the French line and on May 15 broke through and raced on to the Channel coast. Forty-five French and British divisions were cut off in the north. Most of the troops were evacuated to Britain, but they left behind all their heavy equipment.

On June 9 the Germans attacked across the River Somme and pushed on to the south. As their armoured columns spread across the country, the roads became clogged with fleeing refugees, and the French army disintegrated. On June 17 a ministry newly formed by the aged Marshal Pétain asked Germany for an armistice. Under the terms, concluded on June 22, about two-thirds of French territory was occupied by German forces at French expense. France was permitted to establish a government in the unoccupied zone.

On July 10, 1940, the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies met at Vichy in central France and voted full powers to Pétain to govern the country and to draft a new constitution. For the next four years Pétain was the figurehead of the Vichy government, a regime that represented the forces that had opposed the Republic in the preceding decades and sought to return France to a simpler, more rural, more patriotic past.

N.1.

Resistance and Liberation

On June 18, Charles de Gaulle, a relatively unknown French general who had fled to London, appealed to all French soldiers and sailors to join him in continuing the war beside Britain. He soon had a small armed force and a shadow government in England, and he established contact with Resistance movements inside France. They accepted him as the leader of a united movement in opposition to Vichy and the Germans. In 1943 he moved his headquarters to Algiers and brought the North African freedom fighters into his movement.

When the Allies landed in France at Normandy in June 1944, officials from de Gaulle’s organization in Algiers and local Resistance leaders took over the administration. On August 25 the Americans liberated Paris. De Gaulle entered the city on August 26 and organized a national provisional government representing the Resistance both within and outside France, but firmly under his control. He dominated the government for the next 15 months, but stepped down in January 1946, when the newly elected constituent assembly disagreed with his views on the need for a strong executive.

N.2.

The Post-War Period

The Fourth Republic began to function under its new constitution at the end of 1946. The regime’s greatest accomplishments were in social reform and economic development. In 1946 it established a comprehensive social security system that assured medical care, disability and old-age pensions, and unemployment insurance to all citizens. An upsurge in the birthrate raised the long stagnant population from 40 million in 1946 to 49 million in 1966. Agriculture was revolutionized by the consolidation of holdings and by the adoption of modern machinery and new methods. A national plan for the modernization of industry, aided by the US government’s European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan), produced a second industrial revolution. The index of industrial production doubled in the decade between 1948 and 1958. In 1957 France joined with five other Western European powers to form the European Economic Community, a common market of 165 million people unencumbered by tariff barriers.

The Fourth Republic was destroyed by intractable colonial problems. A nine-year battle to hold Indochina against nationalist rebels, costing France 92,000 dead and 3 billion francs, was abandoned in 1954. Algerian nationalists began a war for national independence in 1954, and the army, humiliated in France in 1940 and in Indochina in 1955, was determined to hold that last major imperial possession. The Algerian war proved costly, savage, and unpopular in France. In May 1958 militant army officers and European civilians, fearful that the civilian government in Paris was preparing to negotiate with the rebels, seized control of Algiers. The army command supported them, and the spread of the military coup to the mainland seemed imminent. A new ministry in Paris could not impose its control. In this critical situation General de Gaulle, who had been living in political retirement, emerged as a saviour. In June the National Assembly voted him full powers to govern the country for six months and to prepare a new constitution.

O.

The Fifth Republic

In September 1958 de Gaulle submitted the newly drafted constitution of the Fifth Republic to a popular referendum. Eighty-five per cent of the eligible voters went to the polls, and 79 per cent of them recorded their approval, an overwhelming vote of confidence in de Gaulle. The constitution vested executive power in an indirectly elected president, who selected the government’s ministers and had power to dissolve Parliament and to govern by decree in emergencies. The National Assembly’s power to overthrow a ministry was narrowly restricted. In 1962 an amendment proposed by de Gaulle instituted direct popular election of the president, further enhancing presidential power.

O.1.

Colonial and Defence Policy

The most pressing problem facing de Gaulle in the autumn of 1958 was Algeria. In the first months, while he restored the army to obedience, he did nothing to suggest disagreement with officers whose protests had brought him to the presidency, but he soon concluded that a military solution was impossible. In 1960 he opened peace negotiations with the Algerian rebels, and—undeterred by renewed revolts of army officers in Algeria, by assassination attempts against himself, and by terrorist violence—he pursued these negotiations to an agreement granting independence to Algeria. In a referendum in April 1962, 90 per cent of the voters approved.

Under France’s new constitution the colonies were to become self-governing members of the French Community presided over by the President of France, but native nationalists were eager to gain independence, and in 1960 the constitution was revised to permit amicable separation from France. In that year and the next the empire dwindled to a few islands and coastal strips.

De Gaulle was determined to raise France’s international prestige and to restore its independence in foreign affairs. In 1959 he ordered the closing of US bomber bases in France and withdrew the Mediterranean fleet from North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) command, and then in 1966 he removed all French forces from NATO. To reduce dependence on the American nuclear umbrella he developed a French nuclear force. On the other hand, de Gaulle worked for a strong Europe, strengthening his country’s commitment to the European Economic Community and, in cooperation with the chancellor of West Germany (now part of the united Federal Republic of Germany), virtually ended the centuries-long enmity between France and Germany.

O.2.

The Economy

Economically the 11 years of de Gaulle’s presidency were a golden age for France. After 1961 the country was at peace, the drain of wealth and human lives into colonial wars was ended, and the central government was stable. Between 1959 and 1970 the index of industrial production nearly doubled, and the yield of cereal crops increased 50 per cent. The gross national product increased at an average of 5.8 per cent annually between 1960 and 1975, a rate exceeded only by that of Japan. Purchasing power continued to rise, and the French people achieved an affluence unmatched in their past.

Nonetheless, in the mid-1960s signs of malaise appeared. Monetary inflation continued. Unemployment revived. A surplus of university graduates, products of the democratization of higher education in the 1950s, were growing angry at a society that offered them no suitable jobs. To the young generation which had grown up in an age of affluence and knew little of stagnation and deprivation, the consumer society seemed unfulfilling.

O.3.

The End of de Gaulle’s Presidency

In May 1968 all the forces of discontent burst forth in revolt. Students at the University of Paris, protesting police brutality, went on strike and occupied university buildings. Their example set off strikes of students and workers throughout the country, and by the third week of May the country was virtually paralysed by a general strike. The government’s efforts to end it by persuasion and concession failed, and the fall of de Gaulle’s government appeared imminent. In this extremity de Gaulle, after assuring himself of the support of army divisions stationed in Germany, dissolved the National Assembly and called new elections. The electorate, fearful of growing disorder, rallied to de Gaulle and gave his party an absolute majority in the new assembly. De Gaulle, however, felt the need for additional endorsement of his presidency. In the spring of 1969 he announced a referendum on two constitutional reforms and declared that he would resign if the voters should reject his proposals. In the voting on April 27, 1969, 53 per cent of the voters cast negative ballots, and de Gaulle resigned the next day. He retired to his private estate in eastern France, took no further part in political affairs, and died in 1970.

O.4.

The Pompidou Administration

In the elections held after de Gaulle’s resignation, Georges Pompidou, Prime Minister from 1962 to 1968, was elected to succeed him. In foreign affairs he continued de Gaulle’s emphasis on French independence of the two superpowers. He continued close cooperation with West Germany, tried to maintain friendly relations with the former colonies, and supported the European Common Market. In style, however, he was less imperious and more conciliatory. He dropped his predecessor’s opposition to Great Britain’s entry into the European Community (now called the European Union), and he involved the National Assembly more fully in the formulation of policy.

In 1973 the French economy was hard hit by the Arab oil embargo and its disturbance of the world economy. France had no significant oil deposits in its own territory, and French coal reserves were nearing exhaustion. The rapid industrial growth of the post-war years was suddenly slowed, unemployment rose, and the inflation rate spiralled. Before the government could deal with the new situation, Pompidou died in April 1974.

O.5.

The Election of Giscard d’Estaing

Pompidou’s death came suddenly, and the political parties were unprepared with candidates and manifestos. A dozen candidates entered the election. In the first round of voting the Socialist candidate, François Mitterrand, who was supported by the Communist Party as well as by his own, won the largest vote but fell short of the required majority. Centrists and rightists rallied to the runner-up, the Independent Republican candidate, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, and in the subsequent round he won the presidency with a very small majority.

Giscard planned to associate all centrist parties with the government, to end outdated ideological conflicts, and to remove old barriers to change. The parties rejected his advances, however, and the worsening recession precluded the adoption of new social programmes and increasingly preoccupied the government. In 1975 the index of industrial production fell for the first time since the end of World War II in 1945, and unemployment rose to 900,000, a 45-per cent rise over the level of 1974.

O.6.

The Giscard-Barre Administration

In August 1976 Giscard appointed a new Prime Minister, Raymond Barre, an economist without party affiliation, and charged him with ending industrial stagnation, the foreign trade deficit, and inflation. Barre undertook to move France sharply towards a free-market economy, reversing three centuries of government direction. All price controls were gradually removed. Ailing companies would receive financial assistance from the treasury only if they demonstrated the ability to modernize and to adapt to changing market conditions. Industries no longer competitive in the European or world markets were obliged to retrench. High-technology, competitive industries were encouraged. To cope with the energy problems created by rising oil prices, the building of nuclear power plants was stepped up. To safeguard France’s vital sources of petroleum, the foreign ministry took a more pro-Arab stance. Continuing increases in the price of oil, however, upset many of Barre’s calculations. Private investment did not rise as expected. Foreign trade remained in deficit, and inflation and unemployment continued at high levels.

O.7.

The Presidency of François Mitterrand

In 1981, following a Socialist victory at the polls, François Mitterrand replaced Giscard as president, and Pierre Mauroy became prime minister. Repudiating many of the policies of its predecessor, the Mitterrand government nationalized major banks and industrial firms, raised taxes, expanded social benefits, increased the number of public jobs, abolished the death penalty, and ended the centralized prefectural administration system established by Napoleon. In 1982 and 1983 an economic slowdown and the poor performance of state-owned enterprises led the government to impose currency devaluations and austerity measures. In July 1984 Mitterrand reshuffled his Cabinet; the Communists, who had held four portfolios in the previous Cabinet, declined to participate in the new one. Laurent Fabius became the youngest prime minister in French history at the age of 37. In 1986, after right-wing parties won a narrow victory in elections for the National Assembly, Mitterrand chose a new prime minister, Jacques Chirac, a founder of the moderate party Rassemblement pour la République (RPR) and mayor of Paris. It was the first time opposing parties had governed together since 1958. Chirac lost the 1988 presidential election to Mitterrand, who then chose a fellow Socialist, Michel Rocard, as prime minister.

After France failed in diplomatic efforts to get Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, the French military fought as part of coalition forces in the Gulf War. In May 1991 Rocard resigned, and Mitterrand appointed Edith Cresson, also a Socialist, as France’s first woman prime minister. An outspoken, controversial figure, she was replaced by Pierre Bérégovoy in April 1992, after the Socialists suffered losses in regional elections. In the parliamentary elections of March 1993, the Socialist Party lost its majority in the New Assembly to the Conservatives. The Union for France, a coalition of Chirac’s RPR, the Union for French Democracy (led by former president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing), and several minor conservative parties, won a total of 484 seats to the Socialists’ 54 seats. President Mitterrand appointed Édouard Balladur, a member of the RPR, as prime minister.

In May 1993 an audit commissioned by Balladur’s new government revealed that former prime minister Bérégovoy had either mismanaged the economy or misled the French people regarding the economic situation of France, which was actually poor, with mounting unemployment (over 3 million by 1993), weak competitively, and had a serious balance of payments problem. It was feared that the high budget deficit, much worse than previously believed, could jeopardize the country’s plans to take part in full European monetary union, timetabled for 1997. (Earlier, voters had narrowly approved the Treaty of Maastricht, strengthening integration within the European Union.) Prior to the publishing of the audit, Bérégovoy committed suicide, distressed by allegations regarding it and a loan that he had received in 1986. Balladur introduced privatization programmes and structural reforms to tackle France’s economic woes, but many of these were retracted or modified following sometimes violent protests by various affected interest groups.

Balladur and his coalition government won the elections of March 1994, with 45 per cent of the vote compared to more than 22 per cent for the Socialist Party and 1.1 per cent for the Communists. In May, the Channel Tunnel rail link between France and Britain running beneath the English Channel was officially inaugurated; shuttle services began in November. In September, embarrassing information surfaced regarding President Mitterrand’s close wartime links with collaborationists in the Vichy government. Jacques Delors, the widely respected Socialist President of the European Union, declined to run in December in the forthcoming French presidential elections. A 50 per cent devaluation in January 1994 of the CFA franc used in African Franc Zone countries caused widespread economic disruption in these states.

O.8.

The Chirac Presidency

Following a divisive presidential campaign that pitted him against his fellow RPR member Balladur and his former allies in the governing Union for France coalition, Jacques Chirac won the presidential elections in May 1995 with just over 52 per cent of the poll. He appointed Alain Juppé as his prime minister. The new government plunged France into international controversy by resuming testing of nuclear weapons at Mururoa in the South Pacific in October (shortly after the 50th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), which led to worldwide boycotts of French goods and rioting in French Polynesia. Deficit-cutting measures to restructure the social security system, introduced by Juppé in November, led to nearly one third of public employees going on strike in protest: the government responded with concessions that split their union opponents. Also in December, France announced that it would rejoin the command structure of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which it had left in 1966, reversing three decades of Gaullist defence autonomy. Former president François Mitterrand died of cancer in January 1996, and was given a state funeral.

In February 1996, the French parliament approved a constitutional change proposed by Juppé to hand budgetary control of the social security system from trade unions and employers to parliament. After the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) crisis of early 1996, in which EU sales of beef plummeted following the revelation that BSE, endemic in British cows, might cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, public indignation erupted in France in June 1996 when it was revealed that Britain had exported infected animal feed to France after banning its domestic sale. France responded by turning against British efforts to remove the EU-imposed global ban on British beef exports. President Chirac called snap parliamentary elections in June 1997, but the right-wing parties were defeated by the Socialist Party, in alliance with the Communist and Green parties. The leader of the Socialist Party, Lionel Jospin, became prime minister, and France entered a period of “cohabitation” with a right-wing president and a left-wing government.

O.9.

The Jospin Administration

Jospin came to power with the prospect of implementing numerous and often contradictory manifesto promises, the legacy of a somewhat ill-disciplined coalition election campaign. His chief policy priorities were reducing France’s high level of unemployment and readying the French economy for membership of the European single currency proposed for 1999 under the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) timetable.

France had a major diplomatic defeat at the NATO summit in July 1997, when French initiatives to secure Slovenia and Romania’s accession to NATO and changes in the NATO command structure both failed; in the event, only Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic were admitted to NATO, while French hopes of rejoining the organization’s military command suffered a major setback. Early Socialist pledges to halt privatization of French state assets were soon abandoned, with the announcement in July of plans to privatize half of France Telecom. In September 1997, however, the head of Air France resigned over Jospin’s decision, under pressure from his Communist coalition partners, to halt privatization of the airline. A main plank of Jospin’s job-creation programme, formally unveiled in October 1997, was a controversial proposal to cut France’s official working week from 39 to 35 hours and redistribute the working hours released, a plan criticized by many economists and business leaders. However, Jospin also faced continuing unrest over labour issues, including a lorry drivers’ blockade in November, and in January and February 1998 massed demonstrations and occupations of unemployment benefit offices by French unemployed seeking extra unemployment assistance. Jospin ended the occupations with a mixture of force and compromise. In May 1998 strong French lobbying forced a compromise over the proposed Dutch head of the future European central bank to oversee the single European currency, who consequently would be replaced by a French official halfway through his first eight-year term. Also in May the French parliament passed the legislation for Jospin’s working hours reduction plan.

In March 1999 Laurent Fabius, the former prime minister, and colleagues were controversially acquitted of manslaughter and negligence by the newly formed Court of Justice of the Republic over the distribution of HIV-contaminated blood for haemophiliacs during his period in office. In the same month, France joined the Western military effort against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia over Yugoslav actions in the province of Kosovo.

In December 1999 France announced it would sue the European Union for failing to protect consumers from health risks that France alleged were posed by British beef. The European Union had lifted a three-year worldwide embargo on British beef after the British government admitted that a link might exist between Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) and the fatal neurological disease Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) from August 1, 1999. However, France continued to block imports, claiming the UK measures for safeguarding the consumer were inadequate. Attempts to resolve the issue in the following months failed, fuelling the 'beef war'. In December 2001 the European Court of Justice declared the ban as illegal.

When, in January 2001, a law was passed that recognized as genocide the mass killing of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire during World War I in 1915, a wave of outrage was provoked in Turkey, which then reacted with a series of economic reprisals against French firms. Soon after, an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain led the French government to introduce controls on the movement of all farm animals; in March the first case of foot-and-mouth in France was reported. At the same time, despite the continuing ban on the import of British beef, the spread of BSE from French meat continued to grow.

Eric Halphen, the magistrate investigating alleged criminal corruption by Jacques Chirac as mayor of Paris from 1977-1995, announced on April 26 that he had “plausible” evidence against the president. However, the Cour de Cassation (France’s highest appeals court) dismissed the case in October on the grounds that as the existing president he could not be compelled to give evidence and was immune from prosecution. The investigations were suspended.

On May 2 the National Assembly approved proposals to give greater autonomy to Corsica. The proposals provided for the devolution to the Corsican Assembly of certain powers. Following the approval of the bill there was an increase in violence on the island. The bill received final endorsement in December, although in a heavily modified form. The separatist Corsican National Liberation Front (FLNC) announced that it had abandoned its ceasefire signed in December 1999 in protest. A Constitutional Council on January 17 ruled the bill unconstitutional.

A Toulouse chemical fertilizer factory exploded on September 21, 2001, killing 29 people and seriously injuring many hundreds. Investigations concluded that the blast was an accident, which contradicted concerns that the explosion was the result of terrorist action. The incident took place only 10 days after the attacks on the US cities of New York and Washington, D.C.

On January 1, 2002, France adopted Euro notes and coins along with 11 other European nations.

O.10.

2002 Elections and Beyond

In the first round of the presidential elections, held in mid-April 2002, more than a dozen candidates stood. This fact, coupled with the public's disenchantment with the socialist government of Jospin, severely split the vote and led to Jean-Marie Le Pen of the extreme right National Front party taking second place behind the incumbent Chirac. Faced with this loss, Jospin announced his retirement from politics and Le Pen and Chirac went forward to the second round of voting in early May. Appalled with the success of Le Pen (who took nearly 17 per cent of the vote in the first round), over 1 million people took to the streets in protest before the second round of voting, and, with a big anti-Le Pen campaign in full swing, Chirac won over 82 per cent of the votes in the second round. He appointed Jean-Pierre Raffarin as the interim prime minister in preparation for the parliamentary elections in June. Raffarin remained as prime minister after the elections, which saw the Union pour la Majorité Presidentielle (UMP), a coalition of groups supporting Chirac, win an absolute majority in the National Assembly.

At the Bastille Day parade in Paris in July there was an assassination attempt on Chirac, who survived unscathed. In the growing unrest over Iraq in early 2003, France sided with Germany and Russia in requesting further time for weapons inspectors to complete their jobs. In March the three countries said that they would veto any UN resolution that authorized war on Iraq. The rift between France and the UK, and in particular the US, grew in the run-up to the military campagn in the Middle East with further ire reserved for Jacques Chirac's decision to welcome international pariah Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe, to meetings of the Franco-African summit in Paris.

In early 2003 constitutional changes were enacted to allow for limited devolution to the regions. In a referendum held to decide Corsica’s future in July there was a narrow margin of victory to those opposing the devolution move. Summer temperatures in France, as elsewhere in Europe, were some of the hottest on record. The health ministry announced that around 15,000 people died of the heat in the summer period, most of them elderly. Raffarin promised an investigation into the response of the medical authorities during the crisis. In February 2004 controversial legislation was passed banning the wearing of overtly religious clothing in state schools. The controversy focused on the wearing of the Islamic headscarf by girls.

Alain Juppé, former prime minister, on trial for his alleged involvement in corrupt practices during his years as secretary-general of the Rassemblement pour la République (RPR), was found guilty in January 2004. He received an 18 months’ suspended sentence and was barred from holding political office for 10 years. President Chirac's UMP coalition lost ground in regional elections held in March 2004. Prime Minister Raffarin resigned but was immediately reappointed by Chirac.

In July, Chirac announced that France would hold a referendum on the proposed constitution for the European Union, drawn up by a convention under Giscard d’Estaing. The campaign was hard fought, and Chirac staked a great deal of his authority on its success. However, the increasing unpopularity of both Chirac and the Raffarin government contributed to the eventual rejection of the constitution when the vote was held in May 2005. Raffarin subsequently resigned, and Chirac controversially appointed Dominique de Villepin, a close ally who had served as a minister in Raffarin’s government but was not an elected member of the legislature, as the new prime minister.

An immediate problem facing the new prime minister was the unrest and street rioting in Paris that followed the deaths of two young men of North African origin, who were electrocuted after allegedly being chased by police into an electricity substation. The rioting in Paris spread to other French cities and the violence was fanned by the interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy calling the rioters a “rabble”. Curfew measures were introduced before the riots ended in mid-November 2005. Among the other pressing challenges that Villepin faced was France’s high rate of unemployment (close to 10 per cent in March 2006). Villepin’s government introduced legislation to make it easier for employers to lay off employees under the age of 26, in the hope that this would encourage job creation. However, in March 2006 huge demonstrations opposing the law were held in Paris, protesting that such legislation would simply serve to create a pool of easily disposable labour. Strike action followed in April and under public pressure Chirac announced that the new law on youth employment would be abandoned.

O.11.

The Sarkozy Presidency

The UMP leader Nicolas Sarkozy won the French presidential election in May 2007 by securing 53 per cent of the vote in the second-round run-off against the socialist candidate Ségolène Royal, who took 47 per cent. A divisive and controversial figure in French politics, the right-wing Sarkozy, formerly the minister of the interior, gained a formidable reputation following his comments during the rioting in French cities in 2005 and his tough stance on the entry of Turkey into the European Union. Sarkozy has promised to reform France, by bringing down employment, ending restrictions on the 35-hour working week, cutting taxes, and controlling immigration. Sarkozy appointed François Fillon as prime minister.

Sarkozy’s UMP won the general election of June 2007, taking 313 seats in the National Assembly though losing ground to the Socialists. Fillon was re-appointed prime minister.