A Quick History of France

The land we now call France was once known as Gaul. After its native inhabitants came the Celts, then Roman rule, and then Germanic invasions. One of those Germanic peoples, the Franks, founded the Frankish Kingdom, and that is where France's story as we know it begins. The name "France" itself comes from the Franks. Why did the Franks' name win out over the Celts' or the Romans'? Because the Frankish Kingdom later became the root of France, Italy, Germany and other countries that still lead Europe today. One reading is that the French were quietly claiming, through the name, to be the origin of Europe.

Like the rest of Europe, France passed through a God-centered Middle Ages and grew into a strongly Catholic country. Two wars then shaped it. The first was the Crusades, which after some 200 years of fighting ended in defeat for the West but strengthened a monarchy that had been held down by papal authority. The second was the Hundred Years' War, fought over the English claim to the French throne. Resisting the prospect of an English king on the French throne gave rise, for the first time, to a shared sense that "we are all French."

Strong kingship and national feeling gave France its shape as a state. The monarchy then ended the Wars of Religion with the Huguenots and built a powerful royal state, which led to absolutism. Under Louis XIV, the "Sun King," France was confident of being Europe's strongest power, yet it struggled with a fiscal crisis that was never fundamentally solved. That crisis would ultimately lead to the French Revolution, the turning point of French history.