A Brief History of France: Caves, Kings, Revolutions, and the Republic That Keeps Arguing

Follows: France: A Condensed History of Revolution, Republic, and Grandeur

Companion pieces: If I Was Born in France: La Laïcité, Baguettes, and the Art of Deconnexion (what daily life feels like now; this is how it got that way), and, in this series, A Brief History of Spain, the neighbour across the Pyrenees whose history keeps crossing this one.

On Saturday 31 October 2026, in Lyon, a protester dressed as Marie Antoinette held up a placard that read "Give them brioche". It was the third weekend in a row that hundreds of thousands of people had marched across France. The movement had started in mid-September with high school students protesting about leaking roofs, missing teachers and classrooms without enough chairs. Trade unions, parents and a revived "yellow vest" movement had joined them. Two weeks earlier, the fringes of the marches had turned into some of the worst rioting in years, and the president, Emmanuel Macron, six months from the end of his last term, was more isolated than ever.

The placard was a joke that every French person understood. The line it twisted, "let them eat brioche", is pinned on Marie Antoinette as the perfect symbol of a royal court that did not understand hunger. She almost certainly never said it: Jean-Jacques Rousseau put a version of it in the mouth of an unnamed "great princess" in his Confessions, written when the future queen was still a child in Vienna. But the joke worked because, in France, every protest is measured against 1789. The motto, the flag, the anthem, the words "left" and "right", even the habit of settling arguments in the street, all come from the Revolution.

The condensed history in this library tells that story in ten minutes. This is the long version.

In this history

1. Before France: painted caves, standing stones and the Gauls (to 58 BC)
2. Roman Gaul and the kingdom of the Franks (58 BC–987)
3. The Capetian kings, the Hundred Years' War and Joan of Arc (987–1483)
4. Renaissance and the Wars of Religion (1483–1610)
5. The Sun King, the Enlightenment and the crisis of the old regime (1610–1789)
6. The Revolution, part one: from the Estates-General to the end of the monarchy (1789–1792)
7. The Revolution, part two: Republic, Terror and Directory (1792–1799)
8. Napoleon, and a century of kings, revolutions and empire (1799–1870)
9. The Third Republic (1870–1914)
10. Two world wars and Vichy (1914–1945)
11. Rebuilding, decolonisation and de Gaulle's Fifth Republic (1945–1969)
12. From Pompidou to Macron, and France in 2026 (1969–2026)
13. How to understand France today

Part 1 — Before France: painted caves, standing stones and the Gauls (to 58 BC)

France is a country the French like to call l'Hexagone, the hexagon, for the rough six-sided shape of its mainland: three sides of sea (the Channel, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean) and three of land, guarded in the south by the Pyrenees and in the east by the Alps and the Jura, with the Rhine on the northeast. Only one side, the northeast, is open plain, and that is the side from which most of its invasions have come. Inside, the land is generous: wide river basins (the Seine, the Loire, the Garonne, the Rhône), good soils and a mild climate. For most of European history this was western Europe's most populous country, and that simple fact explains much of its power.

The painted caves

The deep past of France is written on cave walls. Two caves in particular changed how the world thinks about early human beings.

The first is Lascaux, in the Dordogne. On 12 September 1940, a few months after the German army had overrun France, four teenagers exploring a hole in the ground near Montignac slid down into a cave whose walls were covered with horses, bulls, deer and strange signs. The French culture ministry dates the paintings to about 21,000 years ago; radiocarbon dates from the cave, once calibrated, spread across roughly 18,000 to 23,500 years. Lascaux opened to the public after the war and became so popular that the breath and bacteria of visitors began to damage the paintings. It was closed, and replicas took its place: Lascaux II in 1983, a travelling Lascaux III in 2012, and the full-scale Lascaux IV in 2016.

The second is Chauvet, in the gorge of the Ardèche. Three cavers, Jean-Marie Chauvet, Éliette Brunel and Christian Hillaire, found it on Sunday 18 December 1994. The ministry calls it one of the oldest decorated Palaeolithic caves in the world. Its lions, rhinoceroses and horses, drawn with a sense of movement and shading that startled the experts, are more than 30,000 years old by most estimates, older than Lascaux by many thousands of years. UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 2014.

Farmers and standing stones

Farming reached what is now France from two directions, along the Mediterranean coast and up the Danube and Rhine, some seven or eight thousand years ago. Its most famous monuments are in Brittany, where at Carnac thousands of standing stones march in long rows across the fields, raised in the fourth and third millennia BC by people who left no writing. Megalithic tombs (dolmens) are scattered across much of the country.

Greeks and Gauls

In about 600 BC, Greek settlers from Phocaea, in Asia Minor, founded Massalia, today's Marseille, often called France's oldest city. From it, Greek goods, wine and the habit of writing spread up the Rhône. (Its colonists in turn founded Emporion in Catalonia, which the Spain history in this series describes.)

Most of the land, though, belonged to the peoples the Romans called Galli, the Gauls. They were Celtic-speaking peoples, divided into dozens of tribes, some of them very large, who lived by farming, herding and trade. By the second and first centuries BC many lived in fortified hill towns, oppida, struck their own coins, and traded wine and metal with the Mediterranean. Their religious and legal experts, the druids, taught orally, so most of what we know about them comes from their enemies.

Julius Caesar began his famous account of his wars with the words "All Gaul is divided into three parts". He meant the Belgae, the Celtae and the Aquitani, but the line has become shorthand for something truer: there was no "Gaul" as a nation. There were peoples who shared a language family and a religion and who fought each other as readily as they fought Rome. The schoolbook phrase "our ancestors the Gauls", taught in the nineteenth century from Brittany to Algeria, says more about the nineteenth century than about the Gauls. France's ancestors also include Greeks, Romans, Franks, Goths, Vikings, Bretons, Basques and, in modern times, millions of immigrants.

Rome already held the south, its Provincia. The rest of Gaul was independent, rich and divided, and an ambitious Roman governor was about to notice.

Part 2 — Roman Gaul and the kingdom of the Franks (58 BC–987)

Caesar and Vercingetorix

In 58 BC Julius Caesar, governor of the Roman province, used a migration of the Helvetii from what is now Switzerland as his reason to march into free Gaul. Over the next eight years he conquered all of it, tribe by tribe, playing them against one another. In 52 BC the Gauls finally united behind a young noble of the Arverni, from what is now the Auvergne: Vercingetorix. He beat Caesar at Gergovia, but was then besieged in the hill town of Alesia, in Burgundy. Caesar built a double ring of walls, one facing in and one facing out, and held off a huge Gaulish relief army. Vercingetorix surrendered. He was kept prisoner in Rome for six years, displayed in Caesar's triumph in 46 BC, and then executed.

Vercingetorix became a national hero only in the nineteenth century, when Napoleon III paid for excavations at Alesia: a defeated rebel who stood for a nation that loses battles but not its spirit.

Gallo-Roman civilisation

What followed was five centuries of Roman rule, and, as in Spain, one of the most thoroughly Roman places in the empire.

• Cities. Rome founded or rebuilt towns across Gaul. Lugdunum, Lyon, became the capital of the Three Gauls; Nîmes kept its temple, the Maison Carrée, and its arena; Arles and Orange their theatres. The aqueduct bridge of the Pont du Gard still stands over the river Gardon.
• Language. Latin slowly replaced Gaulish. The French language is spoken Latin, changed over a thousand years, with a few hundred Gaulish words (often for country things) and many more from the Germanic Franks.
• Wealth. Gaul exported wine, pottery, grain and wool, and Gaulish nobles became Roman senators.
• Religion. Christianity arrived along the trade routes. Christians were martyred at Lyon in the second century; by the fourth century there were bishops in the towns, and Martin of Tours, a former soldier who famously cut his cloak in half to share it with a beggar, became the most popular saint in Gaul.

From the third century onward, Germanic peoples pressed on the Rhine frontier. In the fifth, as the western empire collapsed, they came in to stay: Visigoths in the southwest, Burgundians in the Rhône valley (they gave their name to Burgundy), and Franks in the north.

Clovis and the Franks

The Franks gave France its name. Their greatest early king, Clovis (481–511), united most of their tribes, defeated the last Roman ruler in northern Gaul, and, crucially, became a Catholic Christian, baptised at Reims around the year 500. Most other Germanic kings were Arian Christians, and Clovis's choice made him the ally of the Gallo-Roman bishops and of the Catholic majority. In 507 he defeated and killed the Visigothic king Alaric II at Vouillé, near Poitiers, driving the Visigoths south into Spain. He made Paris his capital.

His dynasty, the Merovingians, divided the kingdom among sons, as Frankish custom required, and fought endlessly. Real power passed to their chief officials, the "mayors of the palace". One of them, Charles Martel, defeated an Umayyad army from al-Andalus near Poitiers in 732. Later writers made the battle the moment Christian Europe was saved; most modern historians see a large raid turned back, important but not world-changing. Charles's son Pepin deposed the last Merovingian in 751 and became king, founding the Carolingian dynasty.

Charlemagne

Pepin's son Charlemagne (king from 768) conquered the Lombards in Italy, the Saxons in Germany, and a frontier zone in Spain. On Christmas Day 800, in Rome, the pope crowned him emperor. His empire stretched from the Ebro to the Elbe. At his court at Aachen, scholars such as the Englishman Alcuin revived Latin learning, copied classical texts, and developed a clear new handwriting, the Carolingian minuscule, which is the ancestor of the lower-case letters you are reading now.

Both France and Germany claim Charlemagne, and both are right. When his grandsons divided the empire by the Treaty of Verdun in 843, the western part, West Francia, became the kingdom of France, and the eastern part the core of Germany.

Vikings, lords and the end of the Carolingians

The ninth and tenth centuries brought new invaders, Vikings above all. Kings were too weak to defend everyone, and power passed to local lords who could. In 911 the king granted a Viking leader, Rollo, land at the mouth of the Seine; it became Normandy, the land of the Northmen, whose duke would conquer England in 1066. This was the world of feudalism, of lords and vassals bound by oaths, and of peasants bound to the land.

In 987 the great nobles chose as king Hugh Capet, count of Paris. Nobody at the time could have guessed that his family, in one branch or another, would reign for most of the next eight centuries.

Part 3 — The Capetian kings, the Hundred Years' War and Joan of Arc (987–1483)

Small kings, long luck

The first Capetians ruled directly only a small territory around Paris and Orléans, the Île-de-France. Many of their vassals, such as the dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine, were richer and stronger than they were. But the Capetians had two great assets. They had the sacred aura of anointed kings, crowned at Reims. And they had extraordinary luck: for more than three centuries, every king left a son to succeed him. Slowly they turned a title into a state.

Their great problem was the dynasty across the Channel. From 1154 the Plantagenet kings of England, through inheritance and marriage (above all Henry II's marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine), held more of France than the French king did, from Normandy to the Pyrenees. Philip II Augustus (1180–1223) took most of it back: he seized Normandy from King John in 1204, and on 27 July 1214, at Bouvines, beat a coalition of John's allies and the German emperor.

Cathedrals, crusades and a saint king

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were a time of growth. The population rose, forests were cleared, towns and fairs flourished. In the abbey church of Saint-Denis, north of Paris, the abbot Suger began in the 1140s to build in a new style, with pointed arches, ribbed vaults and huge windows; we call it Gothic, but at the time it was called opus francigenum, "French work". Chartres, Notre-Dame de Paris, Reims and Amiens followed.

The same age was harsh to dissent. In the south, the Cathars, Christians whom the Church judged heretics, were strong around Toulouse and Albi. In 1209 the pope launched the Albigensian Crusade against them; twenty years of massacres ended with the south absorbed into the French crown.

Louis IX (1226–1270) was the model of the Christian king: just, pious, generous to the poor, and a crusader who died of disease besieging Tunis. He was made a saint in 1297, and "Saint Louis" became the ideal against which later kings were judged. He also persecuted Jews and had the Talmud burned.

His grandson Philip IV the Fair (1285–1314) was the first ruler of a recognisably modern state, run by lawyers. He quarrelled with Pope Boniface VIII, whom his agents seized at Anagni in 1303; and called the first assemblies of the three orders of society, the clergy, the nobility and the towns, which later became the Estates-General. From 1309, popes lived not in Rome but at Avignon, on the Rhône, under French influence, until 1376.

The Hundred Years' War

In 1328 the direct Capetian line finally ran out of sons. The French barons chose a cousin, Philip VI of Valois. But the king of England, Edward III, was the dead king's nephew through his mother, and in 1337 he claimed the French crown. The result was a century of intermittent war.

Fought mostly on French soil by armies that lived off the land, and combined with the Black Death, which arrived in 1348 and kept returning, the war devastated the countryside.

Joan of Arc

By 1429 the English and their Burgundian allies held Paris and the north, and the uncrowned heir, Charles, was penniless south of the Loire. Then a peasant girl from Domrémy, in Lorraine, aged about seventeen, arrived at his court saying that the voices of saints had told her to drive out the English and have him crowned. Joan of Arc was given armour and a place with an army that lifted the siege of Orléans in May 1429. In July she stood beside Charles as he was crowned at Reims.

A year later she was captured by the Burgundians and sold to the English. A Church court at Rouen tried her for heresy, and on 30 May 1431, aged about nineteen, she was burned at the stake. A later trial annulled the verdict in 1456, and the Catholic Church made her a saint in 1920.

Joan of Arc has been claimed by almost every French camp: by Catholics as a saint, by republicans as a daughter of the people betrayed by the powerful, by the far right as the symbol of a nation defending itself against foreigners, and by feminists as a young woman who led men and was killed for wearing their clothes.

Louis XI and the making of a kingdom

The war's end left a stronger monarchy. Charles VII created the first permanent royal army and a permanent tax to pay for it. His son Louis XI (1461–1483), "the universal spider", outlasted his great rival, Charles the Bold of Burgundy, killed in battle in 1477, and took much of his land. By the time Louis died, the kingdom had nearly its modern outline in the centre and west, and its king was one of the strongest in Europe.

Part 4 — Renaissance and the Wars of Religion (1483–1610)

Italy, and a king of the Renaissance

In 1494 King Charles VIII marched into Italy to claim the kingdom of Naples. It was the start of the Italian Wars (1494–1559), sixty-five years of fighting, mostly against the Spanish and Habsburg rulers whose story is told in the Spain history. France lost the wars but won something else: the Italian Renaissance.

Its great patron was Francis I (1515–1547). He brought Italian artists to his châteaux on the Loire, among them Leonardo da Vinci, who spent his last years at Amboise and died there in 1519, leaving the Mona Lisa in France. Francis rebuilt the Louvre and Fontainebleau, founded the lecturers' college that became the Collège de France, and made a deal with the pope in 1516, the Concordat of Bologna, that let French kings choose their own bishops. And in August 1539, by the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, he ordered that legal acts and official documents be written in French rather than Latin. Parts of it are still in force, the oldest French legislation still used by the courts.

Francis also spent most of his reign fighting the emperor Charles V, who surrounded France on almost every side. He was captured at the battle of Pavia in 1525 and held in Madrid. To break the encirclement he did something that shocked Christian Europe: he allied with the Ottoman sultan Suleiman.

The Reformation comes to France

The Protestant Reformation reached France in the 1520s. Its most influential leader was a Frenchman, John Calvin, who fled persecution and built his model Protestant city at Geneva. Calvin's ideas spread fast among French nobles, merchants and artisans. French Protestants came to be called Huguenots; by the 1560s they may have been a tenth of the population, concentrated in the south and west, and included some of the greatest noble families.

The kings tried persecution, then compromise. Neither worked. After King Henry II died in a jousting accident in 1559, his widow, Catherine de' Medici, ruled for a series of young, weak sons, and the great Catholic and Protestant noble families fought for control of them.

The Wars of Religion

From 1562 to 1598 France went through eight civil wars between Catholics and Protestants, interrupted by truces that never held.

The worst moment came in August 1572. Huguenot nobles had gathered in Paris for the wedding of the king's sister to the Protestant Henry of Navarre. In the night of 23 to 24 August, St Bartholomew's Day, the royal court ordered the killing of the Protestant leaders, beginning with Admiral Gaspard de Coligny. The killing spread through Paris and then to provincial towns. Several thousand people were murdered in Paris; modern estimates for the whole of France vary from about 5,000 to 30,000. In Rome, the pope ordered a Te Deum of thanksgiving.

Henry IV and the Edict of Nantes

By a chain of deaths, the Protestant Henry of Navarre became heir to the throne, and in 1589, when Henry III was assassinated by a Catholic friar, king. Catholic Paris refused him. In 1593 he converted to Catholicism. The line "Paris is well worth a Mass" is attributed to him, probably falsely, but it sums up the bargain. In 1598, by the Edict of Nantes, he gave Protestants freedom of conscience, freedom to worship in many places, equal access to offices, and some fortified towns as security.

The edict was not toleration in the modern sense. It was a peace treaty between two armed communities in one state. But it was one of the first times a major European monarchy accepted that its subjects could, legally, hold two religions. Henry, the "good king Henry" of popular memory, who reportedly wished every peasant a chicken in the pot on Sundays, was stabbed to death in a Paris street in 1610 by a Catholic fanatic, François Ravaillac.

The Wars of Religion taught the French state a lesson it never forgot: that religion, left to itself, could tear the country apart, and that the state must stand above it. Louis XIV would draw one conclusion from that lesson, and the Republic of 1905 the opposite one.

Through the horrors, French writing came of age. Michel de Montaigne, a magistrate from Bordeaux whose family had Catholics and Protestants in it, retired to his tower and wrote his Essays (first published in 1580), a new form for a new kind of thinking: doubtful, personal, tolerant. François Rabelais had already written the giant comic novels of Gargantua and Pantagruel. The French language was ready for its classical age.

Part 5 — The Sun King, the Enlightenment and the crisis of the old regime (1610–1789)

Richelieu

Henry IV's son, Louis XIII, was nine when his father was murdered. The man who made his reign was his chief minister from 1624 to 1642, Cardinal Richelieu. Richelieu had two aims: to make the king obeyed at home and to make France the first power in Europe. At home he besieged and took the Protestant stronghold of La Rochelle (1628), ending the Huguenots' political and military independence, though not yet their freedom of worship; destroyed the castles of nobles who might resist; and sent royal officials, the intendants, into the provinces. He founded the Académie française in 1635 to watch over the French language, which it still does. Abroad, though a cardinal of the Catholic Church, he paid and then joined the Protestant side in the Thirty Years' War against the Catholic Habsburgs of Spain and Austria, because they were France's rivals. Reason of state came first.

The Fronde

When Louis XIII died in 1643, his son Louis XIV was four years old. His mother, Anne of Austria, and the Italian-born Cardinal Mazarin governed for him, and the heavy taxes of war provoked a revolt. The Fronde (1648–1653), named after a children's slingshot game, began with the Paris parlement (the high court) and then drew in the great nobles. The royal family had to flee Paris. The boy king never forgot it.

The Sun King

When Mazarin died in 1661, Louis XIV, aged twenty-two, announced that he would govern without a chief minister. He reigned for seventy-two years in all, from 1643 to 1715, the longest reign in European history for a major monarch, and he gave his name to an age.

• Versailles. He turned his father's hunting lodge at Versailles into the largest palace in Europe, and in 1682 moved the court and government there. The great nobles, once rebels, now competed for the honour of handing him his shirt in the morning. The palace was a theatre of power, and the whole of Europe copied it.
• The state. His minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert built roads, canals, a navy, and royal manufactures of tapestries, glass and silk, and protected French industry with tariffs. The king's bureaucracy, army and police grew. The famous line "L'État, c'est moi", "I am the state", is almost certainly a later invention, but it describes the theory: the king answered to God alone.
• Culture. It was the classical age of French literature: the plays of Molière, Racine and Corneille, the fables of La Fontaine. French became the language of European diplomacy and of the educated classes from Lisbon to St Petersburg.
• Empire and slavery. France held colonies in Canada, the Caribbean, and trading posts in Africa and India. In 1685 the crown issued the Code Noir, the law code governing slavery in the French colonies.

One king, one faith

In October 1685, by the Edict of Fontainebleau, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes. Protestant churches were destroyed, pastors expelled, and Protestants ordered to convert; dragoons were billeted in Huguenot homes to force them. Emigration was forbidden, but a mass exodus followed anyway, to the Netherlands, England, Prussia, Switzerland and South Africa, taking skills and capital with them. Many historians count it among the reign's worst mistakes.

Glory and its bill

Louis also spent his reign at war, for territory and for gloire. He took Franche-Comté and parts of Flanders and Alsace, and built a ring of fortresses, designed by the engineer Vauban, around the frontiers. But the later wars united Europe against him. The last, the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), was fought to put his grandson on the throne of Spain. Philip V kept the Spanish crown, which is why Spain's kings are still Bourbons, but France was exhausted. The bitter winter of 1709 brought famine.

Maddison Project Database 2023; GDP per person in 2011 international dollars. Early figures are rough reconstructions.

The table shows the paradox of the Sun King's France. It was not especially rich per person; the Dutch, with their trade and finance, were far richer. But it had more than twice as many people as Spain, and a state able to tax and conscript them. That was the foundation of its power, and of the burden on its peasants. When Louis died on 1 September 1715, he is said to have told his great-grandson and heir, aged five, that he had loved war too much. The crowd, by some accounts, jeered at the funeral procession.

The century of light

The eighteenth century was France's century of ideas. In salons run by educated women, in cafés, academies and Masonic lodges, a new kind of public opinion grew up, and the writers called philosophes argued that reason, not tradition or revelation, should judge every institution.

The philosophes did not want revolution. Voltaire admired enlightened kings and despised the mob. But they made it normal to ask of any institution, the Church, the nobility, the monarchy itself: what is it for, and does it work?

A kingdom of orders

French society was still divided by law into three "estates". The First Estate was the clergy; the Second, the nobility; the Third, everyone else, from rich bankers to landless labourers, the overwhelming majority. The first two were largely exempt from the main direct tax, the taille. Peasants owned much of the land, more than in most of Europe, but still owed dues to lords, tithes to the Church and taxes to the king. It was a society of privilege, where almost everything (a town, a guild, a province, a noble family) had its own rights and exemptions.

The economy grew. Atlantic ports such as Bordeaux and Nantes grew rich on the colonial trade, above all the sugar and coffee of Saint-Domingue, today's Haiti, produced by hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans; it was the richest colony of its time. Nantes was the leading French slave-trading port.

War, debt and a stuck monarchy

Louis XV (1715–1774) began as "the well-beloved" and ended despised. In the Seven Years' War (1756–1763), France lost Canada and most of its position in India to Britain. Then, to take revenge, Louis XVI (1774–1792) backed the American colonists against Britain. French troops and ships were decisive at Yorktown in 1781, and America won its independence. France won nothing except a vast debt.

The kingdom was not poor. The state was. Its tax system was riddled with exemptions, and every attempt to reform it ran into the privileged, above all the parlements, the high courts that had to register royal edicts. The reforming minister Turgot tried to free the grain trade and abolish the guilds (1774–1776) and was dismissed. His successors borrowed. By the late 1780s, paying the interest on the debt swallowed a huge share of royal revenue. In 1787 the minister Calonne proposed a land tax on everyone, privileged or not, to an Assembly of Notables; they refused, saying only the nation, assembled in the Estates-General, could approve new taxes.

The old regime did not fall because the French were poorer than other Europeans, or because the king was a tyrant. It fell because a state that needed money could not get it without changing who paid, and those who would have paid were strong enough to say no.

So in August 1788 the king called the Estates-General, which had not met since 1614. That same summer, hail and drought ruined the harvest. Bread prices soared in the spring of 1789, just as the country was electing its deputies and writing its lists of grievances, the cahiers de doléances. In January 1789 a priest, the Abbé Sieyès, published a pamphlet that set the terms of the coming fight: What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing. What does it ask? To become something.

Part 6 — The Revolution, part one: from the Estates-General to the end of the monarchy (1789–1792)

The Third Estate becomes the nation

The Estates-General opened at Versailles on 5 May 1789. At once the deputies of the Third Estate demanded that the three orders sit together and vote by head, not by order, since otherwise the clergy and nobility could always outvote them. When the king delayed, they acted. On 17 June they declared themselves the National Assembly, claiming to speak for the whole nation. On 20 June, locked out of their usual hall, they gathered in an indoor tennis court nearby and swore the Tennis Court Oath: not to separate until they had given France a constitution. The king gave way, then moved troops towards Paris.

14 July

Paris was hungry and frightened. When the king dismissed the popular minister Necker on 11 July, crowds took to the streets, looking for weapons. On 14 July 1789 they stormed the Bastille, a fortress-prison in the east of the city, to seize its gunpowder. Its governor was killed and his head carried on a pike. The prison held only seven inmates. But the Bastille was the symbol of arbitrary royal power, and its fall was the moment the Revolution became unstoppable. Within days the king was wearing the new tricolour cockade, the red and blue of Paris with the white of the monarchy.

In the countryside a wave of panic, the Great Fear, sent peasants to attack châteaux and burn the records of their dues.

The night of 4 August and the Declaration of Rights

On the night of 4 August 1789, in a burst of enthusiasm, noble and clerical deputies rose one after another to give up their privileges: feudal dues, the tithe, the sale of offices, the special rights of provinces and towns. In a few hours the legal framework of the old society was abolished.

On 26 August the Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, seventeen articles that are still part of French constitutional law today. Its first article reads: "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights." Sovereignty, says Article 3, "resides essentially in the nation." It promised equality before the law, freedom of opinion, religion and the press, the presumption of innocence, taxation by consent, and the right to property, "inviolable and sacred".

During those debates, as the condensed history explains, deputies who supported a royal veto sat to the right of the president, and their opponents to the left. The words "left" and "right" have meant what they mean ever since.

In October, a crowd of Parisian women angry at the price of bread marched to Versailles and brought the royal family back to Paris.

Remaking France

Over the next two years the Assembly redesigned the country from top to bottom.

• In 1790 it replaced the old provinces, each with its own laws and privileges, with 83 new departments of roughly equal size, most named after rivers or mountains. Departments still exist today.
• To pay the debt it nationalised the vast lands of the Church and sold them, backed by a paper currency, the assignats, which soon lost much of its value.
• By the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of July 1790 it made priests elected, salaried officials of the state and required them to swear an oath to the constitution. About half refused. The pope condemned the reform. This split, between the Revolution and the Church, divided France for more than a century.
• In 1791 France became one of the first countries in Europe to give Jews full civil equality as citizens.

Not everyone counted equally. The playwright Olympe de Gouges answered the Declaration in 1791 with her own Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen: if a woman has the right to mount the scaffold, she wrote, she must also have the right to mount the speaker's platform. She was guillotined in November 1793. French women would not win the vote until 1944, and first voted in 1945.

In August 1791 the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue rose in the largest slave revolt in history, which would end in 1804 with the independence of Haiti.

Flight, war and the fall of the king

Louis XVI never accepted the Revolution in his heart. On the night of 20 to 21 June 1791, the royal family fled Paris in disguise towards the eastern frontier. They were recognised and stopped at Varennes and brought back. From then on, many saw the king as a traitor. The constitution of September 1791 kept him as a constitutional monarch, but trust was gone.

In April 1792 the Assembly, pushed by the faction called the Girondins, who believed war would spread the Revolution and unmask its enemies, declared war on Austria; Prussia joined Austria. The war went badly. On 10 August 1792 armed Parisians and volunteers from the provinces, among them men from Marseille singing a new war song that became the Marseillaise, stormed the royal palace of the Tuileries. The king was suspended and imprisoned. In early September, fearing that prisoners would rise to help the invaders, mobs killed more than a thousand of them in the Paris jails, the September Massacres.

On 20 September 1792, at Valmy, a French army of volunteers and old regulars stopped the Prussian advance with an artillery duel. The German writer Goethe, who was with the Prussians, later recalled telling his companions that a new era of world history had begun that day. The next day, 21 September 1792, the newly elected Convention abolished the monarchy. France was a republic.

Part 7 — The Revolution, part two: Republic, Terror and Directory (1792–1799)

The king's death

The Convention, elected by all adult men, put the king on trial for treason. "Citizen Louis Capet" was found guilty almost unanimously; on the sentence, 361 of 721 deputies voted for immediate death, a majority of one. On 21 January 1793, Louis XVI was guillotined in what is now the Place de la Concorde. Marie Antoinette followed in October.

By then the Republic was at war with most of Europe, including Britain, the Dutch Republic and Spain. To fill the armies the Convention ordered a levy of 300,000 men in February 1793, and in August a mass levy, the levée en masse, which put the whole nation on a war footing: young men to fight, married men to make weapons, women to make tents and nurse. It was the first modern national army.

The Vendée

The levy provoked a great rising in the west, south of the Loire, in the region called the Vendée, where peasants already resented the attack on their priests. In March 1793 they rose in a Catholic and royalist "Grand Army", killing republicans and winning a string of battles. On 1 August 1793 the Convention ordered the rebel region destroyed. After the rebels were defeated in the winter, in early 1794 the "infernal columns" of General Turreau were ordered to kill the inhabitants and burn villages, houses and woods. At Nantes, prisoners were drowned in the Loire.

The death toll is disputed; one widely cited study puts it at about 200,000, including about 170,000 inhabitants of the rebel region, but estimates vary widely. Whether it was a "genocide" is one of the fiercest arguments in French history. Historians such as Reynald Sécher argued that it was, as an attempt to exterminate a population; most specialists accept that it involved mass atrocities against civilians but reject the word, arguing that the killing was aimed at a political and religious rebellion, not at a people. The argument is also about the Revolution itself: those who distrust it see the Vendée as proof of where it led.

The Terror

In June 1793, armed crowds forced the Convention to expel the Girondin leaders. Power passed to the Jacobins and, above all, to the twelve men of the Committee of Public Safety, among them Maximilien Robespierre, a lawyer from Arras famous for his incorruptibility, and the young Saint-Just. The Constitution of 1793, the most democratic yet, was suspended "until the peace".

What followed is called the Terror. The Law of Suspects of 17 September 1793 allowed the arrest of anyone vaguely suspected of hostility to the Revolution. Revolutionary tribunals abolished defence lawyers and pre-trial investigation.

Victims included the queen, Girondin deputies, Olympe de Gouges, the chemist Lavoisier, many nobles and priests, and, most of all, ordinary people from the rebellious provinces. In the spring of 1794 Robespierre turned on his own side, sending the radical Hébert and then his old ally Danton to the guillotine. On 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794), deputies afraid that they would be next turned on Robespierre. He was guillotined the next day.

Remaking time, weights and the soul

The radical Republic also tried to remake daily life. It introduced a new calendar, starting from Year I of the Republic, with ten-day weeks and months named after the weather and the harvest (Thermidor is "the hot month"). It invented the metric system, which most of the world now uses. Some Jacobins tried to "de-Christianise" France, closing churches and holding festivals to Reason; Robespierre himself preferred a cult of the Supreme Being. And on 4 February 1794 the Convention abolished slavery in all French colonies, one of the first acts of its kind anywhere. Napoleon would restore it in 1802.

The Directory and the general

After Thermidor, the wealthier middle classes regained control. A new constitution in 1795 created the Directory, a five-man executive and a two-chamber parliament elected by property owners. It lurched between royalist and neo-Jacobin threats and relied more and more on the army. The armies, meanwhile, had turned from defence to conquest. In 1796–1797 a young Corsican general named Napoleon Bonaparte conquered northern Italy. In 1798 he led an expedition to Egypt. In 1799 he abandoned his army there, came home, and on 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799) helped organise a coup that ended the Directory.

What was the Revolution?

French historians have argued for two centuries about what the Revolution was, and the argument is political as well as scholarly.

The classic, "social" interpretation, associated with historians such as Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul, saw a bourgeois revolution: a rising middle class, backed by peasants and urban workers, overthrowing a feudal aristocracy. The Terror was a tragic but understandable response to war and counter-revolution.

The "revisionist" or political interpretation, led above all by François Furet in the 1970s, rejected that class story. It saw the Revolution as a new political culture, a belief that the people's will must be one and that its enemies must be eliminated, which led to the Terror from inside its own logic, and which foreshadowed the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century.

Many recent historians look beyond Paris: at women, at the colonies and Haiti, at the provinces, at the Revolution's global echoes. Most would agree that it was both an immense advance (rights, citizenship, equality before the law) and a source of terrible violence, and that the two cannot be neatly separated.

Part 8 — Napoleon, and a century of kings, revolutions and empire (1799–1870)

The Consul

The coup of Brumaire made Bonaparte First Consul, in effect a dictator with a constitution approved by a plebiscite. He was thirty. In a few years he built the institutions of the modern French state, many of which still exist.

The Civil Code is his greatest legacy. In clear, short articles it set out a single law for all French citizens: equality before the law, freedom of contract, secure private property, civil marriage and divorce, and equal inheritance among sons and daughters. It also made wives legally subordinate to their husbands. Carried by French armies and admired by lawyers, it shaped legal systems from Belgium and Italy to Latin America and Louisiana.

He also made peace, for a while: with Austria at Lunéville (1801) and with Britain at Amiens (1802). And in 1802 he restored slavery in the French Caribbean. In Saint-Domingue his army failed to reconquer the island, and Haiti declared its independence on 1 January 1804.

The Emperor

In May 1804 the Senate proclaimed him Emperor of the French, and on 2 December 1804, at Notre-Dame, he crowned himself, with the pope looking on. A new imperial nobility followed.

His armies, organised in fast-moving corps and living off the land, seemed unbeatable. At Austerlitz, on 2 December 1805, he crushed the Austrians and Russians; the Holy Roman Empire, which traced itself back a thousand years to Charlemagne, was dissolved the next year. Prussia was destroyed in 1806. He made his brothers kings of Holland, Naples, Westphalia and, in 1808, Spain. In 1809, after defeating Austria again at Wagram, he married the Austrian emperor's daughter, Marie-Louise, to found a dynasty. At its height his empire and its satellites covered most of continental Europe.

But the empire had fatal weaknesses. Britain's navy, which had destroyed the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar in 1805, controlled the seas. His "Continental System", a ban on trade with Britain, hurt Europe more than Britain. And his conquests provoked the very nationalism the Revolution had invented: the Spanish rising of 1808, described in the Spain history, tied down hundreds of thousands of his troops for six years.

Russia and the fall

In June 1812 he invaded Russia with the largest army Europe had ever seen, more than 450,000 men at the start and perhaps 600,000 in all, half of them non-French. The Russians retreated, burning as they went. Napoleon took Moscow, which burned, and waited for a peace offer that never came. The retreat through the Russian winter destroyed the army: only a small fraction of the men who had crossed into Russia came back.

The rest of Europe rose against him. Defeated at Leipzig in October 1813, he abdicated at Fontainebleau in April 1814 and was exiled to the island of Elba. In March 1815 he escaped, landed in the south, and marched on Paris as the soldiers sent to stop him joined him: the Hundred Days. On 18 June 1815, at Waterloo, in today's Belgium, Wellington's British-led army and Blücher's Prussians defeated him for the last time. He was sent to the remote Atlantic island of Saint Helena, where he died on 5 May 1821.

Napoleon is the hardest figure in French history to judge, because he was everything at once: the heir of the Revolution who ended it, the law-giver who crushed liberty, the soldier whose wars killed hundreds of thousands, and the founder of a state that still runs France.

His defenders, then and now, see the man who saved the Revolution's achievements (equality before the law, the end of feudalism, careers open to talent) by giving them order. His critics see a dictator who abolished free elections and a free press, restored slavery, reduced women's rights, and drowned Europe in blood for his own glory. In 2021, the two-hundredth anniversary of his death, the French argued over whether, and how, the Republic should commemorate him.

The Restoration

The victors restored the Bourbons in the person of Louis XVI's brother, Louis XVIII (1814–1824). He did not try to turn the clock back to 1788. His Charter of 1814 kept the Civil Code, equality before the law and the sale of Church lands, and created a parliament elected by a small electorate of rich men. In the south, royalist mobs killed Bonapartists and Protestants in the "White Terror" of 1815.

His brother Charles X (1824–1830) was different: crowned at Reims with the full medieval ritual, he favoured the ultra-royalists and the Church. In 1830 his army conquered Algiers, the start of 132 years of French rule in Algeria. That same July, when he issued ordinances abolishing press freedom and cutting the electorate, Paris rose. In the Three Glorious Days of 27 to 29 July 1830 the barricades went up, and Charles fled into exile.

The bourgeois king

The liberal deputies chose his cousin, Louis-Philippe of Orléans (1830–1848), "King of the French", who wore a frock coat and carried an umbrella. His regime was run for and by the wealthy; the vote was extended, but only to a small minority of property owners. France began to industrialise, building railways and textile mills, and a new working class grew in the cities. So did socialist ideas. The writers of the age, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, George Sand, Stendhal, described the new society of money and ambition.

1848

In February 1848, when the government banned a political banquet called to demand a wider vote, Paris rose again. In three days the king had abdicated. The Second Republic acted fast: it introduced universal male suffrage, among the first countries in the world to do so, and on 27 April 1848 abolished slavery in the colonies for good, the work of Victor Schoelcher. It also created "national workshops" to give jobs to the unemployed. When the new conservative assembly closed them, the workers of Paris rose in the June Days of 1848 and were crushed by the army, with thousands killed.

In December 1848, in France's first presidential election, voters chose by a landslide the nephew of the emperor, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, whose name was his whole programme. Barred by the constitution from a second term, he staged a coup on 2 December 1851, the anniversary of Austerlitz, and a year later made himself emperor, Napoleon III.

The Second Empire

The Second Empire (1852–1870) was authoritarian at first and more liberal later. Under it France became a modern industrial economy. Railways spread across the country; banks such as Crédit Lyonnais and department stores such as Le Bon Marché were founded; and from 1853 to 1870 the emperor's prefect, Baron Haussmann, rebuilt Paris, tearing down medieval slums for wide boulevards, parks, sewers and the uniform apartment buildings that still define the city.

Abroad, Napoleon III fought Russia in the Crimea, helped drive Austria out of northern Italy (gaining Nice and Savoy), and tried to install an Austrian archduke as emperor of Mexico, an adventure that ended with his execution in 1867.

It was also a great age of French art and letters. Gustave Flaubert was tried, and acquitted, for Madame Bovary in 1857. In the 1860s and 1870s painters such as Manet, Monet, Renoir and Degas broke with the official academy. Paris became the capital of modern art, which it would remain until the Second World War.

Sedan

The emperor's downfall came from Germany. The Prussian chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, wanted a war to unite the German states, and provoked one over the candidacy of a German prince for, of all things, the throne of Spain. In July 1870 France declared war. It was a disaster. On 1 September, at Sedan, the French army was surrounded and the emperor himself captured. On 4 September, in Paris, crowds proclaimed the Third Republic.

Part 9 — The Third Republic (1870–1914)

Defeat and the Commune

The new Republic kept fighting. Paris was besieged through the winter of 1870–1871; its people ate horses, cats, rats and the animals of the zoo. On 18 January 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the king of Prussia was proclaimed German emperor. France signed a harsh peace at Frankfurt on 10 May 1871: it lost Alsace and most of Lorraine and paid an indemnity of five billion francs.

Paris, radical, patriotic and humiliated, refused to accept the conservative, monarchist assembly elected in February, which sat at Versailles under Adolphe Thiers. On 18 March 1871 the city rose and elected its own government, the Paris Commune. For two months it ran the capital, separated church and state, and planned social reforms. Then the national army attacked. In the "Bloody Week" of 21 to 28 May, fighting street by street, it retook Paris; the Communards shot hostages, including the archbishop, and burned the Tuileries palace and the town hall. Government troops killed somewhere between about 6,700 and 20,000 Communards, many by summary execution, and tens of thousands more were arrested and thousands deported to New Caledonia. For the left, the Commune became a sacred memory; for the right, a warning.

A republic by one vote

The Third Republic was born almost by accident. The monarchists who dominated the assembly could not agree on a king. In 1875 they passed the laws that became its constitution, including an amendment recognising the president of the Republic that passed by a single vote. The president, Marshal MacMahon, tried to impose a monarchist government in 1877, lost the elections, and resigned in 1879. The republicans had won.

They set about making a republican nation. The Marseillaise became the national anthem in 1879, 14 July the national day in 1880. Above all, the Jules Ferry laws of 1881 and 1882 made primary schooling free, compulsory and secular. In every village a schoolteacher, the "black hussar of the Republic", taught French (not the regional languages that millions still spoke), the metric system, the history of the nation and the duties of the citizen, in open rivalry with the village priest.

Empire

The Third Republic also built the second-largest colonial empire in the world. It made Tunisia a protectorate in 1881, conquered Indochina, Madagascar and vast areas of West and Equatorial Africa, and later Morocco (1912). Its champions, Jules Ferry among them, argued that France had a "civilising mission"; Ferry told the Chamber in 1885 that the "superior races" had a duty towards the "inferior" ones. Opponents on the left, such as Georges Clemenceau, attacked colonial conquest as a betrayal of the rights of man, and nationalists on the right argued that it distracted France from recovering Alsace-Lorraine. Colonised peoples experienced conquest, forced labour and the denial of the rights the Republic proclaimed at home.

Dreyfus

The great crisis of the age began in December 1894, when Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery captain from Alsace, was wrongly convicted of passing military secrets to Germany and sent to Devil's Island in French Guiana. Evidence soon emerged that the real traitor was another officer, Major Esterhazy, but the army covered it up and Esterhazy was acquitted. On 13 January 1898 the novelist Émile Zola published an open letter to the president under a front-page headline, J'accuse…!, accusing the generals of a cover-up.

France split in two. The anti-Dreyfusards (the army's defenders, most Catholics, nationalists and an openly antisemitic press) argued that the honour of the army and the nation came before one man. The Dreyfusards (republicans, socialists, intellectuals; the word "intellectual" in its modern sense dates from this affair) argued that justice for one innocent man was what the Republic was for. Dreyfus was pardoned in 1899 and fully cleared in 1906.

The affair's political result was the law of 9 December 1905 separating the churches and the state. The Republic guaranteed freedom of conscience and the free exercise of religion, but would "neither recognise, nor pay, nor subsidise any religion". This is the founding text of laïcité, French secularism, which the companion piece If I Was Born in France describes in daily life.

The Belle Époque

The years before 1914 are remembered as the Belle Époque, the beautiful era: the Eiffel Tower, the cinema of the Lumière brothers (1895), Marie Curie's two Nobel prizes, the first Tour de France (1903), the paintings of Cézanne, Matisse and the young Picasso. Most French people still lived in the countryside; France's population grew very slowly, because the French had begun limiting family size earlier than any other people in Europe. In 1913 France had about 41.5 million people, fewer than Germany's, a fact that haunted its generals.

Part 10 — Two world wars and Vichy (1914–1945)

The Great War

In August 1914 France went to war with Germany, allied with Russia and Britain, in a mood of "sacred union" that silenced political quarrels. The German army swept through Belgium towards Paris and was stopped at the Marne in September. Then the front froze into trenches from the Channel to Switzerland, most of it on French soil.

The worst battle for France was Verdun, from 21 February to 18 December 1916, the longest of the war. Most of the French army rotated through it. "They shall not pass" became its slogan, and its commander, Philippe Pétain, a national hero. After mutinies in 1917, Georges Clemenceau, prime minister from November, drove the country on to victory. The armistice came on 11 November 1918.

About 1.3 to 1.4 million French soldiers were killed, one of the heaviest tolls relative to population of any major combatant, and millions more were wounded. Almost every town and village in France has a war memorial listing its dead. At the peace of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919, France recovered Alsace and Lorraine and demanded reparations from Germany.

Maddison Project Database 2023. Output per person fell by about a third in the First World War and by about half in the Second.

Between the wars

The 1920s brought recovery and reconstruction; the 1930s, depression, political violence and fear. After far-right leagues rioted outside parliament in February 1934, socialists, communists and radicals formed a Popular Front, which won the elections of May 1936. Léon Blum became the first Socialist, and the first Jewish, prime minister. A wave of factory occupations followed, and the Matignon Agreements gave workers collective bargaining, the 40-hour week and, for the first time, two weeks of paid holiday, the congés payés. The government fell within a year, but the paid holiday became part of French identity.

1940

France and Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939. For eight months little happened. Then, on 10 May 1940, Germany attacked through the Low Countries and the wooded Ardennes, bypassing the fortified Maginot Line. The French army, one of the largest in the world, collapsed in six weeks. The Germans entered Paris unopposed on 14 June. Pétain, now 84, became prime minister and asked for an armistice, which was signed on 22 June 1940.

On 18 June a little-known brigadier-general who had fled to London, Charles de Gaulle, spoke on the BBC, calling on the French to continue the fight and insisting that the defeat was not final. Few heard the broadcast at the time. It became the founding act of the Resistance.

On 10 July 1940, meeting in the spa town of Vichy, the two chambers of parliament voted by 569 to 80, with 20 abstentions, to give full powers to Pétain. The Third Republic was over.

Vichy and the Holocaust

The new "French State" replaced "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" with "Work, Family, Fatherland". Its "National Revolution" blamed the defeat on the Republic, the left, Freemasons and Jews. Germany occupied the north and west; Vichy governed the south until November 1942, when the Germans occupied the whole country.

Vichy's persecution of Jews was its own initiative before it was a German demand. In October 1940 its first Statute of the Jews excluded Jews from the civil service, the army, teaching and the press, without being asked. From 1942, French police took part in the deportations. In the Vel d'Hiv roundup of 16 and 17 July 1942, French police arrested more than 13,000 Jews in Paris, many of them children, and held many of them in a cycling stadium in terrible conditions before sending them to Drancy and on to Auschwitz.

Both the last two lines are true, and France has argued over how to hold them together. Vichy's defenders long claimed that it had shielded French-born Jews by sacrificing foreign ones; historians have shown that Vichy offered up foreign Jews eagerly and that survival owed much to ordinary French people who hid Jews, to the Church's later protests and to the Italian occupation zone. For fifty years the official position was that Vichy was not France, so the Republic owed no apology. On 16 July 1995 President Jacques Chirac broke with that line, acknowledging the responsibility of the French state in the persecution and deportation of Jews.

Resistance and liberation

The Resistance began small and grew, especially after 1942, when Vichy started sending young men to work in Germany and many fled to the hills to join the maquis. Communists, Catholics, socialists and conservatives fought side by side. Jean Moulin, de Gaulle's envoy, united the movements in the National Council of the Resistance in 1943, before being captured and dying after torture by the Gestapo.

The Allies landed in Normandy on 6 June 1944. Four days later, an SS unit massacred 642 men, women and children at Oradour-sur-Glane, whose ruins have been left as they were. Paris rose on 19 August, and on 25 August the German garrison surrendered; de Gaulle walked down the Champs-Élysées the next day. In the purges that followed, thousands of collaborators were executed, many without trial. Pétain was sentenced to death, commuted to life imprisonment. And, by an ordinance of 1944, French women gained the right to vote; they voted for the first time in 1945.

Part 11 — Rebuilding, decolonisation and de Gaulle's Fifth Republic (1945–1969)

A new republic, and thirty glorious years

De Gaulle led the provisional government after the liberation, with communists, socialists and Christian democrats, the parties of the Resistance. It nationalised coal, electricity, the big banks and Renault, created a national social security system, and set up a planning office. When the parties insisted on a parliamentary constitution with a weak executive, de Gaulle resigned in January 1946. The Fourth Republic (1946–1958) followed.

Its governments were famously unstable: more than twenty in twelve years, as coalitions formed and collapsed. Yet the Fourth Republic presided over an economic transformation. The demographer Jean Fourastié later named the years 1945–1975 les Trente Glorieuses, the thirty glorious years. A baby boom, Marshall Plan aid, cheap energy and planning turned a country of small farms and small shops into an urban, industrial economy. Real output per person, as the condensed history notes from World Bank data, rose by about 85 percent between 1960 and 1975 alone.

And it laid the foundations of modern Europe. On 9 May 1950 the foreign minister Robert Schuman proposed pooling French and German coal and steel under a common authority, so that war between the two would become "not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible". The Coal and Steel Community followed in 1951, and the European Economic Community in 1957. France was also a founding member of NATO in 1949.

The end of empire

The Fourth Republic could not solve the problem of empire. In Indochina, a war against the communist-led Viet Minh ended in defeat at Dien Bien Phu on 7 May 1954; at the Geneva conference that year, Prime Minister Pierre Mendès France accepted withdrawal. Tunisia and Morocco became independent in 1956. That same year, the Suez expedition with Britain and Israel against Egypt ended in humiliation under American pressure. Most of sub-Saharan French Africa became independent, largely peacefully, in 1960.

Algeria was different. Conquered from 1830, it was legally not a colony but part of France, divided into departments, and home to about a million settlers of European origin, the pieds-noirs, alongside a far larger Muslim Algerian majority who were, for most of the period, denied equal rights. Already on 8 May 1945, the day the war ended in Europe, a nationalist demonstration at Sétif led to riots in which about a hundred Europeans were killed, and to a repression by the army and settler militias in which thousands of Algerians died; estimates range from about 3,000 to 45,000.

On 1 November 1954 the National Liberation Front (FLN) launched its armed struggle. The Algerian War (1954–1962) was savage on all sides: FLN bombings and massacres of civilians, French army torture, collective punishment, and the forced removal of some two million Algerians into "regroupment" camps.

When the war ended, between about 900,000 and a million pieds-noirs left for France within months. So did tens of thousands of harkis, Algerian Muslims who had served with the French army; many more who stayed behind were killed in reprisals, and those who reached France were often confined to camps. The war's memory still divides French, Algerian, pied-noir, harki and immigrant families, and every French president since has had to decide what to acknowledge.

De Gaulle's return and the Fifth Republic

In May 1958, with the army in Algeria in open revolt and fearing a military coup in Paris, the parliament turned to de Gaulle, then aged 67, and gave him full powers for six months to write a new constitution. The Constitution of the Fifth Republic was approved by referendum on 28 September 1958 by about 80 percent of voters. It created a strong president, who names the prime minister, can dissolve the National Assembly, call referendums and take emergency powers, and a government able to force bills through parliament. In 1962 a further referendum made the president directly elected by universal suffrage.

Its first article, still in force, declares France "an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic". The presidential term, originally seven years, was cut to five by referendum in 2000, and a limit of two consecutive terms was added later.

De Gaulle, elected president, ended the Algerian war he had been brought back to win, surviving several assassination attempts by the OAS. Then he pursued grandeur: an independent nuclear force (the first French atomic test came in 1960), recognition of communist China (1964), criticism of the American war in Vietnam, withdrawal from NATO's integrated military command (1966), and vetoes of British entry to the European Community in 1963 and again in 1967.

May 1968

The young people of the baby boom found de Gaulle's France stiff, paternal and old. In May 1968, student protests at the Sorbonne and the new university at Nanterre turned into street battles with riot police in the Latin Quarter, with barricades and slogans such as "It is forbidden to forbid" and "Be realistic, demand the impossible". Then the workers joined in. About ten million people went on strike, the largest general strike in French history, occupying factories and paralysing the country. At the end of May, de Gaulle secretly flew to see army commanders in Germany.

He came back, dissolved the Assembly, and called on the "silent majority". A huge march in his support filled the Champs-Élysées, and in the June elections the Gaullists won a landslide. But a year later, in April 1969, de Gaulle lost a referendum on regional reform and the Senate, and resigned at once.

May 1968 failed as a revolution and succeeded as a change of manners. Within a decade France had a new attitude to authority in families, schools and workplaces, and a new feminism. Whether that was liberation or the start of an age of individualism is still argued.

Part 12 — From Pompidou to Macron, and France in 2026 (1969–2026)

Modernisers and the end of the boom

Georges Pompidou (1969–1974), de Gaulle's former prime minister, set out to industrialise France and launched the great nuclear power programme. After his death, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing (1974–1981) brought in rapid social reforms: the age of majority lowered to eighteen, divorce by mutual consent, and, in 1975, the law legalising abortion steered through parliament by the health minister Simone Veil, a survivor of Auschwitz, against fierce attacks from her own side. But the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 ended the thirty glorious years. Unemployment rose to about one and a half million by early 1981.

The Socialist years

In 1981 François Mitterrand became the first Socialist president of the Fifth Republic, with communist ministers in his government. A wave of reforms followed: the abolition of the death penalty (the law of 9 October 1981, championed by the justice minister Robert Badinter), nationalisations of banks and industry, a wealth tax, the 39-hour week, a fifth week of paid holiday, retirement at sixty and decentralisation of power to the regions. Within two years, inflation and a currency crisis forced a "turn to rigour" in 1983: France chose to stay in the European monetary system and accept market discipline. That same year the far-right National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen began its rise.

From 1986 the Fifth Republic learned to live with cohabitation, a president of one camp and a parliamentary majority and prime minister of the other. Mitterrand, re-elected in 1988, and his German partner Helmut Kohl drove forward European integration, and in 1992 French voters approved the Maastricht Treaty, which created the European Union and the path to the euro, by a narrow 51 percent.

Chirac, Sarkozy, Hollande

Jacques Chirac (1995–2007) acknowledged the state's role in the Holocaust, cut the presidential term to five years, and in 2003 led the opposition to the American-led invasion of Iraq. Under the Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin (1997–2002), France introduced the 35-hour week. In 2002 Jean-Marie Le Pen shocked the country by reaching the presidential run-off; Chirac won it with more than 80 percent as the left voted for him, the first great "republican front" against the far right.

In 2005 French voters rejected the proposed European constitution, by about 55 to 45. That autumn, riots spread through the poor suburbs, the banlieues. Nicolas Sarkozy (2007–2012) governed through the 2008 financial crisis. François Hollande (2012–2017), a Socialist, legalised same-sex marriage in 2013, and in 2015 led the country through its worst terrorist attacks since the war: in January on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket, and on 13 November at the Bataclan concert hall, cafés and the national stadium, in which 130 people were killed.

Macron

In 2017 Emmanuel Macron, a 39-year-old former banker and economy minister who had never held elected office, founded his own movement and won the presidency, beating Marine Le Pen in the run-off with about two-thirds of the vote. For the first time, neither of the parties that had structured the Fifth Republic, the Socialists and the Gaullist right, reached the second round.

His presidency was a long struggle between reform and revolt. A fuel-tax rise set off the yellow vests (gilets jaunes) movement of small-town France in November 2018. He was re-elected in 2022, again against Le Pen, with 58.5 percent. In 2023 he raised the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64, using the constitutional power to force the bill through without a vote, despite months of mass protest.

Then he gambled. After Marine Le Pen's National Rally won about 31.5 percent in the European elections of June 2024, Macron dissolved the National Assembly. The far right led the first round, but in the second a left-wing alliance, the New Popular Front, came first with 182 seats, Macron's camp second with 168, and the National Rally and its allies third with 143. No bloc had a majority. Michel Barnier's government was brought down by a censure vote on 4 December 2024, the first since 1962; François Bayrou's lost a confidence vote on 8 September 2025; and Sébastien Lecornu, appointed in September 2025, resigned within weeks and was reappointed days later. As the condensed history notes, Macron went through seven prime ministers between 2017 and 2025.

France in 2026

INSEE (population, births, deaths, fertility, life expectancy, unemployment, growth); the Guardian, 19 October 2026 (debt and deficit).

By the autumn of 2026 France was a rich country in a bad mood: growth stalled, unemployment edging up, and a budget deficit of about 5.1 percent of GDP leaving little room to spend.

The school protests that began in mid-September became, by October, the biggest youth movement in years. On the weekend of 17 and 18 October the marches were followed by riots: more than 2,000 shops looted, a town hall set ablaze in Limoges, more than 2,000 arrests, and a thousand police officers injured. The interior minister admitted police had "lost control" in places. Macron banned demonstrations he called "illegitimate" and blamed "ultra far-left groups"; critics accused the government of heavy-handed policing of schoolchildren. About 400,000 people marched on 24 October, by the government's count, and about 320,000 on 31 October.

The country's politics was already turning to the presidential election of spring 2027, in which Macron, limited by the Constitution to two consecutive terms, cannot stand. Marine Le Pen, convicted in 2025 of embezzling European Parliament funds, had won a partial victory on appeal on 7 July 2026: the conviction was upheld, but her ban from office was shortened so that she could run, and she appealed again to the Cour de cassation and launched her campaign. Her party, the National Rally, led the polls, and in September 2026 won enough Senate seats to form its first group in the upper house. On the centre left, Raphaël Glucksmann won the Socialists' primary (the first time since 1969 that the party would have no candidate of its own), but polled behind Le Pen, the former prime minister Édouard Philippe and the radical-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Part 13 — How to understand France today

Key dates

Who's who

Five ideas that unlock the country

1. The state came before the nation. Kings built the state first, and then the state made the nation, imposing French on millions who spoke Breton, Occitan, Basque or Alsatian, and sending prefects from Paris to every department. That is why the French expect so much of the state, and blame it for so much.

2. 1789 is the reference point for everything. Modern French politics is an argument about the Revolution's legacy. The left tends to celebrate 1789 and 1793; the right, liberty and order without the Terror; the far right, the nation. Each claims to be the true heir.

3. Secularism is a peace treaty, not just a principle. Laïcité grew out of the Wars of Religion and the long battle between the Republic and the Catholic Church. Supporters see it as the guarantee of equal citizenship; critics, including many French Muslims, say it is applied most heavily to them. Both claim to defend the Republic.

4. France has lived with defeat and occupation, and its memory is unfinished. 1870, 1940, Dien Bien Phu, Algeria: the national story has had to make room for defeat, for Vichy and for the crimes of colonial war. Each official acknowledgement is welcomed by some as honesty and attacked by others as self-flagellation.

5. Reform comes in leaps, often through crisis. France has had more than a dozen constitutions since 1791, and has tended to change by ruptures rather than small steps. The question in 2026, with a hung parliament and angry streets, is whether the Fifth Republic can still deliver change without another rupture.

France is a country that argues about principles because it was built on them. The argument is noisy and permanent, and it is the reason the rest of the world still borrows France's words to describe its own politics.

The takeaway

France was built by kings who turned a small domain around Paris into the strongest state in Europe, on top of a land that had been Gaulish, Roman and Frankish. Its monarchy tried to impose one faith and one will, and fell in 1789 to a revolution that declared the rights of man, abolished feudalism and slavery, and also produced the Terror and Napoleon. The nineteenth century tried every form of government on offer, and the Third Republic finally made republicanism stick, with free secular schools and the separation of church and state. Two world wars, Vichy and the end of empire nearly broke it; de Gaulle's Fifth Republic rebuilt it. In 2026 France is rich, secular, ageing and anxious, arguing in the streets and in a hung parliament about how much state it can afford, who belongs to the nation, and who will lead it after Macron.

Try this: read the seventeen articles of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen alongside Olympe de Gouges's reply of 1791, and ask what each would say about the protests of October 2026. In Paris, walk from the Place de la Bastille to the Place de la Concorde, where the king was guillotined: the whole Revolution in one walk.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- French Ministry of Culture, archaeology collections: "Lascaux" (discovery 12 September 1940; dating; replicas) and "Grotte Chauvet-Pont d'Arc" (discovery 18 December 1994).
- Enciclopedia Treccani, "Francia" (history sections, from Roman Gaul to Sébastien Lecornu's reappointment in October 2025), "Guerra dei Cent'anni", "Vercingetorige", "San Bartolomeo, notte di", "Terrore", "Vandea", "Versailles" and "Visigoti".
- Conseil constitutionnel: texts of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) and of the Constitution of 4 October 1958 as now in force (Articles 1, 2, 6, 49 and the Preamble); list of French constitutions since 1791. Élysée: list of presidents of the Republic.
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "France" (Holocaust Encyclopedia), for 1940, the Statutes of the Jews, the Vel d'Hiv roundup and the number of Jews in France; deportation and death figures as given in the condensed history and the standard historical literature (Serge Klarsfeld).
- Maddison Project Database 2023 (University of Groningen): population and GDP per person.
- INSEE: Bilan démographique 2025 (January 2026); unemployment, second quarter 2026 (August 2026); GDP, third quarter 2026 (30 October 2026).
- The Guardian, reporting of 8 July, 28 September, 12, 19, 22, 24 and 31 October 2026 (Le Pen's appeal, Senate elections, the centre-left primary, public debt, the protests and riots).
- Death tolls for the Terror, the Vendée, the Commune, the First World War and the Algerian War follow the ranges in the library's condensed history and the scholarly literature it summarises; all remain debated, the Algerian figures politically so.

Go deeper
- 📘 The Discovery of France — Graham Robb (how un-French most of France was until the twentieth century)
- 📘 Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution — Simon Schama (vivid and opinionated; read with a more sympathetic account, such as Peter McPhee's Liberty or Death)
- 📘 Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 — Robert O. Paxton (the book that showed France how much Vichy did on its own initiative)
- 📘 A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 — Alistair Horne (the classic English-language history of the Algerian War)
- 📘 France: A Modern History from the Revolution to the War with Terror — Jonathan Fenby (a readable single-volume overview)
- 🌐 Conseil constitutionnel: the 1789 Declaration (the full text, in French)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: France: A Condensed History of Revolution, Republic, and Grandeur; If I Was Born in France; A Brief History of Spain (this series)