History of France. Stone tools indicate that early humans were present in France at least 1.8 million years ago.[1] The first modern humans appeared in the area 40,000 years ago.
The first written records for the history of France appear in the Iron Age. What is now France made up the bulk of the region known to the Romans as Gaul. Roman writers noted the presence of three main ethno-linguistic groups in the area: the Gauls, the Aquitani, and the Belgae. The Gauls, the largest and best attested group, were a Celtic people speaking what is known as the Gaulish language. Over the course of the 1st millennium BC the Greeks, Romans, and Carthaginians established colonies on the Mediterranean coast and the offshore islands. In the later stages of the Roman Empire, Gaul was subject to barbarian raids and migration, most importantly by the Germanic Franks. Victory in the Hundred Years War had the effect of strengthening French nationalism and vastly increasing the power and reach of the French monarchy. French Colonial Empire - Introduction. From its beginnings in the early 1600s through the great expansion of the late 19th century, the French overseas empire was formed more by the agencies and stimulation of the state, church, and armed forces than by the initiation of the business community.
Merchants, financiers, and manufacturers did engage in and profit from French imperial ventures, but generally they had to be prodded into participation by monarchical or republican officials. In this the French colonial empire differed from its chief rival, the British Empire. Before the French Revolution, Henry IV, Louis XIV, and the latter's minister Jean Baptiste Colbert, who founded the French East India Company, and many missionaries, explorers, and merchants helped acquire Canada, Louisiana, several West Indian islands, and parts of India for France. In 1763, at the end of the Seven Years' War, the French lost Canada and India to the British, and in 1803, Napoleon I sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States.
Donald J. Napoleon Bonaparte : Napoleonic : Napoleon : Bonaparte : Wars : Napoleon I : Napoleonic History : Military : Napoleonic Era : Battles : Naval : Armies : Uniforms : French Revolution. The Revolution [gave] birth to ideological malice in a form we can now recognize, but it was not recognizable then.
It was still discovering itself. Chamfort, by the time that he ran out of luck, had already defined some of its characteristics, but not even he had guessed that it couldn't take a joke. In the twentieth century both the main forms of totalitarianism were united in promoting jokers to the head of the death list. . . . Chamfort was the one who supplied the lasting definition of fraternité: “Be my brother or I wil kill you.” That, in fact, was the joke thsat killed him: he was arrested soon after making it. — Clive James i Cultural Amnesia I cherish the memory of the earlier revolutionary struggles and heroes who fought them. . . . yet I should not like to live under the rule of such sublime beings.
He French Revolution began in 1789 with the meeting of the States General in May. Selected On-Line Texts and Related resources.