Kingdom, revolution, republic
Roman Gaul became the Frankish kingdom, and by the Middle Ages France was Europe's most populous and powerful state, ruled by an absolute monarchy that reached its apogee under Louis XIV at Versailles. In 1789 the Revolution swept it away, proclaiming liberty, equality and fraternity and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Napoleon turned the republic into an empire and conquered much of Europe before his fall in 1815.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were a cycle of republics, empires and restorations, two devastating world wars fought largely on French soil, and occupation by Nazi Germany from 1940 to 1944. The current Fifth Republic, with its strong presidency, was designed by Charles de Gaulle in 1958 amid the crisis of the Algerian war.
The empire and its long shadow over Africa
France codified slavery in the Code Noir of 1685 and worked the plantations of Saint-Domingue, the richest colony in the world, until the enslaved rose and founded Haiti in 1804. In 1825 France forced Haiti to pay an indemnity for its own freedom, a debt that crippled the young state for over a century. In Africa, France ruled from Senegal to Congo, recruited hundreds of thousands of tirailleurs sénégalais to fight its wars, and in December 1944 massacred returning West African veterans at Thiaroye near Dakar when they demanded their pay.
Independence in 1960 did not end the relationship. The CFA franc, pegged first to the French franc and now the euro, still governs the currencies of fourteen African states, its reserves long held in Paris. French troops have intervened repeatedly from Côte d'Ivoire to Mali, and the recent expulsions of those troops from Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger mark a real turn against Françafrique. On restitution, the 2021 Sarr–Savoy report pushed France to return 26 looted treasures to Benin, from the royal palaces of Abomey, a first crack in a very old wall.
A diverse, contested republic
France is home to one of Europe's largest populations of African and North African descent, concentrated in the banlieues that ring its cities, and the tension between the republic's official colour-blindness and the lived reality of those suburbs erupts periodically, as in the 2005 and 2023 riots. Emmanuel Macron, president since 2017, governs a divided country where the far right of Marine Le Pen has never been stronger. France's football team, world champions in 1998 and 2018, is the clearest picture the country has of itself: overwhelmingly the children of its former empire.