France's history: a country that has to number its republics

How Gaul became a Frankish kingdom

The first written records of the territory belong to the Iron Age, when Greek writers named three groups in the region Rome would call Gaul: the Gauls, the Aquitani and the Belgae. Ionian Greeks founded Massalia, now Marseille, on the Mediterranean coast in 800 BC. Rome annexed Provence in 122 BC, and legions under Julius Caesar took the rest in the Gallic Wars of 58 to 51 BC, breaking the Gaulish resistance under Vercingetorix at Alesia in 52 BC.

Roman rule then lasted for centuries, long enough to replace the Gaulish language with Vulgar Latin and to produce a Gallo-Roman culture that sent men back the other way: the emperors Claudius and Caracalla were both born in Gaul.

Clovis I, king of the Salian Franks from 481, routed the last forces of the Roman governors at Soissons in 486, defeated the Visigothic king Alaric II at Vouillé in 507 and annexed Aquitaine, and was baptised a Catholic in 508. He made Paris his capital and founded the Merovingian dynasty. His kingdom did not survive him, because Frankish custom treated land as private property to be divided among heirs, and four kingdoms emerged at his death in 511, centred on Paris, Orléans, Soissons and Rheims.

That inheritance rule eventually drew the map of western Europe. Charles Martel, mayor of the palace, defeated an Umayyad raiding party at Tours in 732; his son Pepin the Short took the crown in 751 and founded the Carolingian dynasty; and Pepin's son Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III in 800. When Charlemagne's grandsons divided the empire by the Treaty of Verdun in 843, the western third, West Francia, approximated the area of modern France and became its precursor.

How the Capetians built a kingdom from Paris

Hugh Capet was crowned king of the Franks in 987, and his descendants held the throne for the next three and a half centuries. Territory came more slowly. Through the eleventh century princely power was at its height: Normandy, Flanders and Languedoc held an authority comparable to kingdoms in everything but name, and the king's own writ ran over the Île-de-France.

Two things changed that. The first was a war of titles. After the Battle of Hastings in 1066 William the Conqueror added King of England to his styles, becoming at once the vassal and the equal of the king of France, and the Plantagenet counts of Anjou went on to assemble a domain running from England to the Pyrenees across half of what is now France. Philip II took most of its continental possessions between 1202 and 1214 and beat the Angevin coalition at Bouvines in 1214. From 1190 the Capetians had begun to style themselves kings of France instead of kings of the Franks, and by the fifteenth century the royal domain covered over half the modern country.

The second was a succession that failed. Charles IV died without an heir in 1328 and the crown passed to Philip of Valois instead of to Edward III of England, who contested it in 1337 and began the Hundred Years' War. The fighting was intermittent and ran until a Valois victory in 1453. In the same century the Black Death killed half of a population of 17 million, and a peasant girl, Joan of Arc, led the counterattacks that recovered most of the English holdings. Brittany was incorporated into the kingdom in 1532.

How absolute monarchy was built and broken

Two counts describe the Ancien Régime better than any adjective. The population was 13 million in 1484 and 20 million in 1700. The king had about 10,000 officials in royal service around 1700, a small number for a country that size and made smaller by roads so poor that travel was usually faster by ship or river boat. Power sat with the law courts, the parlements; with the great noble houses, each holding its own lands and its own armed force; and with the Catholic Church, which controlled about 40% of the wealth. The Estates General could petition the king and could not pass laws.

The wars of religion tested whether that dispersal could be reversed. A massacre of Huguenots at Vassy in 1562 opened the first of them; thousands more were killed in Paris and the provinces on St Bartholomew's Day in 1572; Henry III was assassinated in 1589, and the Huguenot Henry of Navarre took the throne, converted to Catholicism and issued the Edict of Nantes in 1598, which granted the Protestants religious liberties. He was assassinated in 1610. When the Huguenots proclaimed a constitution for a Republic of the Reformed Churches of France in 1620, Cardinal Richelieu turned the whole power of the state against it, and the Peace of Alais in 1629 confirmed religious freedom while dismantling the Protestant fortresses and armies. By the end of that decade Richelieu had established what the sources call "the royal monopoly of force".

Louis XIV completed the work between 1643 and 1715. The court moved to Versailles in May 1682, and the noble elite was compelled to live there, held in place by a system of pensions and privileges. In October 1685 the Edict of Fontainebleau ordered the destruction of every Protestant church and school in the country, and Huguenots left in large numbers. Two famines, in 1693 and 1710, killed over two million people. The wars that filled the reign drained the treasury, and the century that followed emptied it. France lost New France and most of its Indian possessions by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, then spent heavily on the American war and stood close to bankruptcy by 1789.

What the Revolution did to the state

The financial crisis brought the Estates General to Versailles in May 1789. On 17 June the members of the third estate declared themselves the National Assembly on the ground that they represented at least 96% of the nation, claimed sovereign power over taxation, and resolved to write a constitution limiting the king. The Bastille fell on 14 July, and the Assembly abolished feudalism, put the Catholic Church in France under state control and issued a declaration of rights.

What followed was a decade of constitutional drafting that never settled. The constitution of 1791 gave a Legislative Assembly elected for one year by restricted suffrage the power to make laws, raise taxes, ratify treaties and declare war, and left the king an executive who could block statutes for up to two years. Louis XVI was suspended on 10 August 1792, a Convention was elected by universal suffrage, the monarchy was abolished in September, and the king was executed in January 1793. A constitution was passed in 1793 and never came into operation. In June 1793 the constitution in force was suspended altogether and power passed to the Committee of Public Safety; about 16,000 people were executed in the Terror before it ended in July 1794. The Constitution of the Year III, in 1795, split the legislature between a Council of Five Hundred and a Council of Ancients and gave the executive to five Directors. It survived four years. On 18 Brumaire, 9 November 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte took power by coup.

The Constitution of the Year VIII divided the legislature into four assemblies, none of them elected by direct suffrage, and concentrated the executive in one man. What Napoleon built in the years that followed outlasted every regime after him. He governed the provinces through prefects he chose himself, more powerful than the royal intendants before them, which moved decisions to Paris. He settled the religious question by the Concordat of 1801, replaced the collapsed tax system with one that produced steady revenue, kept the conscription introduced in the 1790s, opened army promotion to merit, founded the École Polytechnique and codified the civil law. He was made Emperor by the senate in 1804 and was defeated at Waterloo in 1815.

Why the nineteenth century kept changing regimes

The instability of the hundred years after Napoleon is usually summarised in one observation: every French head of state between 1814 and 1873 spent part of his life in exile, and every regime in that span was the target of assassination attempts.

The Charter that Louis XVIII granted in 1814 restored royal sovereignty and gave the two chambers of parliament no power of initiative and no means of influencing the government. The July Revolution of 1830 overthrew the Bourbons, and the new Charter was passed by the Chamber and accepted by the king instead of handed down by him: legislative initiative returned to the chambers, and ministerial responsibility before parliament was established for the first time. The revolution of 1848 ended the July Monarchy, re-enacted the abolition of slavery and introduced universal male suffrage. Its constitution set a Legislative Assembly of 750 members against a President of the Republic, both elected by universal suffrage and neither able to influence the other, and the deadlock ended in the coup d'état of 2 December 1851. Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was proclaimed emperor in 1852 under a constitution whose ministers answered to him alone. That regime fell with the defeat of 1870.

How the Third Republic outlasted its rivals

The assembly elected on 8 February 1871 sat at Bordeaux and then at Versailles until 1879, and passed the constitutional acts of 1875, which governed France for sixty-five years. The Chamber of Deputies was elected by direct universal suffrage for four years and the Senate indirectly for nine, and both supervised a government accountable to parliament. The president's power to dissolve the Chamber went unused after 1877, and ministries came and went constantly.

What the Third Republic did with its long life was to make the country uniform. The Jules Ferry laws of 1881 and 1882 made all state-funded schools independent of the Catholic Church and made education in them free; the law of 1905 on the separation of the churches and the state established laïcité, under which the state formally recognises no religion, with Alsace-Moselle exempted because it lay inside the German Empire when the law passed. The historian Eugen Weber described the effect of the period as converting "a country of peasants into a nation of Frenchmen".

What the second colonial empire covered

The first colonial empire had gone by 1814. The second began with the conquest of Algiers in 1830 and grew fastest after 1880, when Germany began building one and French republicans who had opposed empire changed their minds. In 1884 Jules Ferry defended it in terms the record preserves exactly: "The higher races have a right over the lower races, they have a duty to civilize the inferior races." Assimilation and full citizenship were offered in principle; in practice French settlers received full rights and colonised populations very limited ones. The conquest of Algeria was complete by 1875, with approximately 825,000 Algerians killed by famine, disease and violence. Counting metropolitan France, the land under French sovereignty reached 11,500,000 square kilometres in 1920 and held 110 million people in 1939.

What the two world wars cost France

Germany declared war on France on 3 August 1914 and sent its armies through Belgium. By early September German forces were within 65 kilometres of Paris and the government had moved to Bordeaux; the advance was halted at the Marne between 5 and 12 September 1914. Trench lines then ran from the Swiss border to the Belgian coast and barely moved from September 1914 until March 1918, through Verdun and the Somme in 1916.

The bill was paid in people and in capital. France lost 1.4 million soldiers dead, 4% of its population, and counted 4,266,000 wounded. The German occupation of the north-east in 1914 took the districts producing 58% of French steel and 40% of French coal. War damage came to about 113% of the gross domestic product of 1913, and the national debt rose from 66% of that figure in 1913 to 170% in 1919. The population, 40.7 million in 1911, was 41.5 million in 1936.

The sense that the country was too small in people to face a faster-growing Germany ran through the early twentieth century; natalist policies were proposed in the 1930s and put into effect in the 1940s. The Battle of France opened in May 1940 with a thrust through the Ardennes forest that went around the Maginot Line, and in six weeks of fighting the French army lost 90,000 men. Between 8 and 10 million French civilians took to the roads, joined by 2 million from Belgium and the Netherlands, about a quarter of the population of France. Paris fell on 14 June 1940. The armistice was signed on 22 June and took effect on 25 June; Germany annexed Alsace and Lorraine, occupied three-fifths of the country and left the south-east to a new government at Vichy.

How France still argues about Vichy

The Third Republic was ended by its own parliament. On 10 July 1940 the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate met as the National Assembly at Vichy, voted to suspend the constitution of 1875 and granted full powers to Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French commander at Verdun in the First World War. Eighty members voted against.

The regime that followed replaced the republican motto of liberty, equality and fraternity with work, family and country. Its antisemitic legislation was its own. The Statut des Juifs, passed in two parts in October 1940 and June 1941, excluded Jews from public life, from the civil service and the military, and from medicine, law and teaching. A General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs was created in March 1941, and a programme of Aryanisation transferring Jewish-owned property to the state began in July 1941. French authorities interned thousands in camps at Gurs, Rivesaltes, Le Vernet and Les Milles, where at least 3,000 died. On 16 and 17 July 1942 French police arrested 13,000 Jews in Paris and held them at the Vélodrome d'Hiver; by that autumn some 42,000 had passed through the transit camp at Drancy, nearly a third of them from the unoccupied zone. About 77,000 Jews living on French territory were murdered in camps and killing centres or died in detention in France, and a third of them were French citizens.

The same years produced the Resistance, which drew on conservative nationalists, Catholic and Protestant clergy, the Jewish community, liberal republicans, socialists and communists alike. Its most widely known figure, Jean Moulin, was sent into France by Charles de Gaulle to link the movements together, and was captured and tortured. On 10 June 1944 an SS company massacred 642 civilians at Oradour-sur-Glane; twenty-one men were tried for it in 1953 and all but one were pardoned by the French government. The French Forces of the Interior numbered 300,000 men by September 1944 and 370,000 by the spring of 1945.

Both records belong to the same four years, and the argument between them has been conducted partly in court. Pierre Laval and Joseph Darnand were convicted of treason and executed in October 1945; Pétain was condemned to death on 15 August 1945 and had the sentence commuted to life imprisonment. René Bousquet, the Vichy police chief who ordered the Paris round-up, was indicted in 1991 and assassinated in 1993 before he could be tried. Maurice Papon was convicted at Bordeaux in 1998 of crimes against humanity for the deportation of over 1,600 Jews between 1942 and 1944. The historian Michael Marrus has written that the Final Solution in France was "a Nazi project from beginning to end", and also that the German authorities would have been unlikely to deport so many people without the aid of French police and administrators. The provisional government's own position, taken in 1944, was that the Vichy laws had been unconstitutional and illegal from the start.

Why the Fifth Republic has held

The Fourth Republic's constitution was approved by referendum on 13 October 1946 and promulgated on 27 October. It restored parliamentary sovereignty: the National Assembly, elected by proportional representation, set its own order of business and alone could bring down a government, while the power to dissolve it was hedged with conditions met once, in 1955. Ministerial instability returned with it. France lost Indochina at Dien Bien Phu, and by February 1954 only 7% of the French public wanted to go on fighting there; the Geneva conference of July 1954 gave the Viet Minh control north of the 17th parallel.

Algeria finished the regime. When army units and settlers seized power in Algiers in May 1958, the National Assembly recalled Charles de Gaulle, who put Michel Debré at the head of a drafting commission. The text was approved by referendum that September with 79% of the valid votes cast, and the Fifth Republic came into operation on 8 January 1959. Executive power rose at the expense of the National Assembly, and the president gained much wider authority. In April 1962 more than 90% of voters approved the Algerian settlement, and 750,000 settlers came to France as refugees. In October 1962, 62% approved an amendment introducing direct popular election of the president.

The same instrument then removed the man who had commissioned it. In April 1969 de Gaulle put two amendments to a referendum, announced that he would resign if they failed, lost by 53% to 47, and left office that night.

What has happened since is amendment. The presidential term was cut to five years in 2002 and limited to two consecutive terms, replacing a seven-year term with no limit; senators' terms went from nine years to six in 2004; a revision in March 2003 moved powers toward local government; a revision in 2008 let the Constitutional Council rule on the constitutionality of laws after promulgation, where before it had ruled only in advance. The constitutional acts of 1875 governed for sixty-five years. The constitution of 4 October 1958 has been in force since January 1959, changed many times and replaced none.