History · France

France: From Gaul to the Fifth Republic

Roman Gaul, the Franks, a thousand years of monarchy, the Revolution that redefined politics for the world, Napoleon, two devastating wars on home soil, and the republic that followed

By Worldlore Editorial · 19 September 2026

A painting of a packed hall of men in 18th-century dress raising their arms toward a figure standing on a table, while spectators lean in from high windows and a curtain billows in the wind
The Tennis Court Oath of 20 June 1789, painted by Jacques-Louis David, in the collection of the Musée Carnavalet in Paris. The deputies stretch their arms toward the man reading the oath at the centre of the hall. (Jacques-Louis David / Musée Carnavalet / Wikimedia Commons · CC0)

The shape of a country

France has been a recognisable country for longer than almost anywhere else in Europe — a territory, a capital and a monarchy that took clear form in the Middle Ages and grew outward from Paris for eight centuries. It has also been one of the most politically inventive: the Revolution of 1789 gave the modern world much of its vocabulary of rights, nations and citizenship, and France then spent the following two hundred years cycling through monarchies, empires and republics trying to settle what that revolution had actually decided. The current arrangement, the Fifth Republic, dates only from 1958.

A short history

  1. c. 15,000 BCE

    Lascaux

    Cave painters work in the south-west.

  2. 52 BCE

    Roman Gaul

    Caesar defeats Vercingetorix at Alesia.

  3. 481–511

    Clovis

    The Frankish king unites Gaul and converts to Christianity.

  4. 800

    Charlemagne

    Crowned emperor; his realm later splits, and West Francia becomes France.

  5. 987

    The Capetians

    Hugh Capet founds a dynasty that rules, in its branches, until 1848.

  6. 1337–1453

    Hundred Years' War

    France expels the English after Joan of Arc.

  7. 1643–1715

    Louis XIV

    Absolute monarchy at its height, centred on Versailles.

  8. 1789

    Revolution

    The Bastille falls; the monarchy is swept away.

  9. 1804–1815

    Napoleon

    Empire, conquest of Europe, and defeat at Waterloo.

  10. 1914–1945

    The world wars

    Fought largely on French soil; occupation and liberation.

  11. 1958

    The Fifth Republic

    De Gaulle founds the current system.

Gaul, Rome and the Franks

The land was inhabited deep in the Palaeolithic — the painted caves of the Dordogne are among the finest anywhere.

A prehistoric painting of a large deer with huge antlers on a pale rock wall
A painted deer at Lascaux, around 17,000 years old. The caves of south-western France hold some of the richest Ice Age art in the world. (HTO / Wikimedia Commons)

By the Iron Age the territory was Celtic Gaul. Julius Caesar conquered it between 58 and 52 BCE, and for five centuries Gallo-Roman civilisation flourished — roads, cities, aqueducts, Latin. As Roman power failed, Germanic Franks moved in; their king Clovis united most of Gaul around 500 and converted to Catholic Christianity, a decision that tied the future France to the Church. Charlemagne, crowned emperor in 800, ruled a vast realm that his grandsons divided in 843; the western share, West Francia, is the seed of France.

The medieval kingdom

In 987 the nobles chose Hugh Capet as king. His descendants — Capetians, then the Valois and Bourbon branches — would hold the throne, with one interruption, until 1848. Early Capetian kings controlled little more than the area around Paris; patiently, over three centuries, they absorbed the great feudal duchies. The Hundred Years' War against England (1337–1453) nearly undid that work: English kings claimed the French crown and won huge victories, until a peasant girl, Joan of Arc, helped turn the war before being burned in 1431. France emerged centralised, with a standing army and a sense of itself.

Absolutism and revolution

The Wars of Religion between Catholics and Protestants tore 16th-century France apart until Henry IV, a Protestant who converted, ended them with the Edict of Nantes in 1598. The 17th century then built the absolute monarchy: Richelieu and Mazarin broke the nobles' independence, and Louis XIV, the "Sun King", ruled for 72 years from a new palace at Versailles, making the French court and French culture the model for Europe — while endless wars and the revocation of religious tolerance drained the country.

By the 1780s the monarchy was bankrupt and the social order rigid. Louis XVI called the Estates-General in 1789 for the first time since 1614; it turned into a National Assembly, and on 14 July a Paris crowd stormed the Bastille.

A crowded painting of armed civilians and soldiers attacking a stone fortress with smoke and flags
The storming of the Bastille, 14 July 1789. The Revolution abolished feudalism and monarchy, proclaimed the Rights of Man, and — through the Terror of 1793–94 — devoured many of its own leaders. (Henry Singleton / Wikimedia Commons)

The Revolution abolished feudal privilege, declared the Rights of Man, executed the king in 1793, and then turned on itself in the Terror. Out of the chaos rose a young general.

Napoleon

Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in 1799 and crowned himself emperor in 1804. He gave France the institutions it still runs on — the Civil Code, the prefects, the Bank of France, the lycées — and conquered most of Europe.

A full-length portrait of Napoleon in a military uniform standing by a desk in his study
Napoleon in his study, painted by Jacques-Louis David in 1812. His Civil Code and administrative system outlasted his empire and spread across Europe. (Jacques-Louis David / Wikimedia Commons)

The invasion of Russia in 1812 destroyed his army; he was defeated, exiled, returned for a hundred days, and beaten finally at Waterloo in 1815. The monarchy came back — and fell again in 1830, and the new one fell in 1848, which brought a Second Republic, then a Second Empire under Napoleon's nephew, then, after defeat by Prussia in 1870, the Third Republic.

The republic, and the wars

The Third Republic lasted seventy years. It built a secular school system, separated church and state in 1905, and assembled the world's second-largest colonial empire, across Africa and Indochina. Paris in the Belle Époque was the cultural capital of the West.

The half-built iron Eiffel Tower rising above Paris buildings in an 1888 photograph
The Eiffel Tower under construction in 1888, for the 1889 World's Fair marking the Revolution's centenary. Many Parisians wanted it torn down afterwards. (Louis-Émile Durandelle / Wikimedia Commons)

Then came the two great catastrophes. The First World War was fought along a line through north-eastern France for four years and killed nearly 1.4 million French soldiers. In 1940 Germany overran the country in six weeks; the north was occupied, the south governed by a collaborationist regime at Vichy, and a small Free French movement under Charles de Gaulle fought on from abroad while the Resistance organised at home.

Occupation and liberation

Soldiers wading ashore from a landing craft under fire on a Normandy beach, 6 June 1944
The D-Day landings in Normandy, 6 June 1944. Paris was liberated that August; de Gaulle walked down the Champs-Élysées two days later. (U.S. Coast Guard / Wikimedia Commons)
A wartime portrait of Charles de Gaulle in uniform
Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French, first president of the Fifth Republic (1959–69), and the dominant figure of modern French politics. (U.S. Office of War Information / Wikimedia Commons)

The Fifth Republic

The postwar Fourth Republic rebuilt the economy and helped found what became the European Union, but it was politically unstable and broke apart in 1958 over the war in Algeria. De Gaulle returned to power, wrote a new constitution with a strong presidency — the Fifth Republic — and, by 1962, granted Algeria independence after a brutal eight-year war, completing the end of the empire.

Since then France has been stable and prosperous: three decades of postwar boom, a nuclear deterrent, a central role in European integration, and repeated alternations of left and right. The old questions have not gone away — the place of religion in a strict secular state, the legacy of empire, the relationship between Paris and the rest — but they are now argued within a settled republican frame.

What France carries

France's history has a double weight. It is one of Europe's oldest continuous states, with a monarchy, a capital and a culture that shaped the continent for centuries. And it is the country of 1789, whose revolution turned subjects into citizens and gave political modernity its language. Much of French history since is the long, contested work of reconciling the two.

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