Long before France existed, the territory stretching between the Rhine, the Alps, the Pyrenees and the Atlantic was inhabited by Celtic peoples the Romans called Gauls. Arriving in waves from central Europe through the first millennium BC, the Gauls did not form a state but a constellation of dozens of peoples —Arverni, Aedui, Sequani, Belgae, Parisii, Veneti— organised into tribes and confederations, often rivals. They lived in villages and in oppida, fortified towns on high ground, and they developed remarkable ironwork, prosperous farming and trade that connected them with the Mediterranean world through the Greek colony of Marseille.
Gaulish society was dominated by a warrior aristocracy of horsemen and by a priestly caste, the druids, who acted as judges, teachers and keepers of a religious learning transmitted orally and never written down. The Gauls worshipped numerous deities linked to nature, held assemblies and practised a religion of which we keep only echoes distorted by Greek and Roman authors. Great metalworkers, they minted coin, forged weapons and jewellery of exquisite craftsmanship and spread practical innovations —the barrel, certain farming tools— that Rome would later adopt.
Far from the cliché of primitive barbarians, the Gauls were a cultivated and dynamic people, but their political fragmentation made them vulnerable. Rivalries between peoples and calls for help by some against others would open the door, in the 1st century BC, to Roman intervention. Independent Gaul was about to disappear, although its substratum —linguistic, religious, territorial— would go on beating beneath the Roman surface for centuries.
The conquest of Gaul was the work of one man, driven by political ambition: Gaius Julius Caesar. Proconsul of Gallia Narbonensis —the Mediterranean south, Roman since the 2nd century BC— Caesar undertook from 58 BC a series of campaigns that in a few years subdued almost all of 'long-haired' Gaul. Exploiting the divisions between the Gaulish peoples, playing on alliances and deploying an implacable military machine, he described his operations in The Gallic War, a masterpiece of propaganda and at the same time a capital historical source.
Resistance culminated in the year 52 BC with the great revolt led by Vercingetorix, the young chief of the Arverni whose name means 'king of warriors'. He managed to unite much of the Gaulish peoples behind him and practised scorched-earth tactics to deprive the Romans of supplies, even inflicting a defeat on them at Gergovia. But he ended up surrounded in the oppidum of Alesia, where Caesar, in a feat of military engineering, raised a double line of fortifications tens of kilometres long to shut in the besieged and hold off the Gaulish relief army. Between July and September of 52 BC, hunger and demoralisation broke the resistance: Vercingetorix surrendered and was taken captive to Rome, where, after appearing in Caesar's triumph in 46 BC, he was strangled in his cell.
Alesia sealed the end of independent Gaul and the beginning of almost five centuries of Roman rule. Gaul filled with towns, roads, aqueducts, amphitheatres and baths; it adopted Latin, from which French would be born, and Roman law; and it was so deeply Romanised that it gave the Empire emperors and great writers. Vercingetorix, by contrast, would re-emerge many centuries later as a symbol: in the 19th century, the France of Napoleon III made him the nation's first hero, the first name in a long patriotic story.
With the crisis of the Western Roman Empire, in the 4th and 5th centuries, Germanic peoples crossed the Rhine and settled in Gaul. Among them the Franks stood out, and from them France would take its name. Around the year 481-482 Clovis, of the Merovingian dynasty, took power among them, and within a few years he subdued the other Frankish chiefs and defeated the last powers of Gaul. Two of his decisions were decisive: the victory over the Alemanni and, above all, his conversion to Catholic Christianity —rather than to the Arianism of other Germanic peoples— with his baptism at Reims, around the year 496-500, at the hands of Bishop Remigius. That alliance between the Frankish monarchy and the Church of Rome would shape the history of France for thirteen hundred years; Reims would go on being the city where kings were crowned.
The Merovingian kingdom, however, was split again and again between heirs, and real power passed into the hands of the 'mayors of the palace'. One of them, Charles Martel, halted a Muslim raid from the Iberian peninsula near Poitiers in 732; his son Pepin the Short deposed the last Merovingian and founded, in 751, the Carolingian dynasty. The peak came with his grandson Charlemagne, king of the Franks from 768, who over decades of campaigning brought much of Western Europe under his sceptre: Gaul, Germania, northern Italy. On Christmas Day in the year 800, the pope crowned him emperor in Rome, restoring the imperial idea in the West.
Charlemagne's empire was a cultural renaissance —schools, the copying of manuscripts, the standardisation of writing— but it did not outlive his grandson. The Treaty of Verdun of 843 divided it between three heirs: from Francia occidentalis would come, in time, the kingdom of France; from the eastern part, Germany. That partition, made to satisfy a few princes, sketched in broad strokes the cultural border of Europe and laid the first stone of the long rivalry between France and Germany.
In the year 987, the great men of the kingdom elected as king Hugh Capet, lord of a modest domain around Paris. The Capetian dynasty was born, and with remarkable continuity —from father to son, over centuries— it gradually extended royal power against the great fiefs. Kings such as Philip II Augustus, who took Normandy from the English and won at Bouvines (1214), or Louis IX (Saint Louis), the symbol of the just king and crusader, or Philip IV the Fair, who subdued the papacy and dissolved the Templars, made France an ever stronger and more centralised monarchy. Around Paris flourished universities, Gothic cathedrals and a language and a culture that radiated across Europe.
That rise was broken in the 14th century by the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453), a long conflict against England over the crown of France and over the vast fiefs the English kings held on French soil, above all in Aquitaine. It was a terrible century: the defeats of Crécy (1346) and Agincourt (1415), the Black Death that in the middle of the 14th century killed perhaps a third of the population, the bands of mercenaries that ravaged the country. After Agincourt, the Treaty of Troyes (1420) went so far as to disinherit the dauphin and recognise the king of England as heir to the French throne. France seemed on the point of disappearing as an independent kingdom.
The turnaround was embodied by a peasant girl from Lorraine, Joan of Arc. Convinced of a divine mission, in 1429 she persuaded the disheartened dauphin to entrust her with troops, relieved the besieged Orléans and led him to be crowned king as Charles VII at Reims, restoring legitimacy to the French cause. Captured by the Burgundians, handed over to the English and tried by an ecclesiastical court, Joan was burned alive at Rouen on 30 May 1431, aged nineteen. Rehabilitated in 1456 and canonised in 1920, she became one of the great figures of national memory, later claimed by almost every French political family. The war ended in 1453 with the recapture of Bordeaux and the almost complete expulsion of the English from the continent.
The 16th century opened for France an age of splendour and of tragedy. King Francis I (1515-1547) and his successors imported the Renaissance from Italy: they summoned artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, who died at Amboise, raised the châteaux of the Loire, protected letters and the arts, and in 1539 the ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts imposed French in place of Latin in official acts, a milestone for the national language. Paris and the Loire courts filled with humanists, and authors such as Rabelais and Montaigne flourished. It was also the century of rivalry with the House of Habsburg, which surrounded France through Spain, the Low Countries and the Empire.
But the Protestant Reformation tore the kingdom apart. From the middle of the century, Calvinism won followers —the Huguenots— among the nobility, the bourgeoisie and whole regions of the south and west, while the monarchy and much of the country remained Catholic. From 1562 to 1598 eight wars of religion followed one another, a mixture of confessional conflict and struggle for power between great noble houses. Their most atrocious episode was the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre, on the night of 23 to 24 August 1572: in Paris, during a royal wedding meant to reconcile the two sides, a massacre of Huguenots broke out that spread to other cities and left, by various estimates, between several thousand and more than ten thousand dead. The figure is still disputed by historians, but the horror of the event marked French memory forever.
The way out came with Henry IV, a Protestant leader who inherited the crown and converted to Catholicism —'Paris is well worth a mass', the phrase attributed to him— in order to pacify the kingdom. In 1598, his Edict of Nantes granted Protestants freedom of conscience, worship in certain places and even fortified towns, a pioneering tolerance in the Europe of his time. The edict brought decades of peace, but it was not final: in 1685, Louis XIV would revoke it, causing hundreds of thousands of Huguenots to flee to Protestant countries, at serious economic and human cost to France.
The 17th century saw absolute monarchy triumph in France. After the interlude of the cardinal-ministers Richelieu and Mazarin, who consolidated central power and the kingdom's strength abroad, Louis XIV came to the throne, the 'Sun King', whose long personal reign (1661-1715) is a byword for absolutism. 'I am the State', as legend sums up his conception of power. Louis XIV domesticated the nobility by drawing it to the court, which he installed in the sumptuous palace of Versailles, turned into a showcase of royal prestige and a model for the whole of Europe. Under his reign and the drive of his minister Colbert, France developed mercantilism, a powerful luxury industry, a formidable navy and army, and a classical culture —Molière, Racine, La Fontaine— of universal reach.
That splendour came at a very high cost. Almost permanent wars exhausted the finances, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 drained the country of its Protestant elites, and the weight of taxation fell on an exhausted peasantry while the nobility and the clergy enjoyed fiscal privileges. The following reign, that of Louis XV, alternated prosperity and defeat: the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) cost France much of its empire in America and India to Great Britain.
While the monarchy stiffened, in the salons and printing houses of the 18th century the Enlightenment (les Lumières) flourished, one of the greatest intellectual movements in history. Montesquieu theorised the separation of powers; Voltaire fought fanaticism and intolerance; Rousseau set out the sovereignty of the people and the social contract; Diderot and d'Alembert directed the monumental Encyclopédie, which sought to gather all human knowledge in the light of reason. Those ideas —equality before the law, liberty, criticism of absolutism and of privilege— undermined the ideological foundations of the Ancien Régime and prepared the ground for the storm that was coming.
In 1789, an insoluble financial crisis forced Louis XVI to summon the Estates General, which had not met since 1614. The representatives of the common people, the Third Estate, proclaimed themselves the National Assembly and swore on the Tennis Court (20 June) not to disband until France had a constitution. On 14 July 1789, the people of Paris stormed the Bastille, the fortress-prison that symbolised royal despotism: that date would become the French national holiday. In August, the Assembly abolished feudal privileges and proclaimed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, asserting liberty, equality before the law and national sovereignty, a text of universal reach that would inspire revolutions all over the world.
The Revolution grew more radical in the face of the court's resistance, the king's flight and war with the European monarchies. In August 1792 the monarchy fell; in September the Republic was proclaimed; on 21 January 1793, Louis XVI was guillotined, and in October Queen Marie Antoinette would be too. Beset by foreign war, internal insurrections —above all the Vendée uprising— and shortages, the Republic entered the phase of the Terror (1793-1794), directed by the Committee of Public Safety and the figure of Robespierre. A state of exception, revolutionary tribunals and the guillotine sought to crush the 'enemies' of the Revolution: official executions are reckoned at around 17.000, along with tens of thousands of deaths in prison, without trial or in the repression of the Vendée. The violence ended up devouring the revolutionaries themselves: Danton was guillotined, and on 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794) Robespierre himself fell, bringing the Terror to an end.
Beyond its bloody face, the Revolution transformed France and the world forever. It abolished feudalism and privilege, proclaimed equality before the law, nationalised Church property, created the decimal metric system, instituted civil registration and laid the foundations of the modern state and of citizenship. Its motto —Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité— is still the Republic's device. Much of French politics is still nourished by the historiographical debate between those who celebrate it as the cradle of democracy and those who stress its totalitarian excesses.
Out of the instability that followed the Terror came a young general of Corsican origin, Napoleon Bonaparte, who made his name in the campaigns in Italy and Egypt. In 1799, a coup d'état (18 Brumaire) put him at the head of the country as First Consul; in 1804 he crowned himself emperor of the French at Notre-Dame, in the presence of the pope. Napoleon was at once heir and gravedigger of the Revolution: he kept many of its gains —equality before the law, the abolition of feudalism— but he did away with political liberty. His civil work was immense and lasting: the Civil Code of 1804 (the Napoleonic Code), which unified and modernised the law and influenced dozens of countries; the administrative reorganisation into departments and prefectures; the Bank of France, the lycées, the Council of State, the Concordat with the Church. Much of the French state today bears his stamp.
As a soldier he was one of the greatest strategists in history. His armies dominated the continent and his victories —Austerlitz (1805), Jena, Wagram— are still studied in military academies. At its height, around 1811, the French Empire and its satellite states covered almost all of Western and Central Europe, and Napoleon placed his brothers and marshals on thrones across half of Europe. But his ambition knew no limits. The invasion of Spain set off a war of attrition, and above all the disastrous Russian campaign of 1812 annihilated the Grande Armée in a retreat through cold and hunger.
The allied powers —Britain, Russia, Austria, Prussia— finally brought him down. In 1814 he abdicated and was exiled to the island of Elba; he returned in 1815 for the brief episode of the Hundred Days, which ended in final defeat at Waterloo (18 June 1815) against the British and the Prussians. Deported by the English to the remote island of Saint Helena, in the South Atlantic, he died there in 1821. His wars had cost the lives of millions of Europeans, but his legend —and the institutions he left— still shape France. The Congress of Vienna of 1815 restored the Bourbons and sought to return Europe to the previous order; the revolutionary seed, however, could no longer be uprooted.
The French 19th century is an incessant swing between monarchy, republic and empire, punctuated by popular revolutions in Paris. The Bourbon Restoration, bent on turning the clock back, fell in the July Revolution of 1830 (the 'Three Glorious Days'), which put Louis Philippe of Orléans on the throne, the 'bourgeois monarchy'. Eighteen years later, the February Revolution of 1848 overthrew Louis Philippe and proclaimed the Second Republic, which introduced universal male suffrage for the first time and definitively abolished slavery in the colonies. But the Republic was short-lived: its elected president, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the emperor's nephew, staged a coup in 1851 and the following year proclaimed himself emperor under the name Napoleon III, opening the Second Empire.
The Second Empire (1852-1870) was a time of accelerated modernisation: industrial revolution, railways, great banks, the transformation of Paris by Baron Haussmann with his boulevards, and active colonial expansion. But it ended in catastrophe. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870, provoked by Bismarck's skilful diplomacy, ended in the disaster of Sedan, the capture of the emperor and humiliating defeat by Prussia. On 4 September 1870 the Third Republic was proclaimed in Paris. Germany, unified at that very moment in the mirrors of Versailles, tore Alsace and much of Lorraine from France, a wound that would poison relations between the two countries for half a century.
In that context of defeat and siege the Paris Commune of 1871 broke out. From 18 March to 28 May, Parisians rose against the conservative government sheltering in Versailles and tried out a popular, social form of power: self-management, secularism, measures in favour of workers and of women. Adolphe Thiers's government crushed it by force in the 'Bloody Week' (21-28 May 1871), with fierce repression whose death toll is still debated: historical estimates run from some 10.000 to close to 20.000 Communards killed in the fighting and in summary executions, along with thousands deported. The Commune remained a founding myth of workers' and revolutionary movements around the world. The Third Republic, born amid defeat and blood, would nonetheless be the longest-lasting regime in contemporary France until 1940.
Between the 16th and the 20th centuries, France built two great colonial empires. The first, in the Ancien Régime period, spread across North America (Canada, Louisiana), the West Indies and India, and rested largely on the plantation economy and on slavery; it was largely lost to Great Britain in the 18th century. The second empire, far larger, was forged in the 19th and early 20th centuries, making France the second colonial power in the world after the British Empire, with possessions in Africa, Asia and the Pacific covering millions of square kilometres and tens of millions of inhabitants.
The conquest of Algeria, begun in 1830, was especially long and violent: decades of war, the hard resistance of the emir Abd el-Kader, scorched-earth policies, mass expropriations and the settlement of European colonists (the pieds-noirs) on the best land. Algeria was legally assimilated into France, divided into departments, but its Muslim population was excluded from full citizenship. In Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), conquered from the 1860s, France exploited the most populous and richest colony of its empire. In sub-Saharan Africa —from Senegal to the Congo, from the Sahel to Madagascar— the expansion of the late 19th century brought military conquest, forced labour and an economy geared to the metropolis. The Third Republic justified all of it with the rhetoric of the 'civilising mission', which historians today analyse critically.
The colonial balance sheet was deeply unequal and marked by violence. Alongside infrastructure, schools and towns, colonisation meant bloody conquests, the indigénat code that discriminated against the colonised, forced labour, brutal repression and the denial of political rights to millions of people. The memory of that empire —its crimes, its myths and its legacies— is still one of the liveliest and most sensitive debates in French society, shaped by immigration from its former colonies and by demands for recognition and reparation.
The First World War (1914-1918) was a catastrophe for France. The country, allied with Russia and the United Kingdom against the Central Powers, was the main setting of the Western Front: the war was fought largely on French soil, from the north to the Vosges. After the war of movement of 1914, halted on the Marne at the gates of Paris, the front settled into a line of trenches that would barely move for four years, in an atrocious war of attrition, with massed artillery, gas and machine guns that cut down lives by the million.
The symbol of that horror was the battle of Verdun, in 1916. For almost ten months, from 21 February to 18 December, Germans and French bled each other dry in a small sector of the front that the German command had chosen precisely in order to 'bleed white' the French army. Under a downpour of shells that turned the landscape into a lunar quagmire, French resistance —'On ne passe pas', they shall not pass— made Verdun an emblem of national sacrifice. The battle left some 300.000 dead and hundreds of thousands wounded on both sides. That same year, the joint Franco-British offensive on the Somme cost as much again.
France came out victorious in 1918, but drained. Close to 1,4 million French soldiers died and several million were wounded or maimed; whole regions of the north and east were devastated. The Treaty of Versailles of 1919 returned Alsace and Lorraine to France and imposed harsh conditions on Germany, but that 'peace' sowed resentments that would feed the next conflict. Every village in France raised its monument to the fallen, and the trauma of the 'Grande Guerre' —a decimated generation— weighed on the whole life of the country between the wars, shaping even the determination to avoid a new war at any cost.
In May-June 1940, Nazi Germany defeated France in barely six weeks. The north and west came under German occupation, and in the south a regime headed by Marshal Pétain was installed, with its capital in the spa town of Vichy. The Vichy regime (1940-1944) put an end to the Republic, established an authoritarian state with the motto 'Work, Family, Fatherland' and practised collaboration with Nazi Germany. It was not simply a passive puppet government: on its own initiative it enacted from October 1940 a 'statute of the Jews' excluding them from the civil service and from numerous professions, long before Berlin demanded it.
Vichy's collaboration in the extermination of the Jews is one of the darkest pages in the history of France, officially acknowledged by the French state in 1995. Its symbol is the Vel' d'Hiv (Vélodrome d'Hiver) round-up, of 16 and 17 July 1942: the French police, not the German, arrested more than 13.000 Jews in Paris —among them more than 4.000 children— crammed into the velodrome in atrocious conditions before being deported via Drancy to Auschwitz, from where almost none returned. In total, some 76.000 Jews were deported from France to the extermination camps, with the active participation of the French administration; only a few thousand survived. It is a fact established by historians and by the courts, with no room for relativisation.
Against Vichy and the occupation the Resistance rose. From London, General Charles de Gaulle issued on 18 June 1940 a call to carry on the fight and embodied Free France. Inside the country, clandestine networks —of every tendency, with a strong communist presence after 1941— carried out sabotage, intelligence and armed struggle; Jean Moulin managed to unify them in 1943 before dying under Gestapo torture. Many resistance members, Jews, communists and hostages were shot or deported. Liberation came with the Normandy landings (June 1944) and the liberation of Paris in August 1944. The post-war years brought a settling of scores (the épuration), the vote for women —at last— in 1944 and a long and difficult work of memory about what France had done and suffered between 1940 and 1944.
The post-war years were, for France, the age of decolonisation, often violent. In Indochina, the war against Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh ended with the military defeat of Dien Bien Phu (7 May 1954) and the Geneva accords, which sealed the end of French Indochina. Barely months later the Algerian war broke out (1954-1962), the most traumatic of all, because Algeria was considered part of France and a million European settlers lived there. It was an atrocious war, with systematic torture practised by the French army, bombings, executions and mass displacement. Casualty estimates are disputed: on the Algerian side figures have ranged from some 250.000-300.000 dead to the much higher numbers claimed by Algeria; on the French side some 25.000 soldiers died. The crisis brought down the Fourth Republic.
In 1958, the threat of a military coup over the Algerian question brought de Gaulle back to power, and he founded the Fifth Republic, with a constitution that hugely strengthened the president (elected since 1962 by direct universal suffrage). De Gaulle, against much of his own camp, led Algeria to independence through the Evian accords (18 March 1962), which caused the exodus of almost a million pieds-noirs to France and the tragedy of the harkis, the Algerian auxiliaries of the French army left to their fate. In parallel, de Gaulle gave France nuclear weapons, took it out of NATO's integrated military command and asserted a foreign policy of independence.
In May 1968, a student revolt in Paris turned into the largest general strike in French history, with millions of workers on strike and a deep cultural challenge to the established order, to authority and to social norms. 'May 68' did not bring down the regime —de Gaulle won the following elections and resigned the year after, in 1969— but it profoundly transformed French society. The following decades saw alternation between right and left (the long socialist presidency of François Mitterrand, that of Jacques Chirac), European construction —France as a driver of the European Union and of the euro— immigration and the multicultural society inherited from the empire, and new challenges: the jihadist terrorism that struck Paris in 2015, social movements, the debate on secularism and identity. France remains today one of the great powers of the world and a republic that never stops arguing, passionately, about its own history.
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Alsace, the fertile plain between the Rhine and the Vosges mountains, has always been a crossroads of Europe, a land of passage and of blending between the Germanic and the French worlds. Its capital, Strasbourg —whose name means 'city of the roads'— was an important Roman town and later a prosperous free city of the Holy Roman Empire. Its magnificent Gothic cathedral of pink sandstone, with its single 142-metre spire, was for centuries the tallest building in Christendom and dominates a historic centre of half-timbered houses, La Petite France, today a World Heritage Site.
Strasbourg holds a place of honour in the history of European culture. It was there that, around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg carried out part of his experiments with movable-type printing before perfecting it in Mainz, a revolution that would change the world. The city, largely German-speaking, soon became a great hub of humanism and of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. Alsace was joined to France in the 17th century, in the framework of the treaties of Westphalia (1648) and the conquests of Louis XIV, who took Strasbourg in 1681, though it long kept its language and its particularities.
It was precisely in Strasbourg that, in 1792, what would become La Marseillaise was born: Rouget de Lisle composed there the 'War Song for the Army of the Rhine', which the Marseille volunteers would spread and which would become the national anthem of France. Alsace, with its Alsatian language (a Germanic dialect), its distinctive food, its vineyards and its traditions, embodies like few regions that double Franco-German heritage that has marked its whole history.
No region of France has changed flag as often as Alsace and part of Lorraine. After the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Treaty of Frankfurt of 1871 forced France to cede Alsace and northern Lorraine (with the Moselle) to the newly born German Empire. So the Reichsland Elsass-Lothringen was created, a territory annexed directly by Germany. Thousands of Alsatians and Lorrainers 'opted' for France and emigrated; those who stayed became German. The loss of the 'lost provinces' became an obsession and a driver of French nationalism, feeding the desire for revenge for almost half a century.
The First World War returned Alsace and Lorraine to France: the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 confirmed their reintegration, celebrated as a great national victory. But the reunion was not straightforward: after almost fifty years under German administration, the region kept particularities —such as the concordat regime governing relations between Church and state, still in force today— and part of the population spoke German or Alsatian, which created tensions with French centralism.
The drama repeated itself in the Second World War. After the defeat of 1940, Nazi Germany annexed Alsace and the Moselle in fact, Germanised them by force and subjected their population to a brutal policy. Its most tragic episode was that of the 'malgré-nous' ('against our will'): more than 100.000 young Alsatians and Lorrainers were forcibly enlisted into the German army and sent mostly to the Eastern Front, where many died or were taken prisoner by the Soviets. The Liberation of 1944-1945 returned these lands definitively to France. That history of successive annexations left Alsace-Lorraine with a singular identity, made of painful memory and of double cultural belonging.
Precisely because of its history as land disputed and then reconciled between France and Germany, Strasbourg was chosen after the Second World War as one of the symbols of European construction and of peace between former enemies. In 1949 the Council of Europe settled there, the first great post-war European organisation, dedicated to the defence of human rights, democracy and the rule of law, with its European Court of Human Rights.
Strasbourg is also the seat of the European Parliament, the assembly elected by the citizens of the European Union, which holds its plenary sessions there. The city hosts other European institutions as well, and its European quarter, with the Parliament and Council of Europe buildings on the banks of the Ill, has become a symbol of a united Europe. That the parliamentary capital of Europe should be a city so often torn between France and Germany is no accident: it embodies the will to turn a frontier of wars into a space of cooperation.
Today Strasbourg combines that European role with an exceptional heritage —its cathedral, the Grande Île listed by Unesco, its museums, its prestigious university— and with the vitality of Alsatian culture. The Alsace region, part since 2016 of the larger Grand Est region, still asserts its personality, and in 2021 it recovered part of its institutional identity with the creation of the European Collectivity of Alsace. From Franco-German battlefield to political heart of Europe, the trajectory of Strasbourg sums up the continent's dream of reconciliation.
At the confluence of two rivers, the Rhône and the Saône, stands Lyon, one of the oldest and most important cities in France. It was founded by the Romans in 43 BC under the name Lugdunum, and it soon became the capital of the Gauls, the great administrative, commercial and religious centre of all the Gaulish provinces. From the hill of Fourvière, where a Roman theatre and odeon survive, Lugdunum dominated the routes of the empire and came to mint coin and to host the federal altar of the Gauls. It was the birthplace of emperors, such as Claudius, born there in 10 BC.
Lugdunum was also an early and tragic stage in the history of Christianity. In the year 177, under the emperor Marcus Aurelius, the city was the theatre of a fierce persecution that made the 'martyrs of Lyon' famous, among them the young slave Blandina, whose martyrdom was engraved in the memory of the early Church. Lyon would become an important episcopal see, with Saint Irenaeus among its first bishops.
After the fall of Rome, Lyon kept its rank as a great city through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, favoured by its strategic position between north and south, between France and Italy. Its trade fairs made it in the 15th and 16th centuries one of the most dynamic financial and printing centres in Europe, where Italian bankers and an intense cultural life flourished. On that ancient, commercial base, Lyon would build in the following centuries its great speciality: silk.
From the 16th century, Lyon was the European capital of silk. The kings of France granted the city the privilege of manufacturing and trading silk fabrics, and for centuries the workshops flourished where the canuts, the weavers, worked. In the Croix-Rousse quarter, tall buildings with wide windows housed the looms, connected by the famous traboules, passages cutting through the blocks. In 1801, the Lyon native Joseph-Marie Jacquard invented a loom programmed by punched cards, a distant forerunner of computing, which revolutionised the textile industry.
The canuts' condition, however, was hard, and Lyon was the setting for some of the first great workers' revolts of the industrial age. In 1831 and 1834, the weavers rose against poverty wages under the motto 'Live working or die fighting', in insurrections put down by the army that heralded the social conflicts of the 19th century. The story of the canuts is one of the founding pages of the French labour movement.
In the 20th century, Lyon earned another title of glory: that of 'capital of the Resistance'. During the Second World War, its position, its traboules —ideal for escaping the police— and its civic tradition made it one of the main hubs of the French Resistance. Jean Moulin, the man who unified the Resistance movements on de Gaulle's instructions, operated there, and so, with particular cruelty, did the local Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, the 'butcher of Lyon', tried decades later. The city today houses a Centre of the History of Resistance and Deportation. To that dense legacy Lyon adds its worldwide fame as a food capital, land of the 'bouchons' and of great chefs such as Paul Bocuse, crowning a history of more than two thousand years.
Normandy owes its name to the 'men of the north' (northmanni), the Vikings who through the 9th century sailed up the Seine and repeatedly sacked the northwest of the Frankish kingdom, even laying siege to Paris. To put an end to those raids, King Charles the Simple agreed in 911, by the treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte, to cede a territory around Rouen to the Viking chief Rollo, in exchange for his converting to Christianity and defending the region. So the duchy of Normandy was born, where the Scandinavians quickly merged with the local population, adopted the Romance language and Christianity, and forged a powerful, well-organised principality.
The most famous episode of that ducal Normandy was the conquest of England. In 1066, Duke William —later known as William the Conqueror— crossed the English Channel with his army, defeated the Anglo-Saxon king Harold at the battle of Hastings and had himself crowned king of England. That feat, told in the extraordinary Bayeux Tapestry, tied the fates of England, Normandy and France together for centuries, and sowed the dynastic conflicts that would lead to the Hundred Years' War.
Normandy was, indeed, one of the great settings of that war. King Philip Augustus of France had reconquered it from the English in 1204; but during the Hundred Years' War it fell into English hands again before being definitively recovered by the French crown in the middle of the 15th century. Its cities —Rouen, where Joan of Arc was burned in 1431; Caen, Bayeux— keep the memory of those centuries when the region was a bridge and a battlefield between France and England.
In the bay separating Normandy from Brittany rises one of the most astonishing places in Europe: Mont-Saint-Michel, a rocky islet crowned by an abbey that seems to spring out of the sky. According to tradition, its story began in the year 708, when Bishop Aubert of Avranches, inspired —so the legend says— by the archangel Michael, ordered a first sanctuary raised on the rock. From the 10th century a Benedictine community settled there, and through the Middle Ages an extraordinary Gothic monastic complex known as 'la Merveille' (the Marvel) was raised on the summit, balanced on the crag.
The Mont became one of the great pilgrimage centres of Western Christendom. Thousands of pilgrims —the 'miquelots'— came across the dangerous sands of the bay, subject to some of the strongest tides in Europe, which ring the islet and either cut it off or join it to land depending on the hour. During the Hundred Years' War, the fortified abbey resisted English assaults and never fell, becoming a symbol of French resistance and of national identity.
After the Revolution, the monastery was closed and turned into a prison, until in the 19th century it was recognised as a historic monument and restored. In 1979, the abbey and its bay were inscribed on the Unesco World Heritage list. Today, after major works to give the Mont back its island character, it remains one of the most visited sites in France, on the symbolic and geographical border between the Norman and the Breton worlds.
The valley of the Loire, the longest river in France, was for centuries one of the favourite regions of the kings, who scattered its banks with châteaux. In the Middle Ages defensive fortresses abounded, but it was in the 15th and 16th centuries that the valley filled with pleasure residences that are today jewels of the French Renaissance. Amboise, Blois, Chambord, Chenonceau, Azay-le-Rideau, Villandry: these châteaux, with their slate roofs, their towers and their gardens, mark the passage from castle-fortress to pleasure palace, and the arrival of Italian art in France.
The Loire was, in fact, the cradle of the French Renaissance. Kings Charles VIII, Louis XII and above all Francis I, seduced by Italy after their military campaigns, brought artists, architects and ideas from the other side of the Alps. Leonardo da Vinci himself spent his last years at the Clos Lucé, in Amboise, invited by Francis I, and died there in 1519. Chambord, the largest of the Loire châteaux, with its famous double-helix staircase perhaps inspired by Leonardo, is the grandest expression of that royal ambition. The valley was also, in the 15th century, the setting for the epic of Joan of Arc, who relieved Orléans in 1429.
Beyond the kings, the northwestern region that accompanies the Loire to the Atlantic has always been a land of dense history: cities such as Tours, birthplace of Saint Martin; Angers and its Apocalypse tapestries; Nantes, at the river mouth, where Henry IV signed the edict of religious tolerance in 1598. The Loire Valley, 'the garden of France', was inscribed by Unesco as a cultural landscape in the year 2000, in recognition of centuries of dialogue between the river, people and architecture.
The beaches of Normandy keep the memory of the most decisive military event of the 20th century in Western Europe: the landings of 6 June 1944, 'D-Day', the start of Operation Overlord with which the Allies opened the western front against Nazi Germany. In the early hours of that day, after tens of thousands of paratroopers were dropped, an armada of thousands of ships landed some 150.000 American, British and Canadian soldiers on five beaches of the Norman coast, with code names that have passed into history: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword.
The landing was an operation on an unprecedented scale, meticulously prepared and fought for inch by inch. On Omaha beach, American troops suffered terrible losses against the German defences of the 'Atlantic Wall'. By the evening of 6 June, despite the fighting, the Allies had established a bridgehead on the continent. Allied casualties for that single day are estimated at around 10.000 dead, wounded and missing.
D-Day was only the beginning. It was followed by the long and bloody battle of Normandy, which went on through the whole summer of 1944 among the hedgerows (the bocage), with towns such as Caen and Saint-Lô flattened by bombing, until the front was broken and Paris liberated on 25 August. Today, the landing beaches, the military cemeteries —such as the American one at Colleville, above Omaha— the remains of the artificial harbour at Arromanches and numerous museums make this coast an immense place of memory, a destination of pilgrimage for veterans and visitors from all over the world who come to honour those who died for the liberation of Europe.
West of Mont-Saint-Michel begins Brittany, the Celtic peninsula that for more than a thousand years defended its singularity against the rest of France. Settled in the early Middle Ages by Britons arriving from present-day Great Britain, fleeing the Anglo-Saxon invasions, Roman Armorica became 'Brittany' and kept a language of its own, Breton (brezhoneg), of Celtic root, related to Welsh and Cornish, alongside Gallo, spoken in the east of the region. It was a kingdom and then an independent duchy, with its own dukes, its culture and its saints.
The duchy of Brittany kept its autonomy until the 16th century. After the marriage of Duchess Anne of Brittany to two successive kings of France, and then of her daughter to Francis I, the Estates of Brittany voted in 1532 for the union of the duchy with the French crown, on condition that its rights, privileges and liberties be preserved. That 'rattachement' did not erase Breton identity: for centuries the region kept its parliament, its institutions and a strong sense of its own particularity, and it led no few tax revolts against the power of Paris.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the centralising, Jacobin policy of the French state actively fought Breton, banned in schools; the language went into sharp decline. But since the middle of the 20th century, a movement of cultural reaffirmation —music, dance, festivals such as the Festival Interceltique de Lorient, Diwan bilingual schools, signage in Breton— has revived the regional identity. Brittany, with its Gwenn-ha-du flag, its stone calvaries, its festivals (fest-noz) and its Celtic pride, still claims its particular place within France today, at the western tip of this Atlantic North and West.
The origins of Paris lie with a Gaulish tribe, the Parisii, who settled around the 3rd century BC on an island in the Seine —today's Île de la Cité— easy to defend and to cross. After the Roman conquest, Lutetia grew there, a Gallo-Roman town with a forum, baths, an amphitheatre (the Arènes de Lutèce) and a theatre, whose remains still survive. The town spread along the left bank, over the hill of Sainte-Geneviève. According to tradition, in the 3rd century the first bishop, Saint Denis, was martyred on the hill of Montmartre —'mount of the martyrs'— and Saint Geneviève became the city's patron after protecting it, so the legend goes, from Attila's Huns.
It was with the Franks and then with the Capetians that Paris became the centre of power. Clovis chose it as one of his residences around the year 508, and above all Hugh Capet and his successors, from 987, made it the capital of their domain and, little by little, of the kingdom. On the Île de la Cité rose the royal palace (today the Conciergerie and the Palais de Justice) and Saint Louis's Sainte-Chapelle, a Gothic jewel built to house relics of the Passion. Opposite, the building of Notre-Dame cathedral, begun in 1163, symbolised the city's rise.
On the left bank there flourished, from the 12th century, one of the great intellectual centres of Europe: the University of Paris, with the famous Latin Quarter —so called because Latin was spoken there— and the Sorbonne, founded in the 13th century. Masters and students from all over Christendom came to study theology, philosophy and the arts. A city of kings, of merchants and of learning, Paris entered the late Middle Ages as one of the largest cities in the West, the heart of a kingdom under construction.
Through the Renaissance and the early modern period, the kings embellished and enlarged Paris. Francis I began the transformation of the old Louvre into a Renaissance palace and brought works and artists from Italy. Henry IV, at the beginning of the 17th century, gave the city harmonious urban set pieces such as the Place des Vosges and the Pont Neuf, the oldest surviving bridge in Paris. The city grew, filled with mansions (hôtels particuliers), convents and churches, and became a European byword for good taste, fashion and the arts.
The great turn came with Louis XIV. Marked as a child by the Fronde, the revolt that had forced him to flee a hostile Paris, the Sun King always distrusted the capital and decided to move the court away from it. From 1682 he installed the government and the high nobility in the palace of Versailles, some twenty kilometres to the southwest, turning his father's old hunting lodge into the largest and most sumptuous palace in Europe, with Le Nôtre's geometric gardens and the dazzling Hall of Mirrors. For more than a century Versailles was the centre of power and the showcase of the French monarchy, imitated by every court on the continent.
Even with the court resident at Versailles, Paris remained the largest city in the kingdom and its true economic, intellectual and popular heart. In its salons, cafés and printing houses the Enlightenment simmered; in its streets the social tensions of a growing population piled up. That distance between the court shut away in its gilded palace and the hungry, restless capital would prove explosive: when the Revolution broke out, the people of Paris would go to fetch the king from Versailles and bring him back, almost a prisoner, to the city.
No city in the world has made as many revolutions as Paris. Here, on 14 July 1789, the people stormed the Bastille and set the French Revolution alight; here Louis XVI was guillotined on today's Place de la Concorde; here the revolutionary assemblies sat and the struggle between factions that led to the Terror was fought. Paris was the stage and the engine of that upheaval that abolished the Ancien Régime and proclaimed the Rights of Man.
The 19th century confirmed Paris as the capital of insurrection. In July 1830, the barricades of the 'Three Glorious Days' brought down the Bourbons; in February 1848, a new Parisian revolution proclaimed the Second Republic and universal male suffrage. And in 1871, after defeat by Prussia and the siege of the city, the Paris Commune broke out, a popular and social power crushed in blood during the Bloody Week in May. Those days are engraved in the topography of the city: the faubourg Saint-Antoine, the Place de la Bastille, the Mur des Fédérés in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, where the last Communards were shot.
That rebellious spirit reappeared in the middle of the 20th century. In August 1944, the city itself rose against the German occupier in the insurrection that preceded liberation by Free French and Allied troops. And in May 1968, the Latin Quarter filled with student barricades that set off the largest general strike in the country's history. From the Bastille to the Sorbonne, the geography of Paris is a map of the revolutions that changed France and, many times, the world.
The Paris the world admires today was born largely of a radical transformation carried out in the middle of the 19th century. Under the Second Empire, between 1853 and 1870, Napoleon III commissioned the prefect Baron Haussmann to carry out a colossal remodelling of the city: long, wide, straight boulevards were driven through the old medieval fabric, stone façades were aligned according to strict rules —the famous 'Haussmannian buildings'— and squares, parks (Bois de Boulogne, Buttes-Chaumont), stations, sewers and water networks were created. The operation modernised and cleaned up Paris, but it also drove the poor out of the centre and made it easier to control the streets militarily.
In that reinvented Paris the Belle Époque flourished, between the end of the 19th century and 1914: a time of artistic, scientific and festive effervescence. The city was the world capital of painting —from Impressionism to the avant-gardes— of fashion, of cabaret (Montmartre, the Moulin Rouge) and of modern life. Paris hosted great Universal Exhibitions, and for that of 1889, celebrating the centenary of the Revolution, the engineer Gustave Eiffel raised an iron tower 300 metres tall, then the tallest in the world. Criticised at first by many artists, the Eiffel Tower became the undisputed symbol of Paris.
The 1900 Exhibition crowned that splendour: it brought the metro (opened that year), the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais, the Pont Alexandre III. Paris established itself as the 'capital of the 19th century', a cultural beacon drawing artists and writers from all over the planet. That golden age, with its lights and its deep social inequalities, would be brutally interrupted by the First World War, but it fixed forever the romantic, luminous image of the City of Light.
The 20th century tested Paris. During the First World War, the city was under threat from the German offensive of 1914, halted at the last moment on the Marne, and it suffered bombardment. But it was the Second World War that left the most painful mark: on 14 June 1940, the Wehrmacht entered Paris, declared an 'open city', and for four years the capital lived under German occupation, with its train of hardship, censorship, repression and collaboration. It was here, in July 1942, that the Vel' d'Hiv round-up took place, the largest arrest of Jews in the history of France, carried out by the French police.
The liberation of Paris, in August 1944, was a founding moment of national memory. The city rose, the Resistance threw up barricades, and on 25 August General Leclerc's 2nd Armoured Division and Allied troops entered the capital; the next day, de Gaulle paraded down the Champs-Élysées before a delirious crowd. Paris, which Hitler had ordered destroyed, was spared ruin and became the emblem of a France reborn.
In the second half of the century, Paris was again a laboratory of protest with May 68, and it was transformed by the great architectural projects of the Fifth Republic: the La Défense business district, the Centre Pompidou, the Louvre Pyramid, the Opéra Bastille, the Grande Arche. Today, the Paris and Île-de-France region concentrates more than twelve million inhabitants, is the economic engine of the country and one of the largest metropolitan areas in Europe. The city has also lived through the trauma of terrorism —the attacks of 2015— and major global events such as the 2024 Olympic Games, confirming itself as one of the capitals of the world.
Marseille is the oldest city in France. It was founded around 600 BC by Greek sailors from Phocaea, in Asia Minor, who called it Massalia and established a colony around the natural inlet of the Lacydon, today's Vieux-Port. Tradition even preserved the story of its founding: the Greek leader Protis is said to have been chosen as husband by Gyptis, daughter of the king of a local tribe, who offered him a cup as a sign of union, sealing the alliance between Greeks and natives out of which the city was born.
Massalia became a prosperous Greek commercial republic, which spread wine, the olive tree, the vine, coinage and the alphabet across Gaul, and in turn founded other colonies along the Mediterranean coast, such as Nice (Nikaia) and Antipolis (Antibes). When in the 1st century BC it backed the losing side in the Roman civil war between Caesar and Pompey, the city was subdued by Caesar in 49 BC, but it kept its Hellenic character and went on being an important port and cultural centre under Rome.
Through the centuries, Marseille kept its vocation as a great Mediterranean port, France's door to the East, to Africa and, later, to the colonial empire. A cosmopolitan and rebellious city, it was the setting for key episodes of French history: it was from here that in 1792 the volunteers set out who carried to Paris the song that would become La Marseillaise, the national anthem. With more than 2.600 years of history, Marseille remains today one of the great cities of the Mediterranean, shaped by successive waves of immigration —Italian, Armenian, North African, Comorian— that have made it a melting pot unique in France.
The very name of Provence comes from the Latin Provincia: it was the first Roman province outside Italy, conquered from the year 125 BC and organised as Gallia Narbonensis, with its capital at Narbonne. The Romans, drawn by the Mediterranean climate and the routes towards Hispania, covered the region with towns, roads and monuments that are among the best preserved in the Roman world. Provence was one of the most Romanised and prosperous regions of the whole empire.
The Roman legacy is everywhere in the south. In Nîmes stand an almost intact amphitheatre (the Arènes) and the temple known as the Maison Carrée; nearby, the Pont du Gard, an aqueduct of three levels of arches over the river Gardon, is one of the masterpieces of Roman engineering and a World Heritage Site. Arles keeps its amphitheatre, its theatre and its necropolises; Orange, a monumental Roman theatre and a triumphal arch; Vaison-la-Romaine, a whole urban site. These monuments bear witness to the splendour of the Provincia and still host performances twenty centuries later.
After the fall of Rome, Provence lived through centuries of turbulent history —invasions, Saracen raids, feudalism— and was long tied to the Holy Roman Empire and to the house of the counts of Provence and of Barcelona, rather than to the kingdom of France. It was not definitively incorporated into the French crown until 1481, when the last count, 'good King René', left his states to Louis XI. Its own culture, tied to the Occitan language (Provençal), its traditions, its light and its landscapes —later celebrated by painters such as Cézanne and Van Gogh— make Provence one of the regions with the strongest personality in France.
For much of the 14th century, the capital of Western Christendom was not in Rome but in Provence: in Avignon. In 1309, in a context of great instability in Italy and under the strong influence of King Philip the Fair of France, Pope Clement V moved the papal seat to Avignon, a city on the Rhône and close to the lands of the Church. So began the so-called 'Avignon papacy', which tradition —following Petrarch— compared to the Babylonian captivity.
Between 1309 and 1377, seven successive popes, all French, lived in Avignon, which became the political, religious and artistic centre of Europe. The pontiffs raised the imposing Palais des Papes, an enormous Gothic fortress-residence that is today one of the largest medieval palaces in the world, and they ringed the city with walls. The papal court drew nobles, clergy, artists, bankers and merchants, and Avignon lived a time of splendour, though also of criticism for the luxury and worldliness of the Church.
In 1377, Pope Gregory XI returned the seat to Rome, but his death shortly afterwards set off the Western Schism (1378-1417), during which two —and later as many as three— rival popes disputed legitimacy, one of them living once again in Avignon. The city and the small surrounding territory (the Comtat Venaissin) remained papal property until the French Revolution, which incorporated them into France in 1791. The Palais des Papes and the historic centre of Avignon, with its famous Pont Saint-Bénézet —the 'pont d'Avignon' of the song— were declared a World Heritage Site in 1995.
In the 12th and 13th centuries, much of the south of present-day France —Languedoc, land of the Occitan language— was the heartland of a Christian heresy: Catharism. The Cathars, also called Albigensians (after the city of Albi), preached a dualist faith that radically opposed the material world, the work of evil, to the spiritual world, and they rejected the hierarchy, the wealth and the sacraments of the Catholic Church. Their doctrine, spread by austere preachers called 'perfects', took strong root among the population and enjoyed the tolerance or the protection of numerous Occitan lords.
Alarmed, the Church answered with force. After the murder of a papal legate, Pope Innocent III proclaimed in 1208 the crusade against the Albigensians, which drew the nobility of northern France southwards with spiritual promises and an appetite for conquest. The war, begun in 1209, was extremely violent: that same year, the taking of Béziers ended in an indiscriminate massacre of its inhabitants, and shortly afterwards Carcassonne fell. The crusade was led by Simon de Montfort, who stripped the local lords, such as the Trencavel viscounts, of their lands. The repression went on for two decades.
The Albigensian Crusade had a decisive political consequence: the subjugation of Languedoc and its incorporation into the crown of France, which thus extended its power to the Mediterranean. The Inquisition was created to hunt down the last heretics. Cathar resistance took refuge in mountain fortresses such as Montségur, whose fall in 1244 ended with the collective burning of more than two hundred 'perfects' who refused to recant. The imposing medieval citadel of Carcassonne, with its double wall and its towers, restored in the 19th century and today a World Heritage Site, is the great symbol of that Occitan world and of the tragedy that subdued it.
The coastal strip of the southeast, the Côte d'Azur, had for centuries a history different from that of Provence. Nice and its county, founded by the Greeks of Marseille, came in the Middle Ages under the house of Savoy, and for more than four centuries Nice was a Savoyard and then a Sardinian city, oriented towards Italy. It was not incorporated into France until 1860, when, in compensation for French support for Italian unification, the county of Nice and Savoy were ceded to Napoleon III and ratified by plebiscite. That is why Nice keeps a strong character of its own, with its Nissart language, its Italian-looking old town and a singular identity.
It was in the 19th century that the myth of the Riviera was born. The British and Russian aristocracy, drawn by the mildness of the Mediterranean winter, began spending the cold season in Nice —where the English financed the seafront promenade still called the Promenade des Anglais— in Cannes, in Menton. That winter tourism of the European elites literally invented the Côte d'Azur as a luxury destination, with its grand hotels, its villas, its casinos and its exotic gardens. Cannes owed its take-off to the chance discovery of the place by an English aristocrat in 1834.
In the 20th century, the Côte d'Azur became a byword for international glamour. In 1946 the first edition of the Cannes Festival was held, making the small city the world capital of cinema every May. The principality of Monaco, wedged into the coast, added its legend of casino and media royalty. Painters such as Matisse, Chagall and Picasso settled in the region, drawn by its light. From Savoyard county to jet-set paradise, the Côte d'Azur —from Nice to Cannes, from Antibes to Saint-Tropez— is today one of the most famous and sought-after coastlines on the planet.
The history of Aquitaine, in southwestern France, was shaped by an exceptional woman and by a long English destiny. In 1137, Eleanor of Aquitaine, heiress to the largest and richest duchy in the kingdom, married the future King Louis VII of France. But the marriage failed and was annulled in 1152; barely two months later, Eleanor married again, this time Henry Plantagenet, duke of Normandy and count of Anjou, who in 1154 became king of England. With that wedding, the immense Aquitaine —from the Loire to the Pyrenees— passed into the hands of the kings of England.
For three centuries, much of the southwest was therefore the land of the king of England, although in theory a vassal of the king of France. That contradiction was one of the deep causes of the Hundred Years' War. Gascony and the Bordeaux region (Guyenne) became the main continental fief of the English kings, and their inhabitants developed a strong relationship with England, above all through the wine trade. The region lived under English administration for much of the late Middle Ages, with institutions and privileges of its own.
English rule ended in 1453, at the close of the Hundred Years' War. The battle of Castillon (1453) and the taking of Bordeaux by the troops of King Charles VII of France marked the definitive reconquest of Aquitaine by the French crown, after three centuries of English presence. That long history left a lasting mark on the region —on its trade, its culture, its relations with the Atlantic world— and it is an essential part of the identity of the French southwest, a land of the Occitan language (Gascon) and of strong personality.
Bordeaux, a great port on the river Garonne, owes its historic prosperity to wine and to Atlantic trade. Already under English rule, in the Middle Ages, its wines —'claret'— were exported massively to England, and the wine trade was for centuries the engine of the city's wealth. In the 18th century, Bordeaux lived its golden age: it filled with magnificent pale stone buildings, squares and classical quays that earn it today the nickname 'pearl of Aquitaine' and the inscription of its Port of the Moon on the World Heritage list.
That 18th-century prosperity, however, was deeply tied to colonial trade and to slavery. Bordeaux was one of the great slaving ports of France: it is reckoned that its shipowners organised some 480 slaving expeditions between the end of the 17th century and the middle of the 19th, deporting between 120.000 and 150.000 enslaved Africans to the West Indies. But even more than from the direct slave trade, the city grew rich from 'direct trade' with the colonies: sugar, coffee, indigo and other products grown by enslaved people on Caribbean plantations, above all in Saint-Domingue (Haiti). Much of the wealth and of the fine buildings of Bordeaux was built, directly or indirectly, on slave labour.
For a long time this part of the story was silenced. In recent decades, the city has undertaken a work of memory: explanatory plaques in streets bearing the names of slave traders, rooms devoted to slavery in the Musée d'Aquitaine, acts of recognition. Acknowledging that the elegance of 18th-century Bordeaux was fed by the slave system is today part of a broader public debate in France about the memory of the slave trade and of colonisation. Bordeaux also remains the wine capital of the world, surrounded by legendary vineyards —Médoc, Saint-Émilion, Graves, Sauternes— that carry on a thousand-year-old tradition.
In the far southwest, beside the Pyrenees and the Spanish border, lies the French Basque Country (Iparralde), the land of a very ancient people whose language, Basque, has no known relation to any other in Europe and whose roots reach back into prehistory. Its historic provinces —Labourd, Lower Navarre and Soule— kept their own charters and particularities for centuries, and their singular culture is expressed in the language, in the fronton and Basque pelota, in the food and in the traditions. Towns such as Bayonne (Baiona) and Saint-Jean-de-Luz have been centres of that identity, historically tied to the sea: the Basques are among the great sailors, whale hunters and whalers of Atlantic Europe since the Middle Ages.
Biarritz, today a famous seaside resort, was originally a modest whaling village. Its transformation was due to imperial favour in the 19th century: Empress Eugénie de Montijo, wife of Napoleon III and in love with the Basque coast, drove the building of an imperial villa on the shore (today the Hôtel du Palais) in the 1850s. The presence of the court drew the European aristocracy, and Biarritz became, like the Côte d'Azur, an elegant summer destination for kings, nobles and great fortunes.
In the 20th century, Biarritz added a new chapter to its history: it was one of the cradles of surfing in Europe. In the mid-1950s, its Atlantic waves drew the first surfers, and the town became the European capital of the sport, without losing its Belle Époque resort air. The French Basque Country today combines that coastal tourism with the vitality of a culture that still claims its language and its identity on both sides of the border, in dialogue with the Spanish Basque Country.
At the other end of this vast region, to the east, rise the French Alps, dominated by Mont Blanc, the roof of Western Europe at 4.808 metres. These mountains belonged for centuries to the dukes of Savoy, a dynasty that reigned on both sides of the Alps, over territories today divided between France and Italy. Savoy, with its capital at Chambéry and its strong identity, was not definitively incorporated into France until 1860, at the same time as Nice, in compensation for Napoleon III's support for Italian unification; the annexation was ratified by a plebiscite.
Chamonix, in the valley at the foot of Mont Blanc, was the cradle of modern alpinism. For centuries, the high mountains and their glaciers inspired fear, but in the 18th century scientific curiosity changed that view. The Geneva scholar Horace-Bénédict de Saussure offered a reward to whoever reached the summit of Mont Blanc, and on 8 August 1786, the doctor Michel-Gabriel Paccard and the guide and crystal prospector Jacques Balmat made the first ascent in history. That feat marked the birth of alpinism as an activity, and Chamonix became its world capital, with its corps of high-mountain guides.
The 20th century established the French Alps as a first-rank tourist and sporting destination. In 1924, Chamonix hosted the first Winter Olympic Games in history, and the region later filled with world-famous ski resorts. The Aiguille du Midi cable car, the Mont Blanc tunnel linking France and Italy, and the development of mountaineering and winter sports made this Alpine corner one of the great poles of French tourism, where Savoyard memory lives alongside high-mountain adventure.
On the shore of one of the purest lakes in Europe lies Annecy, nicknamed the 'Venice of the Alps' for the canals crossing its old town. The town played a notable part in the history of Savoy and of religion. In the 16th century, when the Protestant Reformation triumphed in neighbouring Geneva, Annecy became a refuge for Savoyard Catholicism: the bishopric of Geneva moved there, and the town turned into a bastion of the Counter-Reformation.
Its most famous figure was Saint Francis de Sales, bishop of Geneva with his seat in Annecy at the beginning of the 17th century, a humanist and spiritual writer of enormous influence, author of the Introduction to the Devout Life. Together with Saint Jane de Chantal he founded the Order of the Visitation there. Through the centuries of independent Savoy, Annecy went on being an important ducal town, with its castle of the counts of Geneva and its Palais de l'Isle, the old prison on the canal that is today its best-known image.
Like the rest of Savoy, Annecy and its lake passed to France in 1860. In the 20th century, the town prospered and benefited from the boom in Alpine and lakeside tourism, becoming one of the most appreciated places in the Alps for the beauty of its setting and the cleanliness of its water, the result of a pioneering effort to clean up the lake. Annecy today hosts a famous international animated film festival and embodies, alongside Chambéry, the living memory of old Savoy within France, in the heart of this Alpine southwest.