nation draft France
An old nation that reinvented itself as a republic of ideas, proud of its language, its table and its arguments, and still wrestling with the memory of defeat, empire and who gets to count as French.
Mont-Saint-Michel · Amaustan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Understanding a French person in 5 minutes
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The Republic as an idea
For many French people, France is not just a place but a set of principles born in 1789: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. The Republic promises a nation of equal citizens with no officially recognised ethnic or religious communities in between. Schools teach this universalism as a civic faith. It is a source of real pride, and of real tension when citizens of immigrant descent feel the promise of equality is not kept.
- The Oxford History of the French Revolution — William Doyle, Oxford University Press (1989)
- Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen de 1789 — Assemblée nationale constituante, Conseil constitutionnel (1789)
- Multi-Ethnic France: Immigration, Politics, Culture and Society — Alec G. Hargreaves, Routledge (2007)
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A strong state, a centralised nation
From the Capetian kings through Louis XIV, the Revolution and Napoleon, France was built from Paris outward, often against regional languages and loyalties. The result is a powerful state that French people both rely on and complain about: they expect it to run good schools, hospitals and trains, to protect French culture and to step in during a crisis. Paris dominates politics, business and culture to a degree few countries match.
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)
- The Discovery of France — Graham Robb, Picador (2007)
- Napoleon the Great — Andrew Roberts, Allen Lane (2014)
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Catholic roots, secular republic
France was "the eldest daughter of the Church" for over a thousand years, and its villages are still built around their churches. But the Revolution, the Dreyfus Affair and the 1905 law separating Church and State made laïcité, secularism, a core republican value. Today about half of adults under sixty say they have no religion, and Islam is the second faith. What laïcité demands of believers is one of the country's fiercest debates.
- Loi du 9 décembre 1905 concernant la séparation des Églises et de l'État — République française, Légifrance (1905)
- Histoire de la laïcité en France — Jean Baubérot, Presses universitaires de France (2000)
- La diversité religieuse en France : transmissions intergénérationnelles et pratiques selon les origines — Insee and Ined (Trajectoires et Origines 2 survey), Insee (2023)
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The art of living
Food, wine, conversation, books, cinema and long holidays are not luxuries but part of a good life, and many French people defend them as a matter of identity. UNESCO listed "the gastronomic meal of the French" as intangible heritage in 2010. The language itself is cherished and protected; speaking it well, and arguing well in it, still carries social prestige.
- Gastronomic meal of the French — UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, UNESCO (2010)
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)
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Argument and the street
France was born in a revolution and has repeated the habit: 1830, 1848, the Commune, May 1968, great strikes and the yellow vests. Many French people see protest as a normal part of democracy, and a good debate at the dinner table as a pleasure, not a breach of manners. Grumbling ("râler") is a national sport that coexists with deep attachment to the country.
- May '68 and Its Afterlives — Kristin Ross, University of Chicago Press (2002)
- The Paris Commune 1871 — Robert Tombs, Longman (1999)
- Enquêter in situ par questionnaire sur une mobilisation. Une étude sur les gilets jaunes — Collectif d'enquête sur les Gilets jaunes, Revue française de science politique (2019)
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Grandeur and wounded memory
France was long one of the world's great powers, and that sense of rank lingers in its nuclear deterrent, its UN Security Council seat and its global language. But the twentieth century brought the slaughter of 1914–18, the collapse of 1940 and Vichy's collaboration, and a brutal end to empire in Algeria. Coming to terms with those memories, honestly, has been a long and unfinished task.
- France and the Great War, 1914–1918 — Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, Cambridge University Press (2003)
- The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 — Henry Rousso, Harvard University Press (1991)
- Les questions mémorielles portant sur la colonisation et la guerre d'Algérie — Benjamin Stora, Présidence de la République (2021)
- A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle — Julian Jackson, Allen Lane (2018)
The story
Gaul, Franks & Carolingians
58 BCE – 986 From Gaul to the Franks: Clovis and Charlemagne
A Frankish king is baptised at Reims and three centuries later Charlemagne is crowned emperor in Rome, giving France its name, its faith and its founding myths.
- The Origins of France: From Clovis to the Capetians, 500–1000 — Edward James, Macmillan (1982)
- Charlemagne — Roger Collins, Macmillan (1998)
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)
Read more
- The Origins of France: From Clovis to the Capetians, 500–1000 — Edward James, Macmillan (1982)
- Charlemagne — Roger Collins, Macmillan (1998)
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)
France takes its name from the Franks, French kings were crowned at Reims for a thousand years in memory of Clovis's baptism, and Catholics still call France "the eldest daughter of the Church". At the same time, Republican schools taught generations to begin with "nos ancêtres les Gaulois", so the question of where France starts, with Gauls, Romans or Franks, is itself part of the national argument.
Before there was France there was Gaul, a land of Celtic peoples conquered by Julius Caesar between 58 and 50 BCE. The defeat of the Gallic chief Vercingetorix at Alesia in 52 BCE became, much later, a patriotic legend, and five centuries of Roman rule left Latin (the root of French), roads, cities and Christianity.
Capetian kingdom & Hundred Years' War
987 – 1453 The Capetian kingdom, the Hundred Years' War and Joan of Arc
A small royal domain around Paris grows into a kingdom, survives a century of war with England, and finds a heroine in a teenage girl from Lorraine.
- The Hundred Years War, Volume I: Trial by Battle — Jonathan Sumption, Faber and Faber (1990)
- Joan of Arc: A History — Helen Castor, Faber and Faber (2014)
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)
- The English and Their History — Robert Tombs, Allen Lane (2014)
Read more
- The Hundred Years War, Volume I: Trial by Battle — Jonathan Sumption, Faber and Faber (1990)
- Joan of Arc: A History — Helen Castor, Faber and Faber (2014)
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)
- The English and Their History — Robert Tombs, Allen Lane (2014)
This is where the French state and the idea of France as a nation took shape: a strong king in Paris, a sense of "us" defined against the English, and Joan of Arc, the patriot saint whom Catholics, republicans, the Resistance and the far right have all claimed. The habit of looking to Paris and to the state to hold the country together runs back to the Capetians.
When Hugh Capet was elected king of West Francia in 987, he directly ruled little more than the area around Paris and Orléans; great dukes and counts, some richer than he was, held the rest. Over three centuries his descendants, the Capetians, patiently enlarged the royal domain through marriage, inheritance and war.
In English memory the war is a story of underdog victories, the "happy few" of Agincourt, and of English becoming the language of the nation again, used in Parliament and the law courts and by Chaucer.
Renaissance, Reformation & absolute monarchy
1454 – 1788 The Wars of Religion and the Edict of Nantes
Catholics and Protestant Huguenots fight eight civil wars, including the St Bartholomew's Day massacre, until Henri IV grants limited toleration in 1598.
- The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629 — Mack P. Holt, Cambridge University Press (1995)
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)
Read more
- The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629 — Mack P. Holt, Cambridge University Press (1995)
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)
Many French people trace their deep suspicion of religion in politics, and the later invention of laïcité, back to these wars. The memory of the St Bartholomew's Day massacre and of the persecuted Huguenots is one reason the state insists on staying above all faiths, and France's small Protestant minority, especially in the Cévennes and Alsace, still remembers the "Desert" years of clandestine worship.
By the 1550s perhaps a tenth of the French population had embraced Calvinism; its followers were called Huguenots. Between 1562 and 1598 France was torn by eight civil wars, mixing faith with the ambitions of great noble families.
Louis XIV and Versailles
The Sun King builds Versailles, centralises power and makes France the dominant power and culture of Europe, at a heavy price in war and debt.
- The Fabrication of Louis XIV — Peter Burke, Yale University Press (1992)
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)
Read more
- The Fabrication of Louis XIV — Peter Burke, Yale University Press (1992)
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)
The taste for grandeur, a centralised state run from Paris, the Académie française guarding the language, French as the language of elegance: much of what outsiders think of as "French" took its form under Louis XIV. So did the habit of expecting the state to lead and to dazzle. Versailles is still where presidents receive foreign leaders when they want to impress.
Louis XIV became king at four in 1643 and reigned for 72 years. As a boy he lived through the Fronde (1648–53), a series of revolts by nobles and judges that taught him to distrust both. Ruling personally from 1661, he built a state run by loyal ministers such as Colbert, who promoted manufactures, a navy and colonies.
Revolution & Empire
1789 – 1815 The French Revolution
Bankruptcy and a summons of the Estates-General turn into a revolution that abolishes privilege, declares the rights of man, executes the king and invents modern politics.
- The Oxford History of the French Revolution — William Doyle, Oxford University Press (1989)
- Interpreting the French Revolution — François Furet, Cambridge University Press (1981)
- Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen de 1789 — Assemblée nationale constituante, Conseil constitutionnel (1789)
- Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution — Laurent Dubois, Harvard University Press (2004)
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)
Read more
- The Oxford History of the French Revolution — William Doyle, Oxford University Press (1989)
- Interpreting the French Revolution — François Furet, Cambridge University Press (1981)
- Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen de 1789 — Assemblée nationale constituante, Conseil constitutionnel (1789)
- Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution — Laurent Dubois, Harvard University Press (2004)
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)
The Revolution is France's founding myth and its oldest argument. The motto Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, the tricolour, the Marseillaise, 14 July, the idea of a nation of equal citizens with no intermediate loyalties, the left–right divide (which began with where deputies sat in 1789): all come from it. So does the instinct to take to the streets. How you judge it, especially the Terror and the Vendée, still says something about where you stand.
By the 1780s the French monarchy was effectively bankrupt, partly because of its costly support for the American Revolution. Society was formally divided into three estates: clergy, nobility and everyone else, the Third Estate, which paid most of the taxes. A bad harvest in 1788 sent bread prices soaring.
The birth of the nation and of universal rights: the end of feudal privilege, equality before the law, popular sovereignty.
A catastrophe that killed a king, persecuted priests and nuns and crushed the Catholic, royalist West.
For much of the twentieth century Marxist historians read 1789 as a bourgeois revolution against feudalism.
Napoleon: consul, emperor, exile
A Corsican general takes power, crowns himself emperor, gives France the Civil Code and modern institutions, conquers much of Europe and is finally defeated at Waterloo.
- Napoleon the Great — Andrew Roberts, Allen Lane (2014)
- Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution — Laurent Dubois, Harvard University Press (2004)
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)
Read more
- Napoleon the Great — Andrew Roberts, Allen Lane (2014)
- Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution — Laurent Dubois, Harvard University Press (2004)
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)
Napoleon built much of the state French people still live in: the Civil Code, prefects running each department, the lycée, the baccalauréat, the Legion of Honour, the Banque de France. He is also a test of national memory. In 2021 France marked the bicentenary of his death with intense argument over whether to celebrate a moderniser and military genius or condemn a dictator who restored slavery.
Napoleon Bonaparte, born in Corsica in 1769, rose as a revolutionary artillery officer and won fame in Italy in 1796–97. In the coup of 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799) he became First Consul, and on 2 December 1804 he crowned himself emperor in Notre-Dame with the pope looking on.
The man who ended revolutionary chaos, kept its gains of equality before the law and careers open to talent, and gave France glory and lasting institutions.
An authoritarian who crushed liberty and the press, waged wars that cost millions of lives across Europe, made married women legally subordinate in his Code, and in 1802 restored slavery in the French colonies.
Napoleon's Invasion: the Patriotic War of 1812
Napoleon's Grande Armée takes Moscow, which burns, then is destroyed in retreat, and Russian troops end the war in Paris.
- Russia Against Napoleon: The Battle for Europe, 1807 to 1814 — Dominic Lieven, Allen Lane (2009)
- A History of Russia — Nicholas V. Riasanovsky and Mark D. Steinberg, Oxford University Press
Read more
- Russia Against Napoleon: The Battle for Europe, 1807 to 1814 — Dominic Lieven, Allen Lane (2009)
- A History of Russia — Nicholas V. Riasanovsky and Mark D. Steinberg, Oxford University Press
For France the Russian campaign was the beginning of the end of Napoleon's empire. Its memory survives in everyday speech: "c'est la Bérézina", after the desperate river crossing of November 1812, still means a complete disaster.
In June 1812 Napoleon crossed the Neman River with the largest army Europe had seen, roughly 450,000–600,000 men in its first wave by most estimates, many of them Poles, Germans and other allies. The Russian armies retreated, fought a bloody draw at Borodino on 7 September, and abandoned Moscow, which burned soon after the French entered it.
Monarchies, empires & the Third Republic
1816 – 1913 Defeat in 1870 and the Paris Commune
Prussia crushes France, the Second Empire falls, Alsace and part of Lorraine are lost, and the revolutionary Paris Commune is drowned in blood.
- The Paris Commune 1871 — Robert Tombs, Longman (1999)
- France 1814–1914 — Robert Tombs, Longman (1996)
Read more
- The Paris Commune 1871 — Robert Tombs, Longman (1999)
- France 1814–1914 — Robert Tombs, Longman (1996)
The loss of Alsace-Moselle fed the hunger for revenge that carried France into 1914, and its special legal status today (the region still keeps the pre-1905 Concordat with the churches) is a leftover of that history. The Commune remains a touchstone for the French left; the white basilica of Sacré-Cœur, built partly as an act of atonement after 1871, still divides opinion about what it stands for.
In July 1870 Napoleon III, nephew of the first Napoleon and emperor since 1852, blundered into war with Prussia. Within weeks the French army was beaten and on 2 September the emperor surrendered at Sedan. Two days later a republic, the Third Republic, was proclaimed in Paris, which then endured a four-month siege.
The Commune was the first workers' government, a brief experiment in direct democracy, secular schools and women's activism, crushed by a vengeful bourgeois republic.
At the time, and for many afterwards, the Commune was an insurrection against an elected government in the midst of national defeat, which shot hostages including the archbishop of Paris and burned the Tuileries and the Hôtel de Ville.
The Dreyfus Affair and the 1905 separation of Church and State
A Jewish army officer is wrongly convicted of treason, tearing France in two, and in the aftermath the Republic separates Church and State.
- The Man on Devil's Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France — Ruth Harris, Allen Lane (2010)
- Loi du 9 décembre 1905 concernant la séparation des Églises et de l'État — République française, Légifrance (1905)
- Histoire de la laïcité en France — Jean Baubérot, Presses universitaires de France (2000)
Read more
- The Man on Devil's Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France — Ruth Harris, Allen Lane (2010)
- Loi du 9 décembre 1905 concernant la séparation des Églises et de l'État — République française, Légifrance (1905)
- Histoire de la laïcité en France — Jean Baubérot, Presses universitaires de France (2000)
The Affair created the modern "intellectual" who speaks out, and it set the template for a France split between those who put the nation and order first and those who put individual rights first. The 1905 law is the legal heart of laïcité: "The Republic neither recognises, nor pays, nor subsidises any religion." Almost every modern argument about headscarves, crucifixes or prayer rooms goes back to it.
In 1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an Alsatian Jewish artillery officer, was convicted of passing secrets to Germany and sent to Devil's Island. The evidence was flimsy, and when the real traitor, Major Esterhazy, was identified, the army covered it up. On 13 January 1898 the novelist Émile Zola published his open letter "J'accuse…!" accusing the army of a cover-up.
World wars & Vichy
1914 – 1945 The First World War and the Treaty of Versailles
About two million German soldiers die, the Kaiser falls, and a punitive peace leaves a bitterness the Nazis would exploit.
- Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War — Margaret MacMillan, John Murray (2001)
- A History of Germany 1918–2014: The Divided Nation — Mary Fulbrook, Wiley-Blackwell (2015)
- The Coming of the Third Reich — Richard J. Evans, Penguin (2003)
Read more
- Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War — Margaret MacMillan, John Murray (2001)
- A History of Germany 1918–2014: The Divided Nation — Mary Fulbrook, Wiley-Blackwell (2015)
- The Coming of the Third Reich — Richard J. Evans, Penguin (2003)
For France, Versailles was meant to make sure 1.4 million dead had not died in vain: it returned Alsace-Lorraine and promised reparations for a devastated north. The failure to keep Germany in check afterwards is one reason postwar French leaders chose the opposite path, binding Germany into a shared Europe.
Germany went to war in August 1914 expecting a short campaign. Instead came four years of trench warfare in which about two million German soldiers died, and a British naval blockade that brought hunger at home, remembered in the "turnip winter" of 1916–17.
Across the political spectrum Germans saw the treaty as a "Diktat", imposed without negotiation, and resented Article 231, which they read as blaming Germany alone for the war.
France had lost more soldiers than any other Western ally, and its industrial north had been wrecked by the fighting.
Most historians think the treaty was harsh but not crippling; Germany actually paid only part of the reparations.
The Great War: Verdun and the lost generation
France holds the Western Front for four years at the cost of about 1.4 million soldiers' lives, and wins a victory that feels like a wound.
- France and the Great War, 1914–1918 — Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, Cambridge University Press (2003)
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)
Read more
- France and the Great War, 1914–1918 — Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, Cambridge University Press (2003)
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)
In France "la Grande Guerre" is still the war of mourning. Almost every town and village has a monument aux morts listing its dead, 11 November is a public holiday, and family stories of grandfathers and great-grandfathers in the trenches remain common. The war's scale helps explain the desperate wish to avoid another in the 1930s, and the deep commitment to Franco-German reconciliation after 1945.
When war came in August 1914, the country rallied in a "sacred union" across left and right. German armies drove deep into northern France before being stopped on the Marne in September. Then the front froze into trenches running from the Channel to Switzerland, much of it on French soil.
The Holocaust (the Shoah)
Nazi Germany and its collaborators murder about six million Jews, two out of every three in Europe, in a deliberate attempt to destroy the Jewish people, along with Roma and Sinti, disabled people and others.
- Introduction to the Holocaust (Holocaust Encyclopedia) — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- The Holocaust: Resource Center and History — Yad Vashem, Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center
- The Destruction of the European Jews — Raul Hilberg, Yale University Press (2003)
- The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 — Saul Friedländer, HarperCollins (2007)
- Jewish Americans in 2020 — Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center (2021)
- Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
- The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust — Tom Segev, Hill and Wang (1993)
- Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
- The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 — Saul Friedländer, HarperCollins (2007)
- Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
- Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil — Susan Neiman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2019)
- The Third Reich at War — Richard J. Evans, Penguin (2008)
- One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate — Tom Segev, Metropolitan Books (2000)
- Mass Shootings at Babyn Yar (Babi Yar) — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2024)
- The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times — Norman A. Stillman, Jewish Publication Society (1991)
- A History of Germany 1918–2014: The Divided Nation — Mary Fulbrook, Wiley-Blackwell (2015)
- Elie Wiesel – Facts (Nobel Peace Prize 1986) — Nobel Prize Outreach, NobelPrize.org
- The Question of Palestine — Edward W. Said, Times Books (1979)
- The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books (2020)
- Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 — Benny Morris, Vintage (2001)
- Genocide of European Roma (Gypsies), 1939–1945 — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
- We Are the Romani People — Ian Hancock, University of Hertfordshire Press (2002)
- The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies — Guenter Lewy, Oxford University Press (2000)
Read more
- Introduction to the Holocaust (Holocaust Encyclopedia) — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- The Holocaust: Resource Center and History — Yad Vashem, Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center
- The Destruction of the European Jews — Raul Hilberg, Yale University Press (2003)
- The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 — Saul Friedländer, HarperCollins (2007)
- Jewish Americans in 2020 — Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center (2021)
- Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
- The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust — Tom Segev, Hill and Wang (1993)
- Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
- The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 — Saul Friedländer, HarperCollins (2007)
- Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
- Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil — Susan Neiman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2019)
- The Third Reich at War — Richard J. Evans, Penguin (2008)
- One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate — Tom Segev, Metropolitan Books (2000)
- Mass Shootings at Babyn Yar (Babi Yar) — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2024)
- The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times — Norman A. Stillman, Jewish Publication Society (1991)
- A History of Germany 1918–2014: The Divided Nation — Mary Fulbrook, Wiley-Blackwell (2015)
- Elie Wiesel – Facts (Nobel Peace Prize 1986) — Nobel Prize Outreach, NobelPrize.org
- The Question of Palestine — Edward W. Said, Times Books (1979)
- The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books (2020)
- Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 — Benny Morris, Vintage (2001)
- Genocide of European Roma (Gypsies), 1939–1945 — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
- We Are the Romani People — Ian Hancock, University of Hertfordshire Press (2002)
- The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies — Guenter Lewy, Oxford University Press (2000)
About 76,000 Jews were deported from France, with the help of Vichy's police, and few returned. For decades France told itself that Vichy was not France; Jacques Chirac's 1995 recognition of the French state's responsibility was a turning point, and the Vel d'Hiv roundup of July 1942 is now remembered every year.
Jews call it the Shoah, Hebrew for "catastrophe". When Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933, about 500,000 Jews lived there, less than 1% of the population, and about nine million in Europe as a whole. Nazi ideology cast Jews not as a religion but as a "race" responsible for all of Germany's misfortunes.
Proof that Jews without a state of their own are defenceless; the world closed its doors to Jewish refugees, and only a Jewish state could guarantee "never again".
In the 1950s most West Germans preferred silence, and many former Nazis returned to careers.
Many Jews respect how seriously Germany has faced its past, and Germany's Jewish community has grown since 1990, largely through immigration from the former Soviet Union.
Palestinians had no part in Europe's crime but paid its price, losing their homeland to a state founded partly in its shadow.
Jerusalem's Grand Mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, collaborated with Nazi Germany during the war and met Hitler in 1941; Israeli accounts often stress this.
Roma and Sinti were also persecuted as a "race", sterilised, deported and murdered alongside Jews, but their genocide was long left out of Holocaust memory, trials and compensation.
Defeat, Vichy and the Resistance
France falls in six weeks, Marshal Pétain's Vichy regime collaborates with Nazi Germany and helps deport Jews, and a minority resists until the Liberation.
- France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 — Julian Jackson, Oxford University Press (2001)
- Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 — Robert O. Paxton, Alfred A. Knopf (1972)
- The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 — Henry Rousso, Harvard University Press (1991)
- France — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
- Discours du Président de la République lors des cérémonies commémorant la grande rafle des 16 et 17 juillet 1942 — Jacques Chirac, Présidence de la République (1995)
- A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle — Julian Jackson, Allen Lane (2018)
Read more
- France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 — Julian Jackson, Oxford University Press (2001)
- Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 — Robert O. Paxton, Alfred A. Knopf (1972)
- The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 — Henry Rousso, Harvard University Press (1991)
- France — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
- Discours du Président de la République lors des cérémonies commémorant la grande rafle des 16 et 17 juillet 1942 — Jacques Chirac, Présidence de la République (1995)
- A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle — Julian Jackson, Allen Lane (2018)
The "dark years" are the most painful and most argued-over chapter of modern French memory. The heroic story of a nation of resisters held for a generation; since the 1970s, French people have had to face the reality of state collaboration and complicity in the Holocaust. Comparing anyone to Pétain or to collaborators, or invoking the Resistance, remains a powerful move in French politics.
The German offensive of May 1940 broke through the Ardennes and routed the French army in about six weeks. Millions of civilians fled south in the chaos of "l'exode". On 17 June Marshal Philippe Pétain, the 84-year-old hero of Verdun, now head of government, announced that France must stop fighting.
De Gaulle declared in liberated Paris in August 1944 that the city had been "liberated by its own people".
From the 1970s, Robert Paxton and others showed from German and French archives that Vichy sought collaboration on its own initiative and passed its own antisemitic laws.
About three-quarters of the Jews in France survived, many helped by ordinary people, but some 77,000 died, deported with the active help of French police.
Immigration, the banlieues and the 2005 riots
Postwar labour migration, much of it from North and West Africa, transforms France, while the suburban estates where many settled become a symbol of exclusion.
- Multi-Ethnic France: Immigration, Politics, Culture and Society — Alec G. Hargreaves, Routledge (2007)
- L'essentiel sur… les immigrés et les étrangers — Insee, Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (2025)
- France — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
Read more
- Multi-Ethnic France: Immigration, Politics, Culture and Society — Alec G. Hargreaves, Routledge (2007)
- L'essentiel sur… les immigrés et les étrangers — Insee, Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (2025)
- France — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
About one in nine people living in France is an immigrant, and many more have an immigrant parent or grandparent. The Republic's model says there are no minorities, only equal citizens, and it does not collect ethnic statistics. Many children of immigrants say that promise is not kept, and face discrimination in housing, jobs and police stops. Immigration is one of the most divisive questions in French politics and the main fuel of the far right.
France has been a country of immigration since the nineteenth century, when Belgians, Italians and later Poles, Spaniards and Armenians came to work and settle. After 1945, labour shortages drew workers from Portugal, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, and later from West Africa, Turkey and Southeast Asia.
France offers citizenship and equal rights to anyone who embraces its language and values; recognising ethnic or religious communities would divide the nation into rival tribes ("communautarisme").
Equality is promised but not delivered.
Fourth Republic & decolonisation
1946 – 1957 Algeria: colonial rule and the war of independence
After 132 years of French rule, a brutal eight-year war ends with Algerian independence, the exodus of about a million settlers and the fall of a French Republic.
- A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 — Alistair Horne, Macmillan (1977)
- Algeria: France's Undeclared War — Martin Evans, Oxford University Press (2012)
- Les questions mémorielles portant sur la colonisation et la guerre d'Algérie — Benjamin Stora, Présidence de la République (2021)
- A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle — Julian Jackson, Allen Lane (2018)
Read more
- A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 — Alistair Horne, Macmillan (1977)
- Algeria: France's Undeclared War — Martin Evans, Oxford University Press (2012)
- Les questions mémorielles portant sur la colonisation et la guerre d'Algérie — Benjamin Stora, Présidence de la République (2021)
- A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle — Julian Jackson, Allen Lane (2018)
Millions of people in France have a family link to Algeria: descendants of Algerian immigrants, of the pieds-noirs settlers who left in 1962, of the harkis who fought for France, and of the conscripts who served there. Each group carries a different memory, and they rarely line up. The war shaped the Fifth Republic, the far right, debates over immigration and Islam, and still strains relations between Paris and Algiers.
France invaded Algeria in 1830, and conquest of the interior took decades of war, with mass killings and land seizures. Unlike most colonies, Algeria was made legally part of France, divided into departments, and settled by Europeans from France, Spain, Italy and Malta.
A war of liberation after more than a century of dispossession, massacre and humiliation, beginning with the conquest of 1830 and the massacres at Sétif and Guelma in May 1945.
For decades France called it "the events" or "operations to maintain order"; parliament only officially recognised it as a "war" in 1999.
About a million European settlers, many with roots in Algeria going back generations, lost their homeland in 1962 and often felt unwelcome in France.
The Fifth Republic
1958 – today De Gaulle's Fifth Republic and May 1968
De Gaulle founds a republic built around a strong, directly elected president, and ten years later a student and worker revolt shakes both him and French society.
- A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle — Julian Jackson, Allen Lane (2018)
- May '68 and Its Afterlives — Kristin Ross, University of Chicago Press (2002)
- France — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
Read more
- A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle — Julian Jackson, Allen Lane (2018)
- May '68 and Its Afterlives — Kristin Ross, University of Chicago Press (2002)
- France — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
French people still live under de Gaulle's constitution, and the presidential election is the great event of national life; many complain of a "republican monarch" and call for a "Sixth Republic". "Mai 68", meanwhile, is shorthand for the moment France loosened up: less deference to fathers, teachers, bosses and priests. Whether that was liberation or the start of a lost sense of authority is still a left–right dividing line.
The Fourth Republic (1946–58) rebuilt France and launched European integration, but it had more than twenty governments in twelve years and broke on Algeria. In May 1958, with an army revolt in Algiers threatening to spread to the mainland, parliament called de Gaulle back.
A joyful revolt against a stuffy, authoritarian society that won higher wages for workers and opened the way for feminism, gay rights and environmentalism in the 1970s.
A revolt of privileged students that undermined authority in schools and families and whose individualism eroded shared values; de Gaulle's landslide in June 1968 showed that the "silent majority" wanted order.
Laïcité, the headscarf and terror
From the 1989 headscarf affair to the 2004 school law and the attacks of 2015, the place of Islam in a secular republic becomes one of France's defining debates.
- Histoire de la laïcité en France — Jean Baubérot, Presses universitaires de France (2000)
- The Politics of the Veil — Joan Wallach Scott, Princeton University Press (2007)
- La diversité religieuse en France : transmissions intergénérationnelles et pratiques selon les origines — Insee and Ined (Trajectoires et Origines 2 survey), Insee (2023)
Read more
- Histoire de la laïcité en France — Jean Baubérot, Presses universitaires de France (2000)
- The Politics of the Veil — Joan Wallach Scott, Princeton University Press (2007)
- La diversité religieuse en France : transmissions intergénérationnelles et pratiques selon les origines — Insee and Ined (Trajectoires et Origines 2 survey), Insee (2023)
Laïcité is close to a civic religion: a promise that the state is neutral and that everyone is free to believe or not. But French people disagree sharply over what it demands of citizens, especially Muslim women, and the jihadist attacks of 2015–2020 made the stakes feel existential. The right to mock religion, as Charlie Hebdo does, is for many French people a non-negotiable part of freedom; for others it is a cover for targeting Muslims.
In 1989 three schoolgirls in Creil were excluded for wearing Islamic headscarves, opening a debate that never closed. A law of 15 March 2004 banned conspicuous religious symbols, including headscarves, kippahs and large crosses, in state schools, and a 2010 law banned face coverings in public spaces.
Public schools must be a space free of religious pressure, especially on girls; the Republic protects individuals from communities, and blasphemy is a freedom, not a crime.
The 1905 law was meant to make the state neutral, not to police citizens' clothing.
The gilets jaunes (yellow vests)
A protest against a fuel tax rise grows into a months-long revolt of small-town and rural France against Paris, the elite and the cost of living.
- Enquêter in situ par questionnaire sur une mobilisation. Une étude sur les gilets jaunes — Collectif d'enquête sur les Gilets jaunes, Revue française de science politique (2019)
- France — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
Read more
- Enquêter in situ par questionnaire sur une mobilisation. Une étude sur les gilets jaunes — Collectif d'enquête sur les Gilets jaunes, Revue française de science politique (2019)
- France — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
The yellow vests gave a face to "la France périphérique", people in small towns and rural areas who depend on cars, feel ignored by Paris and struggle to make ends meet. The movement showed how quickly French anger can move from a roundabout to the Champs-Élysées, and how deep the distrust of politicians and the media runs.
On 17 November 2018 hundreds of thousands of people in the high-visibility vests that every French driver must carry blocked roundabouts and roads across France, protesting against a planned rise in fuel tax. Organised on social media, with no leaders or party, the movement spread to demands about wages, pensions, taxes on the rich and direct democracy.
Core values & worldview
If you want to understand a French person, start with the idea that France thinks of itself as more than a country: as a republic built on principles that apply to everyone. The Revolution of 1789 declared that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights”, and Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité is carved over the door of every town hall.
- Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen de 1789 — Assemblée nationale constituante, Conseil constitutionnel (1789)
- The Oxford History of the French Revolution — William Doyle, Oxford University Press (1989)
Equality and the Republic. The French model, in theory, sees only citizens, not communities. The state does not record ethnicity or religion in its census. Many French people find the idea of “minorities” with separate rights foreign, even threatening; many French people of immigrant descent reply that colour-blindness hides real discrimination.
- Multi-Ethnic France: Immigration, Politics, Culture and Society — Alec G. Hargreaves, Routledge (2007)
The state. Over a thousand years France was built from Paris outward, by kings, revolutionaries and Napoleon, often against regional languages and loyalties.
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)
- The Discovery of France — Graham Robb, Picador (2007)
Laïcité. Secularism is not just a law but, for many, a civic value: religion is private, the public sphere neutral, and the freedom to criticise and even mock religion is precious. That is a legacy of a long fight between the Republic and the Catholic Church, settled by the 1905 law.
- Loi du 9 décembre 1905 concernant la séparation des Églises et de l'État — République française, Légifrance (1905)
- Histoire de la laïcité en France — Jean Baubérot, Presses universitaires de France (2000)
Culture and the art of living. French people often see culture, from literature to cooking, as something that matters to everyone, not just an elite. The state funds cinema, protects bookshops and promotes the French language abroad. Pleasure taken seriously, in a good meal or a long conversation, is part of the national self-image.
- Gastronomic meal of the French — UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, UNESCO (2010)
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)
Daily life & customs
Manners are more formal than many visitors expect. You say “Bonjour, madame” or “Bonjour, monsieur” when you walk into a shop, a bakery or a doctor’s waiting room, and skipping it is genuinely rude. Adults who don’t know each other use the formal vous; switching to tu is a small step into friendship. Friends and family greet each other with la bise, kisses on the cheek, whose number varies by region.
Meals are an institution. Lunch is often a proper sit-down affair, and dinner with family or friends can run for hours, with an aperitif, several courses, cheese and coffee. UNESCO’s 2010 listing of the “gastronomic meal of the French” celebrated precisely this ritual of sharing, pairing food and wine and talking at the table.
- Gastronomic meal of the French — UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, UNESCO (2010)
Time off matters. The legal working week is 35 hours, most employees get five weeks of paid holiday, and in August many cities empty as people head for the coast, the mountains or family houses in the countryside. Strikes and demonstrations, especially over pensions and public services, are a normal part of the calendar.
The year has its civic landmarks: 14 July, with the military parade on the Champs-Élysées and fireworks; 11 November and 8 May, when wreaths are laid at every war memorial; and the Catholic holidays that remain public holidays in a secular state, from Easter Monday to All Saints’ Day, when families visit graves.
- France and the Great War, 1914–1918 — Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, Cambridge University Press (2003)
- France — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
Wounds & sensitivities
1940 and Vichy. The collapse of 1940 and the Vichy regime’s collaboration with Nazi Germany are the deepest modern shame. Vichy passed its own antisemitic laws, and French police rounded up Jews for deportation; some 77,000 Jews from France were murdered.
- Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 — Robert O. Paxton, Alfred A. Knopf (1972)
- France — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
- The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 — Henry Rousso, Harvard University Press (1991)
- Discours du Président de la République lors des cérémonies commémorant la grande rafle des 16 et 17 juillet 1942 — Jacques Chirac, Présidence de la République (1995)
The “surrender” jibe. Jokes about French cowardice land badly. France lost about 1.4 million soldiers in the First World War, more than any Western ally, and memorials in every village list the dead.
- France and the Great War, 1914–1918 — Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, Cambridge University Press (2003)
Algeria and empire. The Algerian War (1954–62) left wounds on every side: for families of Algerian descent, for pieds-noirs and harkis who lost their homeland, and for the conscripts who saw or did terrible things. Torture by the French army was long denied. Colonial history, including slavery in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean, is now openly debated, sometimes bitterly.
- A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 — Alistair Horne, Macmillan (1977)
- Les questions mémorielles portant sur la colonisation et la guerre d'Algérie — Benjamin Stora, Présidence de la République (2021)
- Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution — Laurent Dubois, Harvard University Press (2004)
Terrorism. The attacks of 2015–16, on Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan and in Nice, and the murder of teacher Samuel Paty in 2020, left a deep mark. Many people remember exactly where they were on 13 November 2015.
- Histoire de la laïcité en France — Jean Baubérot, Presses universitaires de France (2000)
Church abuse. In 2021 an independent commission estimated that some 216,000 children had been sexually abused by clergy in France since 1950, a revelation that shook Catholic France.
- Les violences sexuelles dans l'Église catholique, France 1950–2020 (Sauvé report) — Commission indépendante sur les abus sexuels dans l'Église (CIASE), CIASE (2021)
Modern attitudes
Secular, but culturally Catholic. In a large 2019–20 survey of adults aged 18 to 59, 51% said they had no religion, 29% were Catholic and about 10% Muslim.
- La diversité religieuse en France : transmissions intergénérationnelles et pratiques selon les origines — Insee and Ined (Trajectoires et Origines 2 survey), Insee (2023)
Liberal on personal freedoms. France legalised abortion in 1975 under Simone Veil, abolished the death penalty in 1981, legalised same-sex marriage in 2013, and in 2024 wrote the freedom to have an abortion into the constitution.
- Simone Veil — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
- France — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
A country of immigration, uneasy about it. About 7.6 million immigrants live in France, 11.2% of the population, and millions more are their children and grandchildren.
- L'essentiel sur… les immigrés et les étrangers — Insee, Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (2025)
European and sovereign. France co-founded the European Communities, and Franco-German reconciliation is a pillar of its foreign policy. Yet many French people are wary of Brussels and globalisation: in 2005 French voters rejected the proposed European constitution.
- France — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
- A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle — Julian Jackson, Allen Lane (2018)
Pessimism and pride. Polls often find French people gloomy about their country’s direction, even as they praise their healthcare, food, landscapes and way of life. Both can be true at once.
Not all French people are the same
Paris and the rest. Paris dominates, and people in “la province” often resent its arrogance; Parisians are sometimes said to think France ends at the ring road. Small-town and rural France, which felt forgotten, found a voice in the yellow vests.
- Enquêter in situ par questionnaire sur une mobilisation. Une étude sur les gilets jaunes — Collectif d'enquête sur les Gilets jaunes, Revue française de science politique (2019)
- The Discovery of France — Graham Robb, Picador (2007)
Regions with their own languages. As late as the 1790s a revolutionary survey found that only a minority of people spoke French well; the rest spoke Breton, Occitan, Basque, Alsatian, Corsican, Flemish, Catalan or local patois.
- The Discovery of France — Graham Robb, Picador (2007)
Overseas France. Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, Réunion and Mayotte are full parts of France, with histories shaped by slavery and colonialism and their own Creole cultures. Their citizens often feel overlooked by the mainland.
- Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution — Laurent Dubois, Harvard University Press (2004)
- France — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
Faith and origin. France has western Europe’s largest Muslim and Jewish populations, a Protestant minority with a long memory of persecution, and a Catholic tradition ranging from devout to purely cultural. Many French people have roots in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Armenia, North and West Africa or Vietnam.
- Multi-Ethnic France: Immigration, Politics, Culture and Society — Alec G. Hargreaves, Routledge (2007)
- La diversité religieuse en France : transmissions intergénérationnelles et pratiques selon les origines — Insee and Ined (Trajectoires et Origines 2 survey), Insee (2023)
Left and right. The words themselves come from the seating of the 1789 assembly, and the divide, over the state, religion, the Revolution and the nation, still shapes family arguments.
- Interpreting the French Revolution — François Furet, Cambridge University Press (1981)
Meeting someone
Conversation starters
- Where they’re from. Ask about their region and its food or wine; you will usually hear a passionate defence of local cheese, cooking or scenery.
- Food. Ask for a restaurant recommendation, or how they make a dish. Very few subjects are safer or more welcome.
- Gastronomic meal of the French — UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, UNESCO (2010)
- Books, films and ideas. Many French people enjoy talking about cinema, literature and politics, and will happily argue with you. Disagreeing politely is a sign of engagement, not hostility.
- Holidays. Where they spend August is a reliable and cheerful topic.
Topics to approach carefully
- The war. Don’t make surrender jokes, and don’t assume your interlocutor’s family were either resisters or collaborators.
- France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 — Julian Jackson, Oxford University Press (2001)
- Algeria. Family histories run in different directions; listen before you comment.
- Les questions mémorielles portant sur la colonisation et la guerre d'Algérie — Benjamin Stora, Présidence de la République (2021)
- Religion and the headscarf. People hold strong, sometimes opposite views; avoid assuming laïcité means hostility to religion, or that every Muslim sees it as persecution.
- Histoire de la laïcité en France — Jean Baubérot, Presses universitaires de France (2000)
- The Politics of the Veil — Joan Wallach Scott, Princeton University Press (2007)
- Money. Asking what someone earns, or talking about your own wealth, is generally considered vulgar.
- The English language. Opening in French, even badly, with a “bonjour”, changes the whole encounter.
Common misconceptions
- “The French are rude.” Much of the reputation comes from visitors skipping the formal greetings that matter so much in France. Once you say “bonjour”, most people are courteous and often warm.
- “France surrenders.” France fought and bled through the First World War and was defeated in 1940 by a German offensive that also routed the British; the Free French and the Resistance fought on.
- France and the Great War, 1914–1918 — Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, Cambridge University Press (2003)
- France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 — Julian Jackson, Oxford University Press (2001)
- “Everyone is Catholic” or “everyone is anti-religious.” Most French people are neither devout nor hostile; many are culturally Catholic and practically secular.
- La diversité religieuse en France : transmissions intergénérationnelles et pratiques selon les origines — Insee and Ined (Trajectoires et Origines 2 survey), Insee (2023)
- “France is Paris.” Most French people live outside the capital, and regional identities, accents and cuisines are strong.
- The Discovery of France — Graham Robb, Picador (2007)
- “The French don’t work.” The working week is short and holidays long, but France’s output per hour worked is among the higher in Europe; the French simply place a high value on time outside work.
People everyone knows
Joan of Arc (Jeanne d'Arc)
A peasant girl from Domrémy who said saints' voices told her to save France. In 1429, aged about seventeen, she helped lift the English siege of Orléans and brought the dauphin to be crowned Charles VII at Reims. Captured, tried for heresy by a pro-English church court and burned at Rouen in 1431, she was rehabilitated in 1456 and canonised in 1920. Since then Catholics, republicans, the Resistance and the far right have all claimed her.
- Joan of Arc: A History — Helen Castor, Faber and Faber (2014)
- The Hundred Years War, Volume I: Trial by Battle — Jonathan Sumption, Faber and Faber (1990)
Louis XIV
The "Sun King" reigned for 72 years (1643–1715), the longest of any European monarch. He tamed the nobility at Versailles, built a centralised state, made French the language of European diplomacy and culture, and waged almost constant war. His revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 drove some 200,000 Protestants abroad. He remains the model of grandeur, and of overreach, in French memory.
- The Fabrication of Louis XIV — Peter Burke, Yale University Press (1992)
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
The sharpest pen of the Enlightenment. Poet, playwright, historian and satirist (Candide, 1759), he campaigned against religious intolerance and judicial cruelty, most famously in the Calas affair, and made wit a political weapon. "Écrasez l'infâme" ("crush the infamous thing"), his war cry against fanaticism, still echoes in French arguments about secularism and free speech. He is buried in the Panthéon.
- Voltaire — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)
Napoleon Bonaparte
A Corsican artillery officer who seized power in 1799 and crowned himself emperor in 1804. His Civil Code, prefects, lycées, Legion of Honour and Concordat with the Church still shape French institutions. His wars redrew Europe and cost millions of lives, and in 1802 he restored slavery in the colonies. For many French people he is still a national hero; for others, a warmonger and despot. He lies under the dome of Les Invalides in Paris.
- Napoleon the Great — Andrew Roberts, Allen Lane (2014)
- Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution — Laurent Dubois, Harvard University Press (2004)
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press (1994)
Charles de Gaulle
The general who refused the 1940 armistice and called on the French to resist from London on 18 June. He led Free France, headed the provisional government at the Liberation, and returned in 1958 to found the Fifth Republic and end the Algerian War. His "certain idea of France", proud, independent and sovereign, still frames French politics; almost every party claims him. Hundreds of streets and squares bear his name.
- A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle — Julian Jackson, Allen Lane (2018)
- France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 — Julian Jackson, Oxford University Press (2001)
Simone Veil
Deported to Auschwitz at sixteen with her family in 1944, she survived and became a magistrate. As health minister she steered through the 1975 law legalising abortion against fierce, often antisemitic abuse. In 1979 she became the first elected president of the European Parliament. Survivor, feminist and European, she was buried in the Panthéon in 2018 and is one of the most admired figures in modern France.
- Simone Veil — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
- France — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
Try it yourself
The quickest way into a culture: a song, a film, a book and a dish.
“Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.”
“Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.”
“Yes, the criminal folly of the occupier was seconded by the French, by the French State.”
Listen
- La Marseillaise Written in 1792 for the army of the Rhine and named after volunteers from Marseille; the national anthem, sung at matches and in moments of grief, as after the 2015 attacks.▶ Listen
- Non, je ne regrette rien Édith Piaf's 1960 defiant anthem; Piaf, Brel, Brassens, Aznavour and the chanson tradition still sit in many French people's memory alongside French rap.▶ Listen
Watch
- La Haine Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 black-and-white film following three young men from a Paris banlieue for a day after a riot; still the reference point for talking about the suburbs.▶ Watch
- Intouchables The 2011 comedy about a wealthy quadriplegic and his carer from the banlieue, one of the biggest box-office hits in French history.▶ Watch
Read
- Les Misérables Victor Hugo's 1862 novel of Jean Valjean, the poor and the barricades of 1832; Hugo was given a state funeral and buried in the Panthéon.Find it
- The Little Prince Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's 1943 fable, one of the most translated books in the world; "One sees clearly only with the heart."Find it
Taste
- The baguette and the family meal The baguette's craft was listed by UNESCO in 2022; the long Sunday lunch, with aperitif, starter, main, cheese and dessert, is the real ritual.Recipe
See & do
- Impressionism Monet, Renoir, Degas and Morisot, first mocked in 1874 and now the most loved art in France; the Musée d'Orsay in a former railway station is its shrine.Look it up
- Astérix Goscinny and Uderzo's comic of an indomitable Gaulish village holding out against Rome, a gentle satire of French self-image beloved since 1959.Look it up
- The Tour de France Run every July since 1903, a three-week tour of the country's landscapes that families watch from the roadside.Look it up
Where
Homeland Diaspora Significant place
Related
Italy · Germany · Spain · Catholicism · Jewish people · Islam
Sources & further reading
- Multi-Ethnic France: Immigration, Politics, Culture and Society — Alec G. Hargreaves, Routledge, 2007
- A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 — Alistair Horne, Macmillan, 1977
- Napoleon the Great — Andrew Roberts, Allen Lane, 2014
- Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press, 2012
- Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen de 1789 — Assemblée nationale constituante, Conseil constitutionnel, 1789
- Les questions mémorielles portant sur la colonisation et la guerre d'Algérie — Benjamin Stora, Présidence de la République, 2021
- Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 — Benny Morris, Vintage, 2001
- The Cambridge Illustrated History of France — Colin Jones, Cambridge University Press, 1994
- Enquêter in situ par questionnaire sur une mobilisation. Une étude sur les gilets jaunes — Collectif d'enquête sur les Gilets jaunes, Revue française de science politique, 2019
- Les violences sexuelles dans l'Église catholique, France 1950–2020 (Sauvé report) — Commission indépendante sur les abus sexuels dans l'Église (CIASE), CIASE, 2021
- Russia Against Napoleon: The Battle for Europe, 1807 to 1814 — Dominic Lieven, Allen Lane, 2009
- The Origins of France: From Clovis to the Capetians, 500–1000 — Edward James, Macmillan, 1982
- The Question of Palestine — Edward W. Said, Times Books, 1979
- France — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Simone Veil — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Voltaire — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Interpreting the French Revolution — François Furet, Cambridge University Press, 1981
- The Discovery of France — Graham Robb, Picador, 2007
- The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies — Guenter Lewy, Oxford University Press, 2000
- Joan of Arc: A History — Helen Castor, Faber and Faber, 2014
- The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 — Henry Rousso, Harvard University Press, 1991
- We Are the Romani People — Ian Hancock, University of Hertfordshire Press, 2002
- L'essentiel sur… les immigrés et les étrangers — Insee, Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques, 2025
- La diversité religieuse en France : transmissions intergénérationnelles et pratiques selon les origines — Insee and Ined (Trajectoires et Origines 2 survey), Insee, 2023
- Discours du Président de la République lors des cérémonies commémorant la grande rafle des 16 et 17 juillet 1942 — Jacques Chirac, Présidence de la République, 1995
- Histoire de la laïcité en France — Jean Baubérot, Presses universitaires de France, 2000
- The Politics of the Veil — Joan Wallach Scott, Princeton University Press, 2007
- The Hundred Years War, Volume I: Trial by Battle — Jonathan Sumption, Faber and Faber, 1990
- A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle — Julian Jackson, Allen Lane, 2018
- France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 — Julian Jackson, Oxford University Press, 2001
- May '68 and Its Afterlives — Kristin Ross, University of Chicago Press, 2002
- Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution — Laurent Dubois, Harvard University Press, 2004
- France and the Great War, 1914–1918 — Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, Cambridge University Press, 2003
- The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629 — Mack P. Holt, Cambridge University Press, 1995
- Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War — Margaret MacMillan, John Murray, 2001
- Algeria: France's Undeclared War — Martin Evans, Oxford University Press, 2012
- A History of Germany 1918–2014: The Divided Nation — Mary Fulbrook, Wiley-Blackwell, 2015
- A History of Russia — Nicholas V. Riasanovsky and Mark D. Steinberg, Oxford University Press
- Elie Wiesel – Facts (Nobel Peace Prize 1986) — Nobel Prize Outreach, NobelPrize.org
- The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times — Norman A. Stillman, Jewish Publication Society, 1991
- The Fabrication of Louis XIV — Peter Burke, Yale University Press, 1992
- Jewish Americans in 2020 — Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 2021
- The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 — Rashid Khalidi, Metropolitan Books, 2020
- The Destruction of the European Jews — Raul Hilberg, Yale University Press, 2003
- Loi du 9 décembre 1905 concernant la séparation des Églises et de l'État — République française, Légifrance, 1905
- The Coming of the Third Reich — Richard J. Evans, Penguin, 2003
- The Third Reich at War — Richard J. Evans, Penguin, 2008
- Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 — Robert O. Paxton, Alfred A. Knopf, 1972
- The Paris Commune 1871 — Robert Tombs, Longman, 1999
- The English and Their History — Robert Tombs, Allen Lane, 2014
- France 1814–1914 — Robert Tombs, Longman, 1996
- Charlemagne — Roger Collins, Macmillan, 1998
- The Man on Devil's Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France — Ruth Harris, Allen Lane, 2010
- The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 — Saul Friedländer, HarperCollins, 2007
- The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 — Saul Friedländer, HarperCollins, 2007
- Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil — Susan Neiman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019
- The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust — Tom Segev, Hill and Wang, 1993
- One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate — Tom Segev, Metropolitan Books, 2000
- Gastronomic meal of the French — UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, UNESCO, 2010
- France — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
- Introduction to the Holocaust (Holocaust Encyclopedia) — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
- Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
- Mass Shootings at Babyn Yar (Babi Yar) — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2024
- Genocide of European Roma (Gypsies), 1939–1945 — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
- The Oxford History of the French Revolution — William Doyle, Oxford University Press, 1989
- The Holocaust: Resource Center and History — Yad Vashem, Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center