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Page 1 of 3 HISTORY 
Ancient & Medieval History
Human presence in France is known to date from the middle Palaeolithic period, about 90,000 to 40,000 years ago. Around 25,000 BC the Stone Age Cro-Magnon people appeared and left their mark in the form of cave paintings and engravings.
The Celtic Gauls moved into what is now France between 1500 and 500 BC. By about 600 BC, they had established trading links with the Greeks, whose colonies on the Mediterranean coast included Massilia (Marseille), Julius Caesar's Roman legions took control of the territory around 52 BC. France remained under Roman rule until the 5th century, when the Franks (thus 'France') and other Germanic groups overran the country.
Two Frankish dynasties, the Merovingians and the Carolingians, ruled from the 5th to the 10th centuries. In AD 732, Charles Martel defeated the Moors at Poitiers, ensuring that France would not follow Spain and come under Muslim rule. Martel's grandson, Charlemagne, significantly extended the boundaries of the kingdom and was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800. During the 9th century, Scandinavian Vikings (the Normans) began raiding France's western coast and eventually founded the Duchy of Normandy.
Under William the Conqueror (the Duke of Normandy), Norman forces occupied England in 1066, making Normandy - and later, Plantagenet-ruled England - a formidable rival of the kingdom of France. A further third of France came under the control of the English Crown in 1154, when Eleanor of Aquitaine married Henry of Anjou (later Henry II of England).
In 1415, French forces were defeated at Agincourt; in 1420, the English took control of Paris, and two years later Henry IV of England became king of France. Just when it seemed that England had pulled off a dynastic union with France, a 17-year-old peasant girl known to history as Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc) surfaced in 1429 and rallied the French troops at Orleans. She was captured, convicted of heresy and burned at the stake two years later, but her efforts helped to turn the war in favor of the French.
The Renaissance & the Reformation
The ideals and aesthetics of the Italian Renaissance were introduced in the 15th century, partly by the French aristocracy returning from military campaigns in Italy.
By the 1530s the position of the Protestant Reformation sweeping Europe had been strengthened in France by the ideas of the Frenchman John Calvin, an exile in Geneva. The Wars of Religion (1562-98) involved three groups: the Huguenots (French Protestants); the Catholic League, led by the House of Guise; and the Catholic monarchy. The fighting brought the French state close to disintegration. Henry of Navarre, a Huguenot who had embraced Catholicism, eventually became King Henry IV. In 1598, he promulgated the Edict of Nantes, which guaranteed the Huguenots many civil and political rights.
The French Revolution
Louis XIV - also known as Le Roi Soleil (the Sun King) - ascended the throne in 1643 at the age of five and ruled until 1715. Throughout his long reign, he sought to extend the power of the French monarchy. He involved France in a long series of costly wars and poured enormous sums of money into the building of his extravagant palace at Versailles.
His successor, Louis XV (ruled 1715-74), was followed by the incompetent Louis XVI. By the late 1780s, Louis XVI and his queen, Marie-Antojnette, had managed to alienate virtually every segment of society. When the king tried to neutralise the power of the more reform-minded delegates at a meeting of the Estates General in 1789, the urban masses took to the streets and, on 14 July, a Parisian m0b stormed the Bastille prison.
At first, the Revolution was in the hands of relative moderates. Yet it was not long before the moderate, republican Girondists (Girondins in French) lost power to the radical Jacobins, led by Robespierre, Danton and Marat, who established the First Republic in 1792. In January 1793, Louis was guillotined in what is now place de la Concorde in Paris. Two months later the Jacobins set up the notorious Committee of Public Safety. This body had virtually dictatorial control over the country during the Reign of Terror (September 1793 to July 1794).
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