FRENCH
Excerpts from Wikipedia.org
The French are the people of France and speak French (le français). "France" etymologically derives from the word Francia, a territory where the Franks, a Germanic tribe which overran Roman Gaul at the end times of the Roman Empire, lived.
French people are primarily the descendants of Gallo-Romans and Franks, as well as Iberians in the southern Pyrenees and some Vikings who settled in Normandy known as Normans. There were also migrations of Brythonic Celtic people to Brittany and Germanic people to Alsatia before the existence of the Frankish kingdoms, and the languages and cultures of these have been maintained to the present day.
History of Gaul
In the pre-Roman era, all of Gaul (an area of Western Europe that encompassed all of what is known today as France, Belgium, part of Germany and Switzerland, and Northern Italy) was inhabited by a variety of peoples who were known collectively as the Gaulish tribes. Their ancestors were Celtic immigrants who came from Central Europe in the 7th century BC, and dominated native peoples (for the majority Ligures).
Gaul was conquered in 58-51 BC by the Roman legions under the command of General Julius Caesar (except the south-east which had already been conquered about one century earlier). The area then became part of the Roman Empire. Over the next five centuries the two cultures and peoples intermingled, creating a hybridized Gallo-Roman culture. The Gaulish language came to be supplanted by Vulgar Latin, which would later split into dialects that would develop into the French language. Today, the last redoubt of Celtic culture and language in France can be found in the northwestern region of Brittany, although this is not the result of a survival of Gaulish language but of a 5th century A.D. migration of Brythonic speaking Celts from Britain.
The Franks
With the decline of the Roman empire in Western Europe a third people entered the picture: the Franks, from which the word "French" derives. The Franks were a Germanic tribe who began filtering across the Rhine River from present-day Germany in the third century. By the early sixth century the Franks, led by the Merovingian king Clovis I and his sons, had consolidated their hold on much of modern-day France, the country to which they gave their name. The other major Germanic people to arrive in France were the Normans, Viking raiders from modern Denmark and Norway, who occupied the northern region known today as Normandy in the 9th century. The Vikings eventually intermarried with the local people, converting to Christianity in the process. It was the Normans who, two centuries later, would go on to conquer England. Eventually, though, the independent duchy of Normandy was incorporated back into the French kingdom in the Middle Ages.
15th to 18th century: The Kingdom of France
In the roughly 900 years after the Norman invasions France had a fairly settled population. Unlike elsewhere in Europe, France experienced relatively low levels of emigration to the Americas, with the exception of the Huguenots. However, significant emigration of mainly Roman Catholic French populations led to the settlement of the provinces of Acadia, Canada and Louisiana, both (at the time) French possessions, as well as colonies in the West Indies, Mascarene islands and Africa.
19th to 21st Century: The Creation of the French Nation-State
The French nation-state appeared following the 1789 French Revolution and Napoleon's empire. It replaced the ancient kingdom of France, ruled by the divine right of kings. According to historian Eric Hobsbawm, "the French language has been essential to the concept of "France", although in 1789 50% of the French people didn't speak it at all, and only 12 to 13% spoke it "fairly" - in fact, even in oïl language zones, out of a central region, it was not usually spoken except in cities, and, even there, not always in the faubourgs [approximatively translatable by "suburbs"]. In the North as in the South of France, almost nobody spoke French. Hobsbawm highlighted the role of conscription, invented by Napoleon, and of the 1880s public instruction laws, which allowed mixing of the various groups of France into a nationalist mold which created the French citizen and his consciousness of membership to a common nation, while the various regional languages of France were progressively eradicated.
Ernest Renan's What is a Nation? (1882)
Ernest Renan described this republican conception in his famous March 11, 1882 conference at the Sorbonne, Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? ("What is a nation?"). According to him, to belong to a nation is a subjective act which always has to be repeated, as it is not assured by objective criteria. A nation-state is not composed of a single homogeneous ethnic group (a community), but of a variety of individuals willing to live together. Ernest Renan's non-essentialist definition, which forms the basis of the French Republic, is diametrically opposed to the German ethnic conception of a nation, first formulated by Fichte. The German conception is usually qualified in France as an "exclusive" view of nationality, as it includes only the members of the corresponding ethnic group, while the Republican conception thinks itself as universalist, following the Enlightenment's ideals officialized by the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
New Imperialism
New Imperialism refers to the colonial expansion adopted by Europe's powers and, later, Japan and the United States, during the 19th and early 20th centuries; approximately from the Franco-Prussian War to World War I (c. 1871–1914). The period is distinguished by an unprecedented pursuit of what has been termed "empire for empire's sake," aggressive competition for overseas territorial acquisitions and the emergence in colonizing countries of doctrines of racial superiority which denied the fitness of subjugated peoples for self-government.
French Indochina was formed in October 1887 from Annam, Tonkin, Cochinchina (who together form modern Vietnam) and the Kingdom of Cambodia; Laos was added after the Franco-Siamese War of 1893. The federation lasted until 1954. In the four protectorates, the French formally left the local rulers in power, who were the Emperors of Vietnam, Kings of Cambodia, and Kings of Luang Prabang, but in fact gathered all powers in their hands, the local rulers acting only as figureheads.
French Flanders
French Flanders (French: La Flandre française; Dutch: Frans-Vlaanderen) is a part of the historical, originally Dutch-speaking region Flanders in present-day France. The region today lies in the modern-day région of Nord-Pas de Calais, the departement of Nord, and roughly corresponds to the arrondissements of Lille, Douai, and Dunkirk on the Belgian border.
French Flanders is mostly flat marshlands in the coal-rich area just south of the North Sea. French Flanders consists of two regions:
- French Westhoek to the northwest, lying between the Lys River and the North Sea, roughly the same area as the Arrondissement of Dunkirk
- Lille Flanders (French: La Flandre Lilloise; Dutch: Rijsels-Vlaanderen), the French parts of Romance Flanders (historically also Walloon Flanders) to the southeast, south of the Lys and now the arrondissements of Lille and Douai
The region was originally part of the feudal County of Flanders, then part of the Spanish Netherlands, in present-day Belgium. It was separated from the county in 1659 due to the Peace of the Pyrenees, which ended the French-Spanish conflict in the Thirty Years War, and other parts of the region were added in successive treaties in 1668 and 1678. The region was ceded to the Kingdom of France, and became part of the province of Flanders and Hainaut. The bulk became part of French the modern administrative Department of Nord, although some western parts of the region which separated in 1237 and became County of Artois before the cession to the French are now part of Pas-de-Calais.
The Thirty Years' War was fought between 1618 and 1648, principally on the territory of today's Germany, and involved most of the major European powers. Beginning as a religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics in the Holy Roman Empire, it gradually developed into a general war involving much of Europe, for reasons not necessarily related to religion. The war marked the culmination of the France-Habsburg rivalry for pre-eminence in Europe, which led to further wars between France and the Habsburg powers.
Languedoc (video)
The Mediterranean coast of Languedoc has been settled by the Greeks, Phoenicians and Romans, and invaded by the Alamanni, Vandals, Visigoths, and Saracens. Languedoc was known in the Middle Ages as the county of Toulouse, an independent county which was in theory part of the kingdom of France. In the 12th century, Languedoc was the center of the Cathar religious movement. The Roman Catholic Church declared them heretics, and the Albigensian Crusade wiped them out. As a consequence, the county of Toulouse was taken by the crown of France in 1271, (the county of Toulouse was a vassal of the crown of France, but had many connections with the Crown of Aragon, which included Catalonia) and has been part of France ever since. Later the name given to the area was Languedoc, literally meaning "language of oc", from the word "yes" in the local Occitan language ("oc", as opposed to "oïl", later "oui", in the north of France).
The Crown of Aragon is a term used to refer to the permanent union of multiple titles and states in the hands of the King of Aragon.
At the height of its power by the 14th and 15th centuries, the Crown of Aragon was a thalassocracy controlling a large portion of the present-day eastern Spain, Southeastern France, as well as some of the major islands and mainland possessions stretching across the Mediterranean Sea as far as Greece.
In 1479, a new dynastic union merged the Crown of Aragon with the Crown of Castile, creating what would become the Kingdom of Spain.
Sino-French War
The Sino-French War or Franco-Chinese War was a war fought between France and the Qing Empire that lasted from September 1884 to June 1885. Its underlying cause was the French desire for control of the Red River, which linked Hanoi to the resource-wealthy Yunnan province in China. France and China had previously been in conflict in the Second Opium War (1856-1860).
In August 1884 at the Battle of Foochow, French forces utterly destroyed the anchored Chinese Southern fleet and the Foochow Arsenal, a modernized navy and shipyard built, ironically, with the assistance of France and under the supervision of Prosper Giquel, a French citizen. The battle lasted less than thirty minutes and resulted in the sinking of nine of eleven Chinese warships, with 3,000 Chinese sailors dead.
After the Battle of Foochow, the French Navy, under the command of Admiral Amédée Courbet, blockaded the Keelung and Tamsui harbors of Taiwan and conducted an amphibious operation against Qing forces on the island (in which Joseph Joffre, future Marshal of France, participated as a captain of engineers). On October 1st 2,250 men were landed at Keelung, which was occupied from 1 October 1884 to July 1885. French troops however could not take Tamsui, and their possessions were limited to a small territory on the northern coast of Taiwan. In February 1885, a relief fleet was sent from China attempting to break the blockade, but this resulted in two Chinese ships being sunk, and three blockaded. From 29 March 1885 the Pescadores Island were ocupied by the French as well, with the effect of strengthening the blocus and further damaging Chinese trade.
