French History To The Renaissance

Settled mainly by the Gauls and the Celtic peoples, the area of modern France comprised the bulk of the region of Gaul under Roman rule from the 1st century B.C. to the 5th century A.D.

Roman rule in Gaul was first established by Julius Caesar, who defeated the Celtic tribes in Gaul during 58-51 B.C.

Julius Caesar wrote an account of his battles during this time known as The Gallic War (Oxford World's Classics).

The area was governed as a number of provinces. The capital of the Gauls was Lyon, known as Lugdunum, in the province of Gallia Lugdunensis.

A small settlement to the north, called Lutece by the Romans, was also in this province. Lutece became Paris.

On December 31, 406 A.D., the Vandals, the Alans and the Suebians crossed the Rhine, beginning an invasion of Gallia.

After coming under increasing pressure from the tribes of Germany from the middle of the 3rd century, Roman rule in Gaul ended with the defeat of the Roman governor, Syagrius, by the Franks in 486.

In 486, Clovis I, leader of the Salian Franks to the east, conquered the Roman territory between the Loire and the Somme Rivers, subsequently uniting most of northern and central France under his rule.

After Clovis' death in 511, his realm underwent repeated division while his Merovingian Dynasty eventually lost effective power to their successive mayors of the palace, the founders of what was to become the Carolingian Dynasty.

The assumption of the crown in 751 by Pepin the Short , established Carolingian rule.

The new ruler's power reached its fullest extent under Pepin's son, Charlemagne, who, in 771, reunited the Frankish domains.

In recognition of his successes and his political support for the Papacy, Charlemagne was, in 800, crowned Emperor of the Romans, or Roman Emperor in the West, by Pope Leo III: on the death of his son Louis I (emperor 814-840), however, the empire was divided among Louis's three sons (Treaty of Verdun, 843).

After a last brief reunification (884-887), the imperial title ceased to be held in the western part which was to form the basis of the future French kingdom.

France in the Middle Ages

During the latter years of the elderly Charlemagne's rule, the Vikings made advances along the northern and western perimeters of his kingdom.

After Charlemagne's death in 814, his heirs were incapable of maintaining any kind of political unity and the once great empire began to crumble. Viking advances were allowed to escalate, their dreaded longboats sailing up the Loire and the Seine Rivers and other inland waterways, wreaking havoc and spreading terror.

In 843, the Viking invaders murdered the Bishop of Nantes and a few years later they burned the Church of Saint Martin at Tours. Emboldened by their successes, the Vikings ransacked Paris in 845.

Charles the Simple (898-922), whose territory comprised much of the France of today, was forced during his reign to concede to the Vikings a large area on either side of the Seine River, downstream from Paris, that was to become Normandy.

The Carolingians were subsequently to share the fate of their predecessors: after an intermittent power struggle between the two families, the accession (987) of Hugh Capet, duke of France and count of Paris, established on the throne the Capetian Dynasty which, with its Valois and Bourbon offshoots, was to rule France for more than 800 years.

The Carolingian era had seen the gradual emergence of institutions which were to condition the development of France for centuries to come: the acknowledgement by the crown of the administrative authority of the realm's nobles within their territories in return for their (sometimes tenuous) loyalty and military support, a phenomenon readily visible in the rise of the Capetians and foreshadowed to some extent by the Carolingians' own rise to power.

The new order left the new dynasty in immediate control of little beyond the middle Seine and adjacent territories, while powerful territorial lords, such as the 10th and 11th century counts of Blois, accumulated large domains of their own through marriage and through private arrangements with lesser nobles for protection and support.

The area around the lower Seine, ceded to Scandinavian invaders as the duchy of Normandy in 911, became a source of particular concern when Duke William took possession of the kingdom of England in 1066, making himself and his heirs the king's equal outside France.

Worse was to follow, with the succession, in 1154, to the disputed English throne of Henry II (already the Count of Anjou and the Duke of Normandy) before his marriage in 1152 to France's newly divorced ex-queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, brought him control of much of south-west France.

A century of intermittent warfare brought Normandy, once more under French control, in 1204, and English control of French territory ended with the French victory at Bouvines in 1214.

The 13th century was to bring the crown important gains also in the south, where a papal-royal crusade against the region's Albigensian or Cathar heretics (1209) led to the incorporation into the royal domain of Lower (1229) and Upper (1271) Languedoc.

Philippe IV's seizure of Flanders (1300) was less successful, ending two years later in the rout of her knights by the forces of the Flemish cities at the Battle of the Golden Spurs in 1302 near Kortrijk (Courtrai in French).

Valois Dynasty

The extinction of the main Capetian line (1328) brought to the throne the related house of Valois, but, Philippe IV's grandson, Edward III of England, claimed the French crown for himself, inaugurating the succession of conflicts known collectively as the Hundred Years War.

The following century was to see devastating warfare, peasant revolts in both England (Wat Tyler's revolt of 1381) and France (the Jacquerie of 1358) and the growth of nationhood in both countries.

French losses in the first phase of the conflict (1337-1360) were partly reversed in the second (1369-1396); but, Henry V of England's shattering victory at the battle of Agincourt in 1415 against a France now bitterly divided between rival Armagnac and Burgundian factions of the royal house was to lead to his son Henry VI's recognition as king in Paris seven years later under the 1420 Treaty of Troyes, reducing Valois rule to the lands south of the Loire River.

France's humiliation was abruptly reversed in 1429 by the appearance of a restorationist movement symbolised by the Lorraine peasant maid Joan of Arc, who claimed the guidance of divine voices for the campaign which rapidly ended the English siege of Orl�ans and ended in Charles VII's coronation in the historic city of Reims.

Subsequently captured by the Burgundians and sold to their English allies, her execution for heresy in 1431 redoubled her value as the embodiment of France's cause.

Reconciliation between the king and Philippe of Burgundy (1435) removed the greatest obstacle to French recovery, leading to the recapture of Paris (1436), Normandy (1450) and Guienne (1453), reducing England's foothold to a small area around Calais (lost also in 1558).

After the war, France's emergence as a powerful national monarchy was crowned by the incorporation of the duchy of Burgundy (1477) and Brittany (1491).

The losses of the century of war were enormous, particularly owing to the plague (the Black Death, usually considered an outbreak of bubonic plague) which arrived from Italy in 1348, spreading rapidly up the Rhone valley and across most of the country.

It is estimated that the population of some 18-20 million in France, at the time of the 1328 hearth-tax returns, had been reduced 150 years later by 40% or more.

Despite the beginnings of rapid demographic and economic recovery, the gains of the previous half-century were to be jeopardised by a further protracted series of conflicts, this time in Italy (1494-1559), where French efforts to gain dominance ended in the increased power of the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors of Germany.

Barely were the Italian Wars over than France was plunged into a domestic crisis with far-reaching consequences.

Despite the conclusion of a Concordat between France and the Papacy (1516) granting the crown unrivalled power in senior ecclesiastical appointments, France was deeply affected by the Protestant Reformation's attempt to break the unity of Roman Catholic Europe.

From the Renaissance to the Revolution

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