Hi Everyone, today I will tell you the whole History of France But first, let’s clarify things What I will tell you is actually the History and pre-History of the territory where France is currently located Because, wait for it… this territory has not always been called France and a lot of different people, tribes and cultures have lived there before that So please get at ease, subscribe and clic on the bell because, in order to understand everything I’ll take you back to the origins of humanity in Eastern Africa, 2.5 millions years ago Let’s go! 2.5 millions years ago the Homo genus, aka humans appeared in Eastern Africa Several human species evolve and about 500,000 years later some groups of these men and women migrate toward Northern Africa, Asia and then Europe Each of them adapt to their environment and evolve into new species Which also migrate and evolve That’s how 100 000 years ago, the region of Europe hosts the human species of Neanderthal whose body is rather chunky and mussled and adapted to the cold weather of ice ages While Africa hosts the human species of Sapiens who simply is… us Sapiens also starts to migrate out of Africa spreads in Eurasia and for yet unkown reasons and supplants other human species such as Neanderthal who partly mixes up with Sapiens before disappearing around 35 000 years ago. Thanks to its cognitive abilities Sapiens creates beliefs (probably animism), myths and art And approximately 10 000 years ago, the last ice age ends toward a warmer weather and people living in particularly good living area in the Middle East progressively give up their nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life and start to cultivate earth and to settle down in fixed places Agriculture enables them to produce more and thus, to feed more people which leads to a demographic explosion along with the creation of the first village and this new way of life spreads across the West and particularly towards Europe. Human societies become more and more complex growing from tribes to civilizations such as the Sumerians who are among the first people to invent Writing and then to spread the use of bronze to the West and in the West, other peoples develop such as the etruscans, iberians, proto-basques also called Aquitains and ligurians. And in 600 BC, Greeks from the rich city-state of Phocea sail across the Mediterranean Sea and found on Ligurian territory the colony of Massalia, future Marseille which establishes its own new colonies such as Nice, Antibes etc. Meanwhile, further North, peoples manage to master iron and take advantage of it to improve their tools and weapons which enable them to spread their territory. These peoples are called the Celts. Some trade developed but of course, the collision of all these peoples also led to conflicts Firstly, among the many Celtic tribes but also between the Ligurians and the Massaliots, and between other southern people such as the Etruscans and the Republic of Rome which was looted by the Sennon Celtic tribe in around 390 BC But Rome got over it, conquered many territories, and became the biggest regional power after its victory against Carthage and Greece But when its ally Massalia was threatened again by Ligurians and Salyan celts Rome helped push them back and took advantage of the situation to conquer, with the support of Aedui celts, the South of what they called the Transalpine Gaul But in 58 BC, the new Governor of the Transalpine Gaul was Julius Ceasar And when his allies, the Aedui Celts asked for his help to push back the Helvetii tribe out of their land he seized this opportunity to conquer the whole of Gaul of course with the help of allied Celtic tribes Tribes from the North and the isle Britain resisted but all the other tribes were conquered within 6 years The last Celtic alliance led by the Arverni Vercingetorix was defeated in Alesia in 52 BC and Gaul became a Roman protectorate After his victory, Ceasar took the power in Rome but was killed in 44 BC After a few years, his adoptive son Octavius took command and established the Roman empire He divided the territory conquered by Ceasar into 3 provinces Aquitania, Lugdunensis and Belgica And Lugdunum, future Lyon, became the capital of the 3 Gauls while Narbonne was already appointed capital of Gallia Narbonensis. There was some revolting done but on the whole, the Celts from the cities as well as the Ligurians, the Iberians and the Aquitans progressively melted into the Roman culture Aqueducts, amphitheatres and thermal baths were built The elite adopted the Latin writing The Celtic gods were mixed with the Roman gods and the Imperial cult In a nutshell, they became Gallo-Romans Meanwhile, in Judaea, some man called Jesus started a new religious movement which stood out from Judaism and later took the name of Christianity The promise of eternal life after death and less strict rituals than Judaism enabled this movement to spread into Greco-Roman cities and reach Gaul 200 years later Since the Christians were believing in one only god and were rejecting the Greco-Roman gods and the Imperial cult they were persecuted by the Romans But the movement went on spreading to such an extent that in 312 After Christ, the Roman emperor Constantin legalized Christianism and then converted to it Cristianism spread across the elite and, around the end of the century, it became the Roman Empire’s official religion But as it gained more members more clashes regarding this or that interpretation of its Holy Books arose That’s how the Arianism movement came to be It’s named after the theologian Arius who considered that Jesus was not born divine but that he acquired his divinity after being resurrected. This movement spread so much that bishops had to gather in a council to debate the issue: this is the Council of Nicea They ended up declaring Arianism heretic. It means they condemn this movement But it did not prevent this movement from spreading among the Roman elite and among Germanic tribes So, who are these Germanic tribes? You need to know that, for roughly a century, these tribes coming from Scandinavian territories had been alternating between collaboration and conflict with the Roman Empire Some of these tribes had already been Romanized by integrating the Roman army in exchange for land they were the Roman empire federated tribes such as the Salian Franks, the Alemanni, the Burgundians, the Goths And this romanization which enabled Arianism to spread into some of these tribes mixing into their close-to Nordic mythology In 370 AD, the Huns arrived in Europe from Central Asia and pushed the Germanic peoples beyond the Roman Empire borders First, the Goths, then in 406, some Western tribes which then alternated between conquests and alliances with the Romans in exchange for land to settle This led to the creation of federated Germanic kingdoms inside the Roman empire such as the Franks, the Visigoths and the Burgundians kingdoms In the meantime, Roman soldiers had left Britannia and Armorica to fight some of these Germanic tribes in Gaul leaving the door open for the Picts, the Scotts, the Angles and the Saxons to push the Britons down to Armorica This area progressively became independent and gradually took the name of its new inhabitants: Britain And when the Huns, led by Attila, attacked Gaul all these tribes formed an alliance to push them back at the battle of the Catalaunian Fields The alliance won, the Huns fled East and the Germanic peoples settled down on Roman territory for good While in the kingdom of Burgundy the relations between the Arian Burgundians and the Nicene christians Gallo-Romans were good the Visigothic kingdom imposed Arianism during the reign of King Euric But further North, king Clovis, Hlodovic in German unified the Frankish kingdom conquiered what was left of the Roman empire and converted into Nicene christianity In doing so, he earned the support of the Eastern Roman Empire because he became one of the only Nicene christian leaders of the West and he also earned the support of Nicene christian Gallo-Romans who were settled on Visigothic, Burgundian and Alamanni territories And these supports enabled the Frankish kingdom to conquer its rival Germanic territories marking the beginning of the Merovingian dynasty But the Frankish kingdom struggled to maintain unity Indeed, when a Merovingian king died all his sons split up the Frankish territory which led to the independence of Aquitaine and ended up dividing what was left in 3 territories Neustria, Austrasia, and Burgundy each of them managed by what was called a Mayor of the Palace These guys gained more and more power until 687 when Austrasia’s Mayor of the Palace, Pepin of Herstal defeated the king troops And although he let the king remain on the throne he was in reality the one in charge. His son Charles, later called Charles Martel, succeeded him in 720 But before talking about Charles Martel let’s see what was then happening in the Middle East. At the beginning of the 7th century, the prophet Muhammad managed to unify the different Arab peoples around Islam and when he died in 632 Muslim Arab peoples started a holy war in order to spread Islam around the world The new Umayyad dynasty spread to the West taking the Moor Berbers on board with them and arrived at the door of Frankish territories in 719 where they became known as Saracens The Duke of Aquitaine drove them away in 721 in Toulouse but lost Nîmes, Carcassonne and then some other territories so he ended up asking help from Charles who, after battling for 7 years, including near Poitiers and in Avignon managed to drive them out On the way, he brought Burgundy and Provence to heel as some chiefs there had formed alliances with the Umayyads. Later on, the battles of Charles Martel would be magnified by the Church in order to legitimize his lineage. Because His son, Pepin the Short was crowned king of the Franks by the Pope in 751 thereby starting the Carolingian dynasty He also conquered Septimania and Aquitaine. His successor, Charles the Great later called Charlemagne conquered Lombardy and several Germanic territories that he christianized by force which earned him to be crowned Emperor by the Pope in 800 King Louis the Pious succeeded him, but when he died in 842 his 3 sons started a war with one another , which divided the Empire in 3 West Francia, Middle Francia and East Francia also called Germany 3 reasons led to the fall of the Carolingian empire: Firstly, the war between the three kings left them weakened. Secondly, at the same moment, 3 foreign peoples invaded simultaneously the territory the Vikings coming from the North, the Magyars from the East and the Saracens from the South Thirdly, the kings progressively saw their power being taken away by lords from the numerous principalities this is called the feudal system And autonomous duchies and counties started building castles made from wood at first and then from stone to defend themselves against invasions In 911, the Carolingians lost East Francia for good and in the same year, the king of West Francia gave territories to the Viking chief Rollon in exchange for his help to fight other Viking tribes Sidenote, Rollon’s descendants later created the powerful Duchy of Normandy Normandy meaning “North men’s land” that is Vikings And one of them, William the Conqueror, became king of England in 1066 But let’s go back to the 10th century. The king of West Francia’s influence was now limited to a narrow stretch land and his role was more symbolic than anything else Bishops and great lords from the different duchies and counties were the ones holding the power and they were electing kings regardless of whether they descended from a Carolingian bloodline or not In 987, Hugues Capet, from the Robertian family line was elected king he was a good fit for the lords because he came from a powerful family which had recently been weakened, making him more easy to control Moreover, he had strong support from the Church. And although this Robertian family would only keep a narrow territory during the next two centuries they would still manage to keep the Royal title in their line This was the beginning of the Capetian dynasty During the Capetian period, divergences of interpretation in the Gospels kept arising, particularly regarding the Filioque which, in 1054, led to the division of Christianity between the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church But this did not stop the Christians to maintain the tradition of going on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem with the permission of the Islamic Arabic caliphates ruling the region But in 1071, the Turkish Seljuq empire empire invaded the Eastern Roman empire as well as the Holy land preventing Christians from going on pilgrimage to Christ’s sepulcher In 1095, the Eastern Roman empire and the Pope called the Western countries to the rescue and… ordinary people like farmers, responded to the call and left for a Holy war killing Jews and plundering cities on their way This was the First Crusade But when they arrived on Seljuq territories they got totally crushed because... they simply were not soldiers So, it was now the turn of the great lords armies’ to embark on this Holy War and after a great deal of plundering and a little bit of cannibalism they managed to take over Jerusalem by taking advantage of the rivalry between the different Seljuq city states And while they were there, some lords decided to keep these territories for themselves that they name the Crusader States forgetting to give them back to their ally, the Easter Roman empire The Order of the Knights Templar was then created in 1129 to protect the pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem And the Knight Templars certainly had a lot of work because … Over the 2 following centuries there would be no less than 7 crusades each of them ending up a big failure crusaders often came back empty-handed and sometimes they attack their Orthodox allies rather than the Muslims In 1151, after the 2nd crusade Queen Alienor of Aquitaine dumped her husband the king of France Louis VII and remarried with Henry Plantagenet who was duke of Normandy and count of Anjou Their combined territories made a big chunk of land and when Plantagenet inherited the throne of England in 1154 all of these territories became English Being squeezed between England and the autonomous counties and duchies did not please the new king Philippe Auguste So he decided to conquer these territories extending the royal estate of Francia For the first time in 300 years the king became the largest land-owner in the kingdom… But Philippe Auguste was not the only one wanting to extend his influence So did the Pope. He was already a major influence in Western countries but not in the county of Toulouse, which was very independent and where a minority of the elite belonged to several divergent Christian movements, wrongly amalgamated under the name of Cathars In 1209, the Pope called for a new crusade to exterminate them which ended up in 1229 with the creation of a tribunal specialized in the judgment of heretics the Inquisition The new king Louis IX took advantage of this crusade to put the county of Toulouse under royal control. All along the 13th century the royal estate of Francia expanded its territory centralized the power in Paris and progressively spread the royal currency and the Francien language among the elite But one duchy stayed under English rule: Guyenne In order to seal a peace treaty between the 2 countries the king of France, Philippe the Fair, gave his daughter in marriage to the king of England, Edward II These two had a son called Edward III who later became King of England Then, Philippe the Fair’s third son, called Charles IV, became king of France but when he died in 1328, he had no heir… except Edward III However, giving him the power meant submitting France to England and this… was a big no no for the French royal family Thus, the throne was handed to Charles IV’s cousin, named Philippe VI In the beginning, Edward III accepted it but when Philippe VI took over Guyenne he decided to claim the throne of France as pay back which set off the Hundred Years’ War in 1337 For almost 30 years, the French army got its ass kicked by the English who had a great fleet and extremely efficient longbows. But the soldiers were not the only ones to die In 1348, the Black Plague killed 1/3 of the European population In 5 years, 25 million people died Plus the deaths due to war-caused starvation As well as peasant revolts against nobles, plunderer soldiers and royal taxes All of it created a climate of terror. There was a small respite during the reign of Charles V but his heir and son Charles VI became mad and unfit to rule Thus, two camps fought for the crown The Duke of Orleans, brother of Charles VI supported by the Armagnac family And the Duke of Burgundy, cousin and advisor to Charles VI After many battles, assassinations and acts of violence from both camps giving England way to invade the North of France Charles VII, the heir to the throne, son to Charles VI allied with the Armagnacs against the Burgundians In response, the Burgundians allied with the English and made Charles VI the Mad sign a treaty which disinherited his own son to the benefit of the king of England. The English attacked the Armagnacs in the city of Orleans in 1428 while, in the meantime, a woman called Joan of Arc was claiming that God had directed her to free France and put Charles VII on the throne She convinced him to send her to Orleans where she galvanized the French soldiers who finally managed to defeat the English The way was now open towards the city of Reims where Charles VII can be crowned King then Joan of Arc rode towards Paris but was captured by the Burgundians and sent to the English She was burnt alive in Rouen in 1431 For his part, Charles VII signed a peace treaty with the Burgundians granting them independence This put an end to the civil war and allowed him to drive the English out of France in 1453 and to take back Guyenne This was the end of the Hundred Years’ War, which actually lasted 116 years Then, France expanded more and more by annexing the adjacent counties and duchies In Brittany, Louis IX married Anne of Brittany in order to progressively integrate the duchy into France Then, kings Charles VIII, Louis XII and Francis the 1st started a war with Spain for the domination of Burgundy and the Italian states leading to many battles, including the battle of Marignan But after the unplanned discovery of the American continent in 1492 and the conquest of the Amerindians territories , the Spanish Habsburg dynasty collected a vast amount of wealth and power And when the Habsburg Charles the Fifth acceded to the throne he inherited a huge empire, through former alliances and marriages in his family To compete with him Francis the 1st allied with the powerful Ottoman empire of the sultan Süleyman the Magnificent who also wanted to expand in Europe He also sent Jacques Cartier colonize North America hoping to find as much wealth there as his Spanish competitor did But he didn’t find gold and winters there were very harsh so France lost interest in this region until the increasing profitability of the fur trade with Natives brang back interest in these lands from 1597 Marking the resumption of the colonization of New France In France, Francis the 1st strengthened the royal power against other lords and imported in France the principles of the Italian renaissance A litterary Renaissance, as the French language spread throughout the country and an artistic Renaissance as medieval castles underwent a wave of renovations in the Italian style first, and then in a style specific to France. But in the meantime, in the Holy Roman Empire of German Nations a priest known by the name Martin Luther was denouncing the quirks of the Catholic Church particularly the indulgence system which consisted in reducing the time spent in purgatory after death in exchange of giving money to the Church Many German princes rallied his cause They would later called the Protestants This movement divided into several branches and spread to France where the Protestants were known as Huguenots which led to the division of France between Huguenots and Catholics They slaughtered each other all along the 16th Century The most famous massacre is the Saint Barthelemy massacre of 1572 These massacres resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths on both sides They are called the French Wars of Religion But in 1588, the legitimate heir of the throne, Henry of Navarre future Henry IV of France But was himself a Huguenot He ended up converting to Catholicism In order to secure the support of the Catholic community which led him to the throne But he still promulgated the Edict of Nantes in 1598 which granted freedom of religion and equal rights to the Huguenots In 1610, Henry IV of France was assassinated and when his successor Louis XIII was old enough to reign he placed his trust in one advisor alone the prime minister cardinal Richelieu who very much wanted to strengthen the royal authority He forbade Huguenot strongholds which threatened to become a counter-power in France He strongly raised the taxes to finance a war against the Habsburgs leading to uprisings within the population And he reduced the nobles’ privileges which made him lose their support This policy went on under the regency of Anne of Austria and her prime minister Mazarin which led the noble parliamentarians and princes to rise up and attempt a coup to take over the throne These events are called The Fronde But Mazarin violently repressed the coup formed an alliance with England and won the war against Spain in 1659 At that moment, Louis XIV was old enough to assume power He decided to reign without a prime minister and to develop absolute monarchy at its highest level First, he claimed to be the representative of God on Earth he was now in charge of electing bishops and he revoked the Edict of Nantes which led to a massive exodus of the protestant population Secondly, he made the aristocracy and provincial governors live in court, in his new Versailles palace in order to better control them Finally, he unified the army under his command as it was previously controlled by several nobles and he enlarged it a lot This enabled him to fight all along his reign against other European powers for the domination of Europe, and the world Scientific progress and the rise of the stock market enabled private business companies from England, the United Provinces and France to settle in many different countries in order to trade and if possible, conquer them During the 17th century France set up trade posts in the Indian Ocean, in Africa and conquered the West indies, fighting what was left of the local Karib peoples and then implemented under Louis XIV the triangular trade through the slave trade In a nutshell, they shipped European products to Africa and traded them for slaves with the Africans These slaves were sent as workforce in the West indies plantations where they were traded for colonial production which was then shipped back to Europe and sold there These first colonies gave a worldwide dimension to European conflicts which now involved their colonies in war negotiations First, New France A territory Louis XIV had to partly give away to England after the Spanish succession war Louis XV then had to give them the rest of it after the Seven Years’ War along with control over the East of India which established England as the world’s greatest power And finally, from 1775, the United States of America that France helped during their independence war against England which increased the French debt a lot In the meantime, a new philosophical and intellectual movement appeared in England and in the United Provinces and spread through France during the reign of Louis XV the Enlightenment This was a revolution in the way people thought carried by Marivaux, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot or Montesquieu For the first time, an intellectual power rose outside of monarchist and religious institutions People talked about human rights, challenged the authority of the Church and questioned absolutism The Enlightenment pushed the nobility and bourgeoisie to demand more involvement in power as in parallel, tensions grew within the rest of the population because of bad harvests As for Louis XVI, he worried more about the debt that France had racked up His plan to reduce it was to tax the nobles for the first time which of course made them turn on him. To solve this crisis, Louis XVI call in 1789 for a large consultation with deputies from the clergy, the nobility and the Third Estate composed of the bourgeoisie and the common people this assembly was called the Estates General But the Third Estate felt under-represented in these Estates General as it carried the voices of 96% of the population So, they seized their chance On June 20th 1789, they gathered in the Salle du jeu de Paume to write the Constitution, and they created the National Assembly the legislative was now distinct from the executive On July 14th, the Bastille prison was taken by the people This was the French revolution Revolutionaries put an end to noble privileges proclaimed all men are born free and equal in rights implemented a constitutional monarchy in 1791 and abolished slavery in 1794 after the Santo Domingo (future Haiti) rebellion But meanwhile, their policy became more and more intolerant against opponents to the revolution who were jailed or deported and against the Catholic clergy which led to strong tensions all around France Nobles fled to other kingdoms and asked them to intervene Thus, two camps appeared among the revolutionaries: The moderates (Girondists) represented by Lafayette and Barnave who wanted to put an end to the revolution and strengthen the French constitutional monarchy by declaring war to foreign monarchies And the radicals (Montagnards), represented by Danton and Robespierre who wanted to go on with the revolution until the republic was proclaimed and keep eliminating counter-revolutionaries inside the country Both camps ended up agreeing to go to war against Austria and Prussia and then proclaimed the Republic on September 21st 1792 They guillotined Louis XVI in 1793 which created a coalition of foreign monarchies against France 300,000 additional French people had to go to war This was the last straw for many French regions that had already been violently affected by the anti-religious measures,so they rose against the revolutionary government And in the North-West the rebellion evolved into an ultra-violent civil war in Vendée between revolted and revolutionaries which killed around 150,000 people Meanwhile, Robespierre, supported by the Parisian sans-culotte revolutionaries ordered the arrest of moderate members of parliament, took over power and put under the guillotine everyone suspected to be a counter-revolutionary including Danton, his former ally everyone was a suspect, it was Terror everywhere in France Robespierre was overthrown in 1794 and centrist revolutionaries called the Thermidorian republicans took power and put an end to the Terror In order to rule, they created an executive council known as the Directory composed of 5 people In the meantime, the revolutionary army was winning a lot of battles and established some Republics in the conquered territories And a general known as Bonaparte stood out in Italy and Egypt and grew in popularity He took advantage of the directory‘s political instability to come back to France, instigated a coup in 1799 and became Consul for life Napoleon straightened the country created the Bank of France, the civil code brought back the Estate and the Catholic Church together and restored slavery in the colonies Then, in 1804, England demanded that France release Holland and Switzerland and Napoleon used this threat of a new war to make the French people plebiscite him as emperor England put an embargo on French ships The English fleet was too powerful for Napoleon to fight directly so he decided to economically suffocate England and to do so, he had to dominate the whole of Europe Within 8 years, he managed to conquer a great part of Europe all the way to the gates of Russia defeating every coalition in their attempts to stop him But when the Napoleonian army arrived in Moscow the Muscovites fled their city and burnt it With no shelter nor food, the Napoleon troops froze to death After that distaster Napoleon was defeated many times and finally, France was invaded by the coalition Napoleon was exiled but came back in power for 100 days in 1815 but was badly defeated in Waterloo by the English He was exiled, for good this time, on the island of Saint-Helen The coalition set up a new constitutional monarchy in France France with Louis XVIII, Louis XVI’s brother this was the Bourbon Restoration Then, his ultra-royalist brother Charles X succeeded after him He censored the printing press, favored the rich and gave political power to the Church which led to three days of revolution in July 1830 This revolution put Louis Philippe I on the throne He repeated the same kind of mistakes and was overthrown by a 3rd revolution in 1848 This time, the Republicans managed to proclaim the 2nd republic and while everybody was waiting for the presidential election the provisional government implemented The freedom of the press and the freedom of assembly The abolition of slavery The restriction of working time to 10 hours a day And finally, the universal manhood suffrage which enabled the election for a 4 years term of the 1st President of the Republic : Louis Napoleon Bonaparte none other than the nephew of Napoleon I, who was supported by common people But 3 years later, after a coup accepted in a plebiscite by citizens he proclaimed himself Emperor as Napoleon III and implemented an authoritarian policy which repressed uprisings, restrained freedoms and as such, created a stable political and economic context which enabled the relaunch of colonization already started by Louis XVIII and Charles X particularly with the violent conquest of Algiers in 1830 It intensified during the Empire with the conquest of territories in Africa, the Middle-East, Asia, and in the Pacific Ocean - And secondly, this stability enabled an ambitious program to rebuild Paris entirely along with the Baron Haussmann and to reduce the industrial gap with England by building the railway system funded by new investment banks With the industrialization, two new social classes appeared the business and industrial bourgeoisie and the working class beset by misery for whom Napoleon III unpenalized strikes in 1864 This political regime was deeply established in the countryside but questioned by the middle class and a new revolution was about to unfold To avoid it, Napoleon III accepted to give more power to the parliament And in 1870, he takes advantage of a Prussian provocation and of the time's patriotic mood to declare war to Prussia and its North German Confederation This way, he was looking to assert his power in a war he believed easy to win But before long, France was suffering numerous defeats Napoleon III was taken prisoner and the Prussian and German coalition was headed to Paris On the one side, the Parisian working class and the far-left wing wanted to take advantage of Napoleon III being imprisoned to proclaim the Republic and to fight this war to push back the coalition On the other side, the Republican deputies were hesitant yes, they wanted the Republic but through official elections in order to assert their legitimacy in the entire country and not only in Paris And if they wanted to run elections, they needed the peace But under popular pressure the Republican deputies proclaimed the Republic and the state of war on September 4th 1870 Thus, the Prussian and German coalition besieged Paris The civil Parisians as well as the National Guard defended the city while some Republicans deputies tried to negotiate peace in secret and turned against them the Parisians A peace agreement was finally signed on January 28th 1871 followed by the election of a royalist national assembly and a national vote from which Thiers was elected Chief of the Republic But the Parisians did not agree with this, and in March 1871 when Thiers tried to seize their canons the Parisians and the National Guard rose up and created the revolutionary government of the Paris Commune a movement which spread to Lyon, Marseille and Toulouse The Parisian communards fought a war against the French Republic government, which took refuge in Versailles A very large number of them were executed on Thiers’ orders This massacre put an end to the Paris Commune and left a deep scar on the French working movement Meanwhile, Prussia imposed very hard conditions for peace France had to pay a compensation of 5 billions French francs And lost the regions of Alsace and Moselle Following this defeat, the founders of the 3rd Republic’s values became deeply rooted in a strong patriotism and an intense belief in the Republic and in progress And they spread these values through their reforms Spreading of the Republican values such as The Marseillaise as the national anthem, Marianne, Bastille Day as a national bank holiday Development of freedom Education became free, secular and mandatory But not all of it was good As for History Schoolchildren were taught a unified version of the history of France presenting the Gauls as the French common ancestors France’s regional history to the benefit of the history of the royal domain and presenting the Republic as the ultimate achievement of progress And finally, the 3rd Republic went on with colonization presented as a duty to bring civilization as well as Christianism to colonized people In 1881, the 3rd Republic implemented the “Native code”. It declared colonized people as subjects of France and denied them citizenship And England, France and other European countries shared Africa among one another designing artificial borders which divided African peoples while in Asia, France went on with the conquest of Indochina In France, the 2nd industrial revolution brought progress in electricity and the automobile And now that the Republic was stable new socialist movements appeared and some of them asked for a fairer tax which would adapt to the people’s income And while the left wing and the right wing split deeper and deeper the Dreyfus case starting in 1894 intensified this gap in an anti-Jewish hatred background Which left its mark on France for several generations And we arrive in the year 1914 You need to know that since the 1870 Franco-Prussian war European countries had been forming alliances with other countries in order to get stronger And when a Serbian man from Bosnia killed the heir of the Austro-Hungarian Empire Franz Ferdinand All this system of alliance activated which led to World War 1 Well, why was this war worldwide? First, because colonized countries were massively requisitioned And moreover, all along this war new countries integrated one alliance or the other In France, the war against Germany quickly became a trench warfare which killed more than 1.7 million people And when everything ended in 1918 the war and Bolshevik revolution in Russia caused the fall of 4 empires and reshaped the European map Regarding France, the country recovered Alsace and Lorraine and made Germany pay a steep price in war compensations which is humiliated Following the financial crisis of 1929 a dangerous rise of nationalism in Italy, Germany and France pushed the 3 French left-wing parties to merge forces and create the Popular Front which won the 1936 election and gave a lot of new rights to the working class Meanwhile in Germany, Hitler won the elections in 1932 and implemented a totalitarian regime based on The project to create a new man and a strong nation with the Aryan model An expansionist policy And of course scapegoats: the Jews and other minorities Germany invaded Austria in 1938 then Czechoslovakia in 1939 But England and France were not ready for war so they did not react But when Poland was invaded in 1939 they ended up declaring war to Germany It’s World War 2 France secured the Maginot Line but on May 10th 1940, the Germans swiftly attacked France and had it sign an armistice They divided France into two areas an occupied zone under German control and an unoccupied zone where French political leader Marshall Pétain settled down in Vichy from where he collaborated with Germany causing, among other things, the deportation of 76,000 Jews In the meantime, French General Charles de Gaulle fled to England from where he organized the French resistance both in the country with Jean Moulin and outside of France by progressively rallying French colonies with the help of England In 1944, a big part of Eastern Europe was freed by the U.S.S.R which then occupied these countries, according to the Yalta Agreements In France, the Normandy and Provence landings led to the Liberation of the entire country on May 8th, 1945 Japan was still at war but surrendered when the USA launched two nuclear bombs on the country The war toll was 18 million militaries dead and 45 million civilians partly caused by the extermination camps But the end of the war did not put an end to the massacres First in France, where the Liberation triggered an anti-collaboration wave causing the execution of 9,000 people But also for the Algerians for whom the armistice on May 8th was the opportunity to demonstrate against colonization and for their independence in return for their strong involvement in the liberation of France But France violently repressed these demonstrations killing thousands, maybe even tens of thousands This event was a sign that a big wave of decolonization was coming How come? Firstly, because in 1941 Roosevelt and Churchill promulgated the Atlantic Charter after the German invasions stating that every country has the right to choose the type of government they want to live in Add to this a weakened Europe the creation of the United Nations Organization which supported decolonization and the Cold War between the USA and the USSR which both supported different colonized countries And BOOM !, colonized countries started rebelling In 1946, Communists Vietmings fought for their independence and won the war against France in 1954 The same year, uprisings in Algeria led to a brutal war with France The country gained its independence in 1962 1962 and many Algerians who had been enrolled in the French army, the Harkis were compelled, to avoid being killed to take refuge in France, which neglected them The Algerian war even caused the fall of the 4th Republic and opened the door to negotiations with all the other colonized countries Some of them chose to remain French and others progressively got their independence although France still maintains a strong monetary, financial and economical control in these regions But let’s go back to post-war France In 1944, Women obtained the right to vote for the first time The National Committee for Resistance nationalized the energy, insurance and banks and created the Social Security system French people made a lot of babies And in the Cold War context, France signed a military treaty with the USA integrating NATO and receiving in exchange, like many other European countries financial assistance from the US: the Marshall plan Charles de Gaulle returned to power in 1958 set up the 5th Republic and took his distance with the USA He resigned from presidency after the referendum following the student demonstrations of May 68 European countries gathered into a European Economic Community which became the European Union in 1992 Trade between countries increased leading to trade globalization which spread into many sectors such as culture, science or information thanks to the Internet And the impact of globalization and the increase of worldwide consumption caused numerous drifts which started to throw the Earth ecosystem off-balance What solutions will humanity find concerning this worldwide ecological issue? History will tell That’s it for the History of France, I hope you liked it If yes, please subscribe and like this video You can also share it with your friends who want to travel to France, your French teacher, well anybody who would be interested in it And if you have some thoughts, the commentary box is made for you Of course, each second of this video has already been detailed in a whole book so if you are a noob in French History, I can only advise to make some more research in order to nuance what I said and get into more details I made several videos which can be useful in this matter If you want to support me you can click the “Join” button to financially support the channel And you can also support me on Tipeee and Utip the links are in the description box I wish you all the best, and see you soon!