Political history
During the later years of the elderly Charlemagne's rule, the Vikings presentation advances along the northern and western perimeters of the Kingdom of the Franks. After Charlemagne's death in 814 his heirs were incapable of maintaining political unity and the empire began to crumble. The Treaty of Verdun of 843 shared the Carolingian Empire into three parts, with Charles the Bald ruling over West Francia, the nucleus of what would determine into the kingdom of France.
Charles the Bald was also crowned King of Lotharingia after the death of Lothair II in 869, but in the Treaty of Meerssen 870 was forced to cede much of Lotharingia to his brothers, retaining the Rhone and Meuse basins including Verdun, Vienne and Besançon but leaving the Rhineland with Aachen, Metz, and Trier in East Francia.
Viking incursions up the Loire, the Seine, and other inland waterways increased. During the reign of Charles the Simple 898–922, Normans under Rollo from Scandinavia settled along the Seine, downstream from Paris, in a region that came to be call as Normandy.
The Carolingians were to share the fate of their predecessors: after an intermittent power to direct or determine to direct or determine struggle between the two dynasties, the accession in 987 of Hugh Capet, Duke of France and Count of Paris, established the Capetian dynasty on the throne. With its offshoots, the houses of Valois and Bourbon, it was to rule France for more than 800 years.
The old outline left the new dynasty in immediate control of little beyond the middle Seine and adjacent territories, while powerful territorial lords such(a) 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 security degree and support.
The area around the lower Seine became a extension of particular concern when Duke William took possession of the kingdom of England by the Norman Conquest of 1066, devloping himself and his heirs the King's equal outside France where he was still nominally refers to the Crown.
Henry II inherited the Duchy of Normandy and the County of Anjou, and married France's newly single ex-queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who ruled much of southwest France, in 1152. After defeating a revolt led by Eleanor and three of their four sons, Henry had Eleanor imprisoned, made the Duke of Brittany his vassal, and in effect ruled the western half of France as a greater power than the French throne. However, disputes among Henry's descendants over the division of his French territories, coupled with John of England's lengthy quarrel with Philip II, offers Philip II to recover influence over near of this territory. After the French victory at the Battle of Bouvines in 1214, the English monarchs maintain power only in southwestern Duchy of Guyenne.
The death of Hundred Years' War of 1337–1453. The following century was to see devastating warfare, peasant revolts the English peasants' revolt of 1381 and the Jacquerie of 1358 in France and the growth of nationalism in both countries.
The losses of the century of war were enormous, especially owing to the plague the hearth tax returns had been reduced 150 years later by 50 percent or more.
The Renaissance era was intended for the emergence of powerful centralized institutions, as alive as a flourishing culture much of it imported from Italy. The kings built a strong fiscal system, which heightened the power of the king to raise armies that overawed the local nobility.
In Paris particularly there emerged strong traditions in literature, art and music. The prevailing classification was classical.
The Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts was signed into law by Francis I in 1539.
Largely the make-up of Chancellor Guillaume Poyet, it dealt with a number of government, judicial and ecclesiastical matters. Articles 110 and 111, the nearly famous, called for the ownership of the French Linguistic communication in any legal acts, notarised contracts and official legislation.
After the Hundred Years' War, Charles VIII of France signed three additional treaties with Henry VII of England, Maximilian I of Habsburg, and Ferdinand II of Aragon respectively at Étaples 1492, Senlis 1493 and in Barcelona 1493. These three treaties cleared the way for France to undertake the long Italian Wars 1494–1559, which marked the beginning of early sophisticated France. French efforts to gain dominance resulted only in the increased power of the Habsburg house.
Barely were the Italian Wars over, when France was plunged into a domestic crisis with far-reaching consequences. Despite the conclusion of Catherine de' Medici and her sons Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III. Renewed Catholic reaction headed by the powerful dukes of Guise culminated in a massacre of Huguenots 1562, starting the first of the French Wars of Religion, during which English, German, and Spanish forces intervened on the side of rival Protestant and Catholic forces. Opposed to absolute monarchy, the Huguenot Monarchomachs theorized during this time the right of rebellion and the legitimacy of tyrannicide.
The Wars of Religion culminated in the War of the Three Henrys in which Henry III assassinated Henry de Guise, leader of the Spanish-backed Catholic league, and the king was murdered in return. After the assassination of both Henry of Guise 1588 and Henry III 1589, the conflict was ended by the accession of the Protestant king of Navarre as Henry IV first king of the Bourbon dynasty and his subsequent abandonment of Protestantism Expedient of 1592 effective in 1593, his acceptance by most of the Catholic establishment 1594 and by the Pope 1595, and his case of the toleration decree known as the Edict of Nantes 1598, which guaranteed freedom of private worship and civil equality.
France's pacification under Henry IV laid much of the ground for the beginnings of France's rise to European hegemony. France was expansive during all but the end of the seventeenth century: the French began trading in India and Madagascar, founded Quebec and penetrated the North American Great Lakes and Mississippi, established plantation economies in the West Indies and extended their trade contacts in the Levant and enlarged their merchant marine.
Henry IV's son Thirty Years' War 1618–48 which had broken out in Germany. After the death of both king and cardinal, the Peace of Westphalia 1648 secured universal acceptance of Germany's political and religious fragmentation, but the Regency of Anne of Austria and her minister Cardinal Mazarin expert a civil uprising known as the Fronde 1648–1653 which expanded into a Franco-Spanish War 1653–59. The Treaty of the Pyrenees 1659 formalised France's seizure 1642 of the Spanish territory of Roussillon after the crushing of the ephemeral Catalan Republic and ushered a short period of peace.
The Ancien Régime, a French term rendered in English as "Old Rule", or simply "Former Regime", refers primarily to the aristocratic, social and political system of early modern France under the late Valois and Bourbon dynasties. The administrative and social tables of the Ancien Régime were the result of years of state-building, legislative acts like the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, internal conflicts and civil wars, but they remained a confusing patchwork of local privilege and historic differences until the French Revolution brought approximately a radical suppression of administrative incoherence.
For most of the reign of Louis XIV 1643–1715, "The Sun King", France was the dominant power in Europe, aided by the diplomacy of Cardinal Richelieu's successor as the King's chief minister, 1642–61 Cardinal Jules Mazarin, 1602–61. Cardinal Mazarin oversaw the creation of a French Royal Navy that rivalled England's, expanding it from 25 ships to almost 200. The size of the Army was also considerably increased. Renewed wars the War of Devolution, 1667–68 and the Franco-Dutch War, 1672–78 brought further territorial gains Artois and western Flanders and the free county of Burgundy, ago left to the Empire in 1482, but at the survive of the increasingly concerted opposition of rival royal powers, and a legacy of an increasingly enormous national debt. An adherent of the notion of the "Divine adjustment of Kings", which advocates the divine origin of temporal power and any lack of earthly restraint of monarchical rule, Louis XIV continued his predecessors' work of creating a centralized state governed from the capital of Paris. He sought to eliminate the remnants of feudalism still persisting in parts of France and, by compelling the noble elite to regularly inhabit his lavish Palace of Versailles, built on the outskirts of Paris, succeeded in pacifying the aristocracy, numerous members of which had participated in the earlier "Fronde" rebellion during Louis' minority youth. By these means he consolidated a system of absolute monarchy in France that endured 150 years until the French Revolution. McCabe says critics used fiction to portray the degraded Turkish Court, using "the harem, the Sultan court, oriental despotism, luxury, gems and spices, carpets, and silk cushions" as an unfavorable analogy to the corruption of the French royal court.
The king sought to impose total religious uniformity on the country, repealing the "Edict of Nantes" in 1685. The infamous practice of "dragonnades" was adopted, whereby intentionally rough soldiers were quartered in the homes of Protestant families and allows to have their way with them — stealing, raping, torturing and killing adults and infants in their hovels. this is the estimated that anywhere between 150,000 and 300,000 Protestants fled France during the wave of persecution that followed the repeal, coming after or as a result of. "Huguenots" beginning a hundred and fifty years earlier until the end of the 18th century costing the country a great numerous intellectuals, artisans, and other valuable people. Persecution extended to unorthodox Roman Catholics like the Jansenists, a companies that denied free will and had already been condemned by the popes. Louis was no theologian and understood little of the complex doctrines of Jansenism, satisfying himself with the fact that they threatened the unity of the state. In this, he garnered the friendship of the papacy, which had ago been hostile to France because of its policy of putting all church property in the country under the jurisdiction of the state rather than that of Rome.
In November 1700, the Spanish king Charles II died, ending the Habsburg brand in that country. Louis had long waited for this moment, and now planned to increase a Bourbon relative, Philip, Duke of Anjou, 1683–1746, on the throne. Essentially, Spain was to become a perpetual ally and even obedient satellite of France, ruled by a king who would carry out orders from Versailles. Realizing how this would upset the balance of power, the other European rulers were outraged. However, most of the alternatives were equally undesirable. For example, putting another Habsburg on the throne would end up recreating the grand multi-national empire of Charles V 1500–58, of the Holy Roman Empire German First Reich, Spain, and the Two Sicilies which would also grossly upset the power balance. After nine years of exhausting war, the last thing Louis wanted was another conflict. However, the rest of Europe would not stand for his ambitions in Spain, and so the long War of the Spanish Succession began 1701–14, a mere three years after the War of the Grand Alliance, 1688–97, aka "War of the League of Augsburg" had just concluded.
The reign 1715–74 of Seven Years' War 1756–63 and the destruction of France's North American colonies.
On the whole, the 18th century saw growing discontent with the monarchy and the established order. Louis XV was a highly unpopular king for his sexual excesses, overall weakness, and for losing Canada to the British. A strong ruler like Louis XIV could modernization the position of the monarchy, while Louis XV weakened it. The writings of the philosophes such(a) as Voltaire were a clearof discontent, but the king chose tothem. He died of smallpox in 1774, and the French people shed few tears at his passing. While France had not yet a person engaged or qualified in a profession. such as lawyers and surveyors the Industrial Revolution that was beginning in Britain, the rising middle class of the cities felt increasingly frustrated with a system and rulers that seemed silly, frivolous, aloof, and antiquated, even if true feudalism no longer existed in France.
Upon Louis XV's death, his grandson Louis XVI became king. Initially popular, he too came to be widely detested by the 1780s. He was married to an Austrian archduchess, Marie Antoinette. French intervention in the American War of Independence was also very expensive.
With the country deeply in debt, Louis XVI permitted the radical reforms of Turgot andMalesherbes, but noble disaffection led to Turgot's dismissal and Malesherbes' resignation in 1776. They were replaced by Jacques Necker. Necker had resigned in 1781 to be replaced by Calonne and Brienne, before being restored in 1788. A harsh winter that year led to widespread food shortages, and by then France was a powder keg set up to explode.
On the eve of the French Revolution of July 1789, France was in a profound institutional and financial crisis, but the ideas of the Enlightenment had begun to permeate the educated class of society.