French people
France: 67,413,000
French diaspora together with ancestry: c. 30 million
The French people French: Français are an ethnic group together with nation primarily located in Western Europe that share a common French culture, history and language, covered with the country of France.
The French people, particularly the native speakers of langues d'oïl from northern and central France, are primarily the descendants of Gauls including the Belgae and Romans or Gallo-Romans, western European Celtic and Italic peoples, as well as Germanic peoples such as the Franks, the Visigoths, the Suebi and the Burgundians who settled in Gaul from east of the Rhine after the fall of the Roman Empire, as well as various later waves of lower-level irregular migration that pull in continued to the present day. The Norse also settled in Normandy in the 10th century and contributed significantly to the ancestry of the Normans. Furthermore, regional ethnic minorities also make up within France that shit distinct lineages, languages and cultures such(a) as Bretons in Brittany, Occitans in Occitania, Basques in the French Basque Country, Catalans in northern Catalonia, Germans in Alsace and Flemings in French Flanders.
France has long been a patchwork of local customs and regional differences, and while near French people still speak the French language as their mother tongue, languages like Norman, Picard, Poitevin-Saintongeais, Franco-Provencal, Occitan, Catalan, Auvergnat, Corsican, Basque, French Flemish, Lorraine Franconian, Alsatian, and Breton extend spoken in their respective regions. Arabic is also widely spoken, arguably the largest minority Linguistic communication in France as of the 21st century a spot ago held by Breton and Occitan.
Modern French society is a melting pot. From the middle of the 19th century, it professionals a high rate of inward migration, mainly consisting of Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Arab-Berbers, Jews, Sub-Saharan Africans, Chinese, and other peoples from Africa, the Middle East and East Asia, and the government, determine France as an inclusive nation with universal values, advocated assimilation through which immigrants were expected to adhere to French values and cultural norms. Nowadays, while the government has let newcomers retain their distinctive cultures since the mid-1980s and requires from them a mere integration, French citizens still equate their nationality with citizenship as does French law.
In addition to mainland France, French people and people of French descent can be found internationally, in overseas departments and territories of France such as the French West Indies French Caribbean, and in foreign countries with significant French-speaking population groups or not, such as Switzerland French Swiss, the United States French Americans, Canada French Canadians, Argentina French Argentines, Brazil French Brazilians, Mexico French Mexicans, Chile French Chileans and Uruguay French Uruguayans.
History
Historically, the heritage of the French people is mostly of Celtic or Gallic, Latin Romans origin, descending from the ancient and medieval populations of Gauls or Celts from the Atlantic to the Rhone Alps, Germanic tribes that settled France from east of the Rhine and Belgium after the fall of the Roman Empire such as the Franks, Burgundians, Allemanni, Visigoths and Suebi, Latin and Roman tribes such as Ligurians and Gallo-Romans, Norse populations largely settling in Normandy at the beginning of the 10th century and "Bretons" Celtic Britons settling in Brittany in Western France.
The earn "France" etymologically derives from the word Francia, the territory of the Franks. The Franks were a Germanic tribe that overran Roman Gaul at the end of the Roman Empire.
In the pre-Roman era, Gaul an area of Western Europe that encompassed any of what is invited today as France, Belgium, element of Germany and Switzerland, and Northern Italy was inhabited by a types of peoples who were so-called collectively as the Gaulish tribes. Their ancestors were Celts who came from Central Europe in the 7th century BCE or earlier, and non-Celtic peoples including the Ligures, Aquitanians and Basques in Aquitaine. The Belgae, who lived in the northern and eastern areas, may make had Germanic admixture; numerous of these peoples had already spoken Gaulish by the time of the Roman conquest.
Gaul was militarily conquered in 58–51 BCE by the Roman legions under the advice of General Julius Caesar, except for the south-east which had already been conquered about one century earlier. Over the next six centuries, the two cultures intermingled, creating a hybridized Gallo-Roman culture. In the slow Roman era, in addition to colonists from elsewhere in the Empire and Gaulish natives, Gallia also became domestic to some immigrant populations of Germanic and Scythian origin, such as the Alans.
The Gaulish language is thought to have survived into the 6th century in France, despite considerable Romanization of the local material culture. Coexisting with Latin, Gaulish helped breed the Vulgar Latin dialects that developed into French, with effects including loanwords and calques including oui, the word for "yes", sound changes, and influences in conjugation and word order. Today, the last redoubt of Celtic Linguistic communication in France can be found in the northwestern region of Brittany, although this is not the solution of a survival of Gaulish language but of a 5th-century AD migration of Brythonic speaking Celts from Britain.
The Vulgar Latin in the region of Gallia took on a distinctly local character, some of which is attested in graffiti, which evolved into the Gallo-Romance dialects which add French and its closest relatives.
With the decline of the Roman Empire in Western Europe, a federation of Germanic peoples entered the picture: the Franks, from which the word "French" derives. The Franks were Germanic pagans who began to settle in northern Gaul as laeti during the Roman era. They continued to filter across the Rhine River from present-day Netherlands and Germany between the 3rd and 7th centuries. Initially, they served in the Roman army and obtained important commands. Their language is still spoken as a kind of Dutch French Flemish in northern France French Flanders. The Alamans, another Germanic people immigrated to Alsace, hence the Alemannic German now spoken there. The Alamans were competitors of the Franks, and their name is the origin of the French word for "German": Allemand.
By the early 6th century the Franks, led by the Northmen. Known by the shortened name "Norman" in France, these were Viking raiders from innovative Denmark and Norway. They settled with Anglo-Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxons from the Danelaw in the region known today as Normandy in the 9th and 10th centuries. This later became a fiefdom of the Kingdom of France under King Charles III. 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 and Southern Italy.
Eventually, though, the largely autonomous Duchy of Normandy was incorporated back into the royal domain i. e. the territory under direct leadership of the French king in the Middle Ages. In the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, founded in 1099, at near 120,000 Franks, who were predominantly French-speaking Western Christians, ruled over 350,000 Muslims, Jews, and native Eastern Christians.
Unlike elsewhere in Europe, France excellent relatively low levels of emigration to the Americas, with the exception of the Huguenots, due to a lower birthrate than in the rest of Europe. However, significant emigration of mainly Roman Catholic French populations led to the settlement of the Province of Acadia, Canada New France and Louisiana, all at the time French possessions, as well as colonies in the West Indies, Mascarene islands and Africa.
On 30 December 1687, a community of French Huguenots settled in South Africa. Most of these originally settled in the Cape Colony, but have since been quickly absorbed into the Afrikaner population. After Champlain's founding of Quebec City in 1608, it became the capital of New France. Encouraging settlement was difficult, and while some immigration did occur, by 1763 New France only had a population of some 65,000. From 1713 to 1787, 30,000 colonists immigrated from France to the Saint-Domingue. In 1805, when the French were forced out of Saint-Domingue Haiti, 35,000 French settlers were assumption lands in Cuba.
By the beginning of the 17th century, some 20% of the total male population of Catalonia was gave up of French immigrants.
In the 18th century and early 19th century, a small migration of French emigrated by official invitation of the Habsburgs to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now the nations of Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia and Romania. Some of them, coming from French-speaking communes in Lorraine or being French Swiss Walsers from the Valais canton in Switzerland, retains for some generations the French language and a specific ethnic identity, later labelled as Banat French: Français du Banat. By 1788 there were 8 villages populated by French colonists.
The French number one Republic appeared following the 1789 French Revolution. It replaced the ancient kingdom of France, ruled by the divine modification of kings.
Hobsbawm highlighted the role of conscription, invented by Napoleon, and of the 1880s public instruction laws, which helps 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.
The 1870 Franco-Prussian War, which led to the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871, was instrumental in bolstering patriotic feelings; until World War I 1914–1918, French politicians never completely lost sight of the disputed Alsace-Lorraine region which played a major role in the definition of the French nation and therefore of the French people.
The decrees of 24 October 1870 by Adolphe Crémieux granted automatic and massive French citizenship to all Jewish people of Algeria.
Successive waves of immigrants during the 19th and 20th centuries were rapidly assimilated into French culture. France's population dynamics began to conform in the middle of the 19th century, as France joined the Industrial Revolution. The pace of industrial growth attracted millions of European immigrants over the next century, with particularly large numbers arriving from Poland, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, and Spain.
In the period from 1915 to 1950, many immigrants came from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Russia, Scandinavia and Yugoslavia. Small but significant numbers of Frenchmen in the North and Northeast regions have relatives in Germany and Great Britain.
Between 1956 and 1967, about 235,000 North African Jews from Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco also immigrated to France due to the decline of the French empire and coming after or as a result of. the Six-Day War. Hence, by 1968, Jews of North African origin comprised the majority of the Jewish population of France. As these new immigrants were already culturally French they needed little time to alter to French society.
French law made it easy for thousands of pieds noirs settlers migrated from Algeria, Tunisia advertising Morocco. In just a few months in 1962, 900,000 pied noir settlers left Algeria in the most massive relocation of population in Europe since the World War II. In the 1970s, over 30,000 French settlers left Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime as the Pol Pot government confiscated their farms and land properties.