countries. As the threat of a foreign invasion receded and that France became mostly pacified, the Thermidorian reaction put an end to the Terror and to Robespierre's dictature.
Metropolitan France is situated mostly between latitudes
3en shams
France was one of the first countries to create a Ministry of the Environment,
Animated map of the growth and decline of the French colonial empire.
After a short-lived governmental scheme, Napoleon Bonaparte seized control of the Republic in 1799, being appointed as First Consul, and later Emperor of the First Empire (1804–1814/1815). As a continuation of
the wars sparked by the European monarchies against the French Republic, changing sets of
European Coalitions declared wars to Napoleon's French Empire. His armies conquered most of continental Europe, with members of the
Bonaparte family being appointed as monarchs in some of the newly established kingdoms. These victories led to the worldwide expansion of French revolutionary ideals and reforms, such as the
Metric system, the
Napoleonic Code or the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. After the catastrophic
Russian campaign, Napoleon was finally defeated and the Bourbon monarchy
restored. About a million Frenchmen died during the
Napoleonic Wars.
[59]
After his
brief return from exile, Napoleon was finally defeated in 1815 at the
Battle of Waterloo, the monarchy was
re-established (1815–1830), but with new constitutional limitations. The discredited Bourbon dynasty was overthrown by the
civil uprising of 1830, which established the constitutional
July Monarchy, which lasted until 1848, when the
French Second Republic was proclaimed, in the wake of the
1848 European revolutions. In 1852,
Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, Napoleon I’s nephew and president of the French Republic, was proclaimed emperor of the
second Empire, as Napoleon III. He multiplied French interventions abroad, especially in
Crimea, in
Mexico and
Italy, which resulted in the annexation of
Savoy and
Nice. Napoleon III was eventually unseated following defeat in the
Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and his regime was replaced by the
Third Republic.
France had
colonial possessions, in various forms, since the beginning of the 17th century to the 18th century. But in the 19th and 20th centuries, its
global overseas colonial empire extended greatly and culminated as the second largest in the world behind the
British Empire. At its peak, between 1919 and 1939, the second French colonial empire extended over 12,347,000 square kilometres (4,767,000 sq mi) of land. Including
metropolitan France, the total area of land under French
sovereignty reached 12,898,000 square kilometres (4,980,000 sq mi) in the 1920s and 1930s, which is 8.6% of the world's land area.
France was a member of the
Triple Entente when
World War I broke out. A small part of Northern France was occupied, but France and its allies eventually emerged victorious against the
Central Powers, at a tremendous human and material cost: the first war left 1.4 million French soldiers dead.
[60] The interbellum phase was marked by
intense international tensions an a variety of social reforms introduced by the
Popular Front government (
Annual leave,
working time reduction, women in
Government...). Following the
German Blitzkrieg campaign in
World War II, metropolitan France was divided in an
occupation zone in the north and
Vichy France, a newly established authoritarian regime collaborating with Germany, in the south.
[61] The
Allies and the
French Resistance eventually emerged victorious from the
Axis powers and French sovereignty was restored.
The
Fourth Republic was established after World War II and saw spectacular economic growth (
les Trente Glorieuses). France was one of the founding members of the
NATO (1949), which was the Western counterpart of the
Warsaw Pact system of
collective defence. France attempted to
regain control of French Indochina but was defeated by the
Viet Minh at the
Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Only months later, France faced a new
conflict in Algeria. The debate over whether or not to keep control of
Algeria, then home to over one million
European settlers,
[62] wracked the country and nearly led to civil war. In 1958, the weak and unstable Fourth Republic gave way to the
Fifth Republic, which contained a strengthened Presidency.
[63] In the latter role, Charles de Gaulle managed to keep the country together while taking steps to end the war. The Algerian War was concluded with
peace negotiations in 1962 that led to Algerian independence. France granted independence progressively to its colonies, the last one being
Vanuatu in 1980. A vestige of the colonial empire are the
French overseas departments and territories that include
French Guiana,
Martinique and
French Polynesia.
In the wake of a
worldwide series of protests, the
May 1968 revolt, although a political failure for the protesters, had an enormous social impact. In France, it is considered to be the watershed moment when a conservative moral ideal (religion, patriotism, respect for authority) shifted towards a more liberal moral ideal.
France has been at the forefront of the European Union member states seeking to exploit the momentum of monetary union to create a more unified and capable European Union political, defence, and s
France to Launch New National Gastronomy Festival this Fall 
