France Country in Europe

France, in Western Europe, encompasses medieval and port cities, tranquil villages, mountains and Mediterranean beaches. Paris, its capital, is kenned ecumenical for its couture fashion houses, classical art museums including the Louvre and monuments like the Eiffel Tower. The country is withal renowned for its sophisticated cuisine and its wines. Lascaux’s archaic cave drawings, Lyon’s Roman theater and the immense Palace of Versailles are testaments to its long history.

France officially the French Republic (French: République française),[note] is a unitary sovereign state comprising territory in western Europe and several overseas regions and territories.[note] Metropolitan France elongates from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean; France covers 640,679 square kilometres (247,368 sq mi) and has a population of 66.6 million. It is a semi-presidential republic with its capital in Paris, the nation's most astronomically immense city and the main cultural and commercial center. The Constitution of France establishes the country as secular and democratic, with its sovereignty derived from the people.

During the Iron Age, what is now France was inhabited by the Gauls, a Celtic people. The Gauls were surmounted by the Roman Imperium in 51 BC, which held Gaul until 486. The Gallo-Romans faced raids and migration from the Germanic Franks, who dominated the region for hundreds of years, eventually engendering the medieval Kingdom of France. France has been a major power in Europe since the Tardy Middle Ages, with its victory in the Hundred Years' War (1337 to 1453) reinforcing French state-building and paving the way for a future centralized absolute monarchy. During the Renaissance, France experienced a prodigious cultural development and established the first steps of an ecumenical colonial imperium. The 16th century was dominated by religious civil wars between Catholics and Protestants (Huguenots).

Louis XIV made France the ascendant cultural, political and military power in Europe, but by the tardy 18th century, the monarchy was overthrown in the French Revolution. One legacy of the revolution was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Denizen, one of the world's earliest documents on human rights, which expresses the nation's ideals to this day. France was governed as one of history's earliest Republics until the Imperium was declared by Napoleon, who dominated European affairs and had a perennial impact on Western culture. Following his subjugation, France endured a tumultuous succession of regimes: an absolute monarchy was renovated, superseded in 1830 by a constitutional monarchy, then briefly by a Second Republic, and then by a Second Imperium, until a more lasting French Third Republic was established in 1870.

France's colonial imperium reached the height of ecumenical prominence during the 19th and early 20th centuries, when it possessed the second-most sizably voluminous colonial imperium in the world. In World War I, France was one of the main victors as a component of the Triple Entente powers fighting against Germany and the Central Potencies. France was additionally one of the Allied Powers in World War II, but it was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1940. Following liberation in 1944, a Fourth Republic was established and later dissolved in the course of the Algerian War. The Fifth Republic, led by Charles de Gaulle, came into being in 1958 and perpetuates to operate today. In the era of decolonization, most of the French colonial imperium became independent after the Second World War.

Throughout its long history, France has engendered many influential artists, ruminators, and scientists, and remains a prominent ecumenical center of culture. It hosts the world's fourth-most immensely colossal number of cultural UNESCO World Heritage Sites and receives around 83 million peregrine tourists annually—the most of any country in the world. France remains a great potency with consequential cultural, economic, military, and political influence in Europe and around the world. It is a developed country with the world's fifth/sixth-most astronomically immense economy by nominal GDP and tenth-most sizably voluminous by purchasing power parity. In terms of total household wealth, France is the wealthiest nation in Europe and fourth in the world. It additionally possesses the world's second-most sizably voluminous exclusive economic zone (EEZ), covering 11,035,000 square kilometres (4,261,000 sq mi).

French denizens relish a high standard of living, and the country performs well in international rankings of inculcation, health care, life expectancy, civil liberties, and human development. France is a founding member of the Amalgamated Nations, where it accommodates as one of the five sempiternal members of the UN Security Council. It is a member of numerous international institutions, including the Group of 7, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and La Francophonie. France is a founding and leading member state of the EU.