France: Did you mean...?

Society in the Kingdom of France in the period of the Ancien Regime was broken up into three separate estates, or social classes: the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners. These classes and their accompanying power dynamics, originating...

The policy of appeasement towards the demands of Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) regarding Nazi Germany's territorial expansion ultimately failed when the Second World War (1939-45) began. The reasons appeasement was adopted by Britain and France...

The Dreyfus Affair, or L'Affaire as it has become known, demonstrated the competing forces at work to either reestablish the monarchy and the Church in power or to solidify and advance the unfulfilled ideals of the 1789 French Revolution...

The Law of Associations was adopted by the French Parliament on 3 July 1901 to limit the influence of Catholic teaching orders as the first step toward the formal separation of church and state that would follow in 1905. Of 16,904 religious...

Map of France during the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453 CE), around the time of the Treaty of Troyes (1420 CE).

A map indicating in red the territory controlled by Charles the Simple, aka Charles III of West Francia (r. 893-923 CE)

The Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) was an intermittent conflict between England and France lasting 116 years. It began principally because King Edward III (r. 1327-1377) and Philip VI (r. 1328-1350) escalated a dispute over feudal rights...

Charles VI (1368-1422), King of France, oil on canvas painting by Gillot Saint-Evre, 1837. Commissioned by King Louis Philippe I in 1837, the painting is part of the Portraits of the Kings of France series in the Palace of Versailles. Charles...

Isabella of France, Detail from an illustration in the Grandes Chroniques de France (Français 6465, fol. 338v.) by Jean Fouquet, Tours, c. 1455-1460. National Library of France, Paris.

A c. 1700 portrait by Hyacinthe Rigaud of Louis XIV of France (r. 1643-1715). (Louvre Museum, Paris)