France

France, formally the French Empire (Empire français), is a constitutional parliamentary empire in western Europe, reigned over by Napoleon VII as Emperor of the French and governed by a President of the Council responsible to the Estates-General. It has a population of approximately 58 million, its capital is Paris, and it contains within its imperial structure two constituent duchies, Normandy and Brittany.

In the space of a single century France was a republic, a fascist state and an empire, and it has been each of them without ceasing to be recognisably France. That continuity is the fact about the country that matters most, and the French make more of it than anybody: the nation outlasts the forms it takes, and every regime that has tried to own it has found itself one more chapter in its history. The Republic lost the First Great War. It then handed its own emergency powers, lawfully, to a man who used them to destroy it, murder six million people and launch the Second Great War. The victors partitioned the country at Versailles in 1945 and reconstituted it not as a republic but as an empire under the Bonaparte line, on the theory that a hereditary symbol above party would give France the stability its republics had not.

The theory has largely worked, and France has spent eighty years as a prosperous, secular, argumentative democracy under a crown it did not choose. In 2027 Napoleon VII refused his assent to a statute for the first time in the Empire’s history, over a submarine base in the Duchy of Normandy, and the refusal left the country without a governing ministry. France is anxious, and the question of what the Empire is for has been reopened at the moment it had seemed finally closed.

Etymology

The name France descends from the Latin Francia, the land of the Franks, the Germanic confederation that established itself in northern Gaul in the fifth century and gave its name first to a kingdom and then to a country. The Frankish root is usually read as carrying the sense of free or bold, and French writers have never tired of the coincidence that the name of the nation and the first word of its revolutionary motto are said to share an ancestor. The older name of the territory, Gaul, survives in learned and rhetorical usage.

In French the country is la France and the state is presently the Empire français, and the distinction between the two is precisely the one the modern constitutional order depends upon. Regimes have been named and renamed with unusual frequency, kingdom, republic, empire, republic again, a fascist state that never renamed itself, and empire once more, while the name of the country beneath them has not changed at all.

The title of the head of state is Emperor of the French, not Emperor of France, which is the style Napoleon I took in 1804 and which the restoration of 1945 kept deliberately: the Emperor reigns over a people and not over a territory. The customary formula “the Bonapartist Republic” appears in no constitutional instrument. It is used by ministers and critics alike to describe an empire administering a revolutionary inheritance. Foreign chanceries write French Empire in formal correspondence and say France everywhere else.

In ordinary speech the metropolitan territory is often called l’Hexagone for the rough six-sided shape the land makes on a map, a colloquialism that survived the partition of 1945 even though the partition spoiled the shape. Parisians say la province for everything outside the capital, a usage the provinces resent and have never managed to retire.

History

Before the Revolution

France was the most populous kingdom and the greatest land power of early modern Europe, and its history to the eighteenth century is unchanged from any standard account: the Capetian and Valois kings, the Hundred Years’ War, the union of Brittany in 1532, the wars of religion, and the absolute monarchy of the Bourbons at Versailles.

The hinge into the modern history is a debt. France entered the American war in 1778, after Saratoga, to injure Britain. It had offered the Continental Congress an alliance on condition of independence and been refused, and it went to war anyway, financing the fleets of d’Estaing and supplying the Americans with money and arms without a treaty. When the American war ended at Boston in 1779 with the Four-Year War’s settlement, it had delivered France none of what it had wanted, and France fought Britain on, with Spain, until the European peace signed at Versailles in 1783 brought it a few islands and trading posts. The American colonies did not become independent. They became, after the Charter of 1783, the United Kingdom of America, under the same Crown France had gone to war to wound. The French treasury had, in effect, purchased the United Kingdom of America, and by 1786 debt service consumed more than half of royal revenue.

Revolution and the first Empire

The French Revolution of 1789 to 1799 followed, event for event, the course the rest of Europe knows: the Estates-General summoned because nothing else could raise money, the fall of the Bastille, the abolition of feudal privilege, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Republic, the Terror, and the seizure of power by Napoleon Bonaparte, who crowned himself Emperor of the French in 1804. France abolished slavery in its colonies in 1794, Napoleon restored it in 1802, and it was abolished again only in 1848.

The United Kingdom of America remained neutral throughout the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. It recognised the Republic early and Napoleon as Emperor in 1804, which Britain never did; it fought an undeclared naval war against France in the Caribbean between 1798 and 1803; and it bought Louisiane from Napoleon in 1803. The wars ended at Vienna in 1815, where France opposed the restoration of the Holy Roman Empire and was overruled.

The Revolution remains the foundation of French legitimacy under every regime since. The present Empire dates itself from 1789 as much as from 1804, keeps 14 July as the national day, and treats the principles of the Revolution as the inheritance it exists to carry.

The nineteenth century

The Bourbons were restored in 1815 and overthrown in 1830, when Louis Philippe, Duke of Orléans, became King of the French while remaining Grand Duke of Louisiane in the United Kingdom of America, an arrangement the Realm found comic and the American Parliament regulated by statute. He was deposed in the revolution of 1848, returned to Louisiane, and the House of Orléans renounced any claim to the French throne as the price of resuming the grand duchy. It has reigned there since.

The Second Republic of 1848 elected Napoleon’s nephew, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, as its President, and he made himself Napoleon III in 1852. The Second Empire was modern, authoritarian, prosperous and finally reckless. It rebuilt Paris, built railways and banks, and collapsed in 1870 in a war with the German states, at Sedan, where the Emperor was taken prisoner. The German Empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in January 1871, and France ceded Alsace and the eastern part of Lorraine, which became the German Reichsland of Elsaß-Lothringen and have remained German since. The United Kingdom of America stayed neutral.

The Paris Commune of 1871 was crushed by the government of the new Republic with thousands killed, and became a founding memory of the French left. The Third Republic that followed survived royalist and Bonapartist restoration attempts, separated church and state in 1905, and was convulsed by the Dreyfus affair. It also built a great colonial empire: Algeria from 1830, Indochina between 1862 and 1893, West and Equatorial Africa, Madagascar and the Pacific islands. By 1914 the Bonapartes had not reigned for more than forty years and were barred by law from serving in the national forces, and France was the last great republic in Europe, revanchist about Alsace, restless, powerful and militarily formidable in a continent of constitutional monarchies.

The First Great War

The war began in June 1914 with the assassination of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha by a French national. Whether the assassin acted for anyone in the French state has never been established, and the question of who bears the responsibility for the war remains open: French revanchism explains why France was isolated and what it wanted, and does not by itself settle who lit the fuse.

France fought alongside Russia and the Ottoman Empire against the German Empire, Britain, Italy, Japan and, from 1916, the United Kingdom of America. It entered Belgium driving for the Ruhr and held interior lines for four years with an army its enemies conceded was superb. A French offensive in Lorraine in 1916 failed after eleven days and was followed by mutinies that the government concealed and that became, once they were known, a permanent scar in French political memory. France began unrestricted submarine warfare the same year and sank the American liner SS Chesapeake, the act that did most to bring the Realm into the war. The allied blockade starved French cities; several hundred thousand civilians died of it.

The last French offensive came in the spring of 1918. It failed, and France collapsed from within: three governments fell in six weeks, and the armistice of 11 November 1918 was sought by a republic that could no longer govern itself. France lost about 1.7 million soldiers.

The Treaty of Berlin and the betrayal myth

The peace was dictated at Berlin in 1919. The Treaty of Berlin imposed reparations that nobody expected to be paid, capped the French army, forbade submarines, stripped France of its colonies on the African mainland, which went to Britain and Germany as League mandates, of its Pacific islands, which went to Japan, and of its posts in India, which went to the Raj, and transferred Nice to Italy. Madagascar and Réunion were left to France. Britain’s share of the African mandates was the whole of French West Africa, among it Dahomey and Niger, both independent republics from 1960, and French Somaliland at Djibouti, which joined Ethiopia by referendum in 1977. Germany’s share included French Equatorial Africa, which became four independent republics in 1960: Gabon, the Congo, Ubangi and Chad. There was no occupation of France, only what the treaty called a Rhine bridgehead and a Rhine demilitarised zone, named for a frontier France had not had since 1871, and Corsica stayed French. France was excluded from the new League of Nations. A committee of experts stabilised the franc with an international loan in 1924.

The army was told that it had been betrayed rather than beaten, by the politicians who sought the armistice, by Russia’s collapse, by strikers at home and by the Republic itself, and it believed the story because it preferred it. The veterans came home to a society that could not explain why so much sacrifice had ended in defeat. The Republic did not reform itself; it absorbed the grievance until it could not.

The seizure of power

France’s transition from defeated republic to fascist state did not come through a coup. It came through crisis, and it came lawfully.

The conditions were in place for years before the event that used them: the Treaty of Berlin’s humiliation still raw, the Depression grinding, the Chamber deadlocked, the ministries falling one after another, and a financial panic breaking together with a communist scare that frightened the propertied into looking for a protector. What none of that supplied was a moment. The moment was a march of veterans, and it turned on the fact that the Republic shot them.

In February 1934 a column of ex-servicemen, many of them mutilated, wearing their decorations and carrying no weapons, moved on the Chamber of Deputies to demand a government that could govern. The leagues had been marching for years and the government had learned to let them. This was not a party demonstration. It was the men who had been told for fifteen years that their sacrifice had bought nothing, coming to say so to the men who had spent it.

The police fired on them on the Pont de la Concorde, facing the Chamber. The number of dead has been disputed ever since and has never been fewer than a dozen, and the identity of the dead was the thing that could not be survived. A republic that killed its own crippled soldiers in front of its own parliament could not afterwards explain itself to anybody, and it did not try for long. The ministry fell within days, and its successor could not form. The leagues became the only force in France that could put a hundred thousand orderly men into a street and get them home again, and the army, asked whether it would clear them, gave the answer that ends republics: not that it refused, but that it would prefer not to be asked.

What followed was not a coup. It was an invitation, extended by the President of the Republic, Albert Lebrun, under the emergency powers of the Republic’s own constitution.

The calculation behind it was neither stupid nor unusual. The office needed a government that could hold the street, and there was exactly one man who could. Henri Delacroix commanded the leagues, had said nothing that could not be walked back, and arrived surrounded by respectable men: conservative deputies who had agreed to serve, industrial syndicates promised rearmament contracts, senior officers who preferred him to the alternative, and newspapers that had spent a year explaining that only an emergency government would do. The men who put him in believed to a man that they were using him, a useful brute to be deployed against the left and dismissed when the danger passed. He held a minority of the portfolios and no majority of his own. He would be contained by the institutions, by the President’s power to dismiss him, and by his own inexperience.

He was in office eleven days before the first of them understood the mistake.

The containment theory had assumed he wanted to govern France, and he wanted to own it. The emergency powers that had been used to appoint him were used to legislate without the Chamber. The prefectures went first, then the police, then the courts, each by lawful instrument and each within a month. The violence came afterwards, once the instruments were his: political opponents were detained under public-order provisions that had been on the statute book since the previous century, the press was brought in through the paper supply rather than by censorship, which was quieter and worked better, and the officers who had preferred him were retired in batches with full honours and replaced by men who owed him everything. Lebrun discovered within the year that the power to dismiss a head of government is worth exactly as much as the willingness of somebody to enforce the dismissal, and there was nobody. He remained in office, signing, for as long as he was useful.

Nothing in the sequence was illegal at the moment it was done. That is the feature of the French case the constitutional monarchies found hardest to answer, because France did not have its republic taken from it. France was handed a set of emergency instruments by its own republicans, written in 1889 for use in a crisis, and a man came who used them exactly as written.

Henri Delacroix

Delacroix, known to the movement and in time to the country as le Chef, was a decorated but undistinguished veteran of the First Great War, of middling provincial origin, who had risen through the veterans’ street-leagues, the very constituency the police had fired on. That was understood at the time as the reason he could hold them and was not otherwise thought about.

He was a gifted speaker to crowds; he never sat in the Chamber as a deputy, and addressed it as President of the Council rarely and badly until he stopped attending in 1936. The regime presented him as a tireless worker; the records of his government show a man who rose late and governed by monologue, and the Tribunal’s investigators found no private life of any kind. He was a man of a single idea: that France had been encircled, betrayed and restrained by the monarchical powers and must break the settlement that bound it or cease to be a nation. His creed was revenge on the monarchies and the purity of the nation, and he meant both literally. Officers and officials swore a personal oath to him, the serment au Chef, and the oath rather than the constitution became the working instrument of the state.

He was taken alive in 1945, tried before the Paris Tribunal, convicted and guillotined.

Rénovation Nationale and the hollowed republic

Delacroix’s party was Rénovation Nationale, with Georges Maunoury as its Secretary-General; its members, and the movement as a whole, were called the Nationaux. The party absorbed the leagues and the state absorbed the party.

The regime never renamed the country. France remained, officially, the French Republic. The forms of the Third Republic were worn like a mask: there was still a Chamber, there were still elections, the constitution was never repealed, and the President went on signing. What had been hollowed out was everything behind the forms. The regime was ultranationalist, corporatist and violently anti-monarchical. It banned every Bonapartist and royalist organisation and exiled or imprisoned the families, which is how Louis Bonaparte came to serve in the Foreign Legion under an assumed name. It suppressed the Catholic Church, which it regarded as a rival loyalty and to which it offered no terms, and the Church consequently emerged from the period with a clean record and very little else.

Abroad, the regime left the League of Nations, rearmed in breach of the Treaty of Berlin in stages, remilitarised the restricted zones and pressed on Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. It backed the military rising in Spain from July 1936, its transport aircraft ferried the Army of Africa across the strait, and French aircraft bombed Guernica on 26 April 1937. Its colonial policy turned the overseas empire from a possession into a quarry, with forced labour, intensified extraction and settler nationalism. Refugees, political opponents and those the regime was beginning to mark for destruction fled north and east, to Germany, Austria-Hungary, Switzerland, Belgium, Britain and the United Kingdom of America.

The genocide

The Rénovation Nationale state murdered approximately six million people.

Its victims were the non-French, everyone the regime designated as not belonging to the French nation, equally and regardless of religion: Jews, the families of immigrants from Italy, Spain, Poland and the colonies, North Africans, Roma, and the citizens of every country France occupied who fell into its categories. The designation was made through a register of national belonging, and the register said whatever the regime needed it to say. Families French for generations were entered as foreign on the evidence of a grandparent’s birthplace, a surname or a denunciation, and removed as easily as they had been entered. The arbitrariness was the terror: nobody could know they were safe, which is why so many people did what the register required of them.

The machinery ran through three stages. Sorting camps and holding-pens registered the deported and stripped them of their possessions, and the great clearing-camp at Drancy-le-Nord, on the outskirts of Paris, became the byword for the first station of the road. Labour camps worked the still-useful to death. And the extermination camps, of which Montnoir and Estvère were the largest, killed the rest. Prisoners of war from the Allied armies were treated according to the same racial hierarchy.

It required hundreds of thousands of ordinary French officials: prefects who compiled the lists, police who made the arrests, railway clerks who scheduled the trains, mayors who certified the register, and neighbours who denounced. France teaches this plainly and teaches it to every child. There is no French account of the genocide in which it was done by a few men in Paris, because there are too many signatures on the documents.

The Second Great War

Fascist France began the Second Great War in 1939 by invading the Low Countries under Plan Sichel, commanded by Marshal Charles Vautrin. In 1940 it occupied Denmark and Norway, the first under a cooperative administration and from August 1943 under direct French rule. It bombed London, Birmingham and Clydebank in 1940 and 1941, was the first power to use long-range rockets, besieged Malta from Bizerte from June 1940 to the autumn of 1942, and drove deep into Germany, occupying Stuttgart and the Baden corridor and besieging Berlin for two weeks in the winter of 1941 before the advance was halted at the Weser.

The Allied reversal came in 1942 and 1943, in the Ruhr Recovery and the Cauldron of Kassel. The United Kingdom of America entered the war in December 1941, after Japan’s attack on Honolulu, and adopted a France-first strategy. The French overseas empire split: North Africa fought the Allies and was taken from French colonial forces, while the territories that defected rallied to Louis Bonaparte and the free French cause.

The counter-invasion came on 6 June 1944, when the main Overlord landings struck the Breton coast, with Operation Rollo in the Cotentin. Louis Bonaparte came ashore with the assault wave. The drive on Paris converged from three directions, one of them up the Rhône, and the capital fell after the Battle for the Île-de-France in the early spring of 1945. Paris did not rise. Its centre came through the war intact; its industrial suburbs and rail yards had been bombed through 1944 and 1945 and were rebuilt afterwards. The photograph of the Union Jack flying over Paris became the image by which the world remembers the end.

The resistance inside France had unified early, as the Council of the Republic, convened by a provincial lawyer known as Sillon: republican, deliberately faceless, and responsible for the documentary archive of the regime’s crimes that became the prosecution’s case after the war. Its maquis held out in the central massif, and the Nationaux burned the village of Vaubourg in reprisal in 1944. The Council accepted the Breton dukedom that Louis Bonaparte held and resisted the Norman one, which it regarded as a foreign crown on French soil.

Versailles and the Paris Tribunal

The victors met at Versailles in 1945, in the palace where the German Empire had been proclaimed in 1871. They faced the question the First Great War had not resolved: what to do with a republic whose instability had produced two wars in a generation. The doctrine they adopted, associated with Harry S. Truman, was “Punish Paris, Preserve France”: to take enough to make aggression unthinkable and not so much that France became a permanent wound in the middle of Europe.

• Nord-Pas-de-Calais, including Lille and Calais, was ceded to Belgium.
• Savoy was ceded to Italy, which had held Nice since 1919.
• Normandy was constituted as a semi-independent constituent duchy within the French Empire, with the Hanoverian monarch as its Duke. The Duke does not hold Normandy from the Emperor, and the two offices are not subordinate one to the other; France reserves defence, foreign policy and the currency relationship.
• Brittany was reconstituted as a constituent duchy by a bilateral convention between France and the Bretons, which the settlement recognised, with the Emperor himself as Duke in a legally separate capacity.
• The limits on French armed forces, and a prohibition on weapons of mass destruction, were imposed on the reconstituted state.

The Paris Tribunal tried the leaders of the regime. Dozens were tried and most were convicted. Henri Delacroix was guillotined. Albert Lebrun, the President who had invited him and signed for him, and had been held at Rambouillet since 1940, was convicted, the Tribunal holding that a head of state who lends his office to a criminal enterprise shares in it, and his sentence was suspended. Few of the Nationaux escaped: the borders were closed and the documentation of the Council of the Republic named them.

The Bonapartist restoration

A restored republic was widely thought to restore the conditions that had twice produced catastrophe. The settlement’s answer was the Bonaparte line, which bridged the Revolutionary inheritance, liberty, secularism and the nation, with an imperial form that placed a hereditary symbol above party and was acceptable to the monarchies that had won.

The choice had a face, and the face had earned it in the field. Louis Bonaparte had served in the Foreign Legion under an assumed name, and in 1942 distributed Breton resistance declarations invited him to accept the provisional dukedom of Brittany. He accepted, took operational command of the Breton resistance formations, promised an election and a referendum, landed with the assault wave in 1944, and swore his ducal oath in Breton at Nantes. His chief of staff in Brittany was Charles de Gaulle. It was that record, rather than dynastic sentiment, that made a Bonaparte restoration thinkable to a country that had just destroyed one regime and to the powers that had beaten it.

He became Emperor-elect in 1945 and kept his promise. The constitution of 1946 was put to a referendum and carried narrowly, with the republicans campaigning against it; the republicans got a secular, parliamentary, rights-bearing constitution, and the Empire was the price. He took the regnal number Napoleon VI, counting, as the family always had, the Prince Imperial who died in 1879 and Prince Victor as Napoleon IV and V, and the settlement accepted the count. He delegated the functions of the office from the outset and, out of a personal reluctance that became part of his legend, did not formally accede until 1960.

The early Empire, 1945 to 1960

The first fifteen years of the Empire were unstable in the way the settlement had hoped to prevent. Ministries were short, coalitions broke over the colonies and the budget, and the Estates-General could bring a government down without being able to agree on another.

France was nevertheless rebuilt, with Marshall Programme funds received under audit and constitutional safeguards, and admitted to the institutions of the postwar order on terms that reminded it why. It signed the Treaty of Brussels in 1949 as a founding member of the Atlantic Treaty Organization, nine years after invading Norway, whose government declined to accede at the same table. It rejoined the League of Nations in 1952, and has never held a veto in its Security Council. It entered a coal and steel community with Germany and the Low Countries in the 1950s as the junior partner, and joined the British landing at Suez in 1957.

France returned to Indochina in 1946 and fought to hold it for eight years. The war ended with the fall of the besieged fortress of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and the republican premier Pierre Mendès France, a Jew and the son of a survivor of the camps, ended it and withdrew. Mendès France also opened the negotiations that took Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria to independence under League supervision through the 1950s and 1960s, without a war, which France regards as the one colonial exit it got right.

The instability ended with a constitutional reform around 1960, adopted as Napoleon VI finally acceded. It introduced a constructive vote of no confidence, so that a ministry could be removed only by the election of its successor; created the Constitutional Council; and limited the Senate to delay. Ministries have lasted since.

Napoleon VI and the Thirty Glorious Years

The reign of Napoleon VI, from 1960 to 1997, coincided with the long postwar boom the French call the Thirty Glorious Years, and the boom is what legitimised the Empire. A generation that had grown up with rationing, partition and the Tribunal grew old with motorways, nuclear power stations, television, holidays and a franc that held its value, and did not much mind who was on the stamps. Napoleon VI never used the power of assent, and was respected more than he was loved.

Britain and France signed the Concorde treaty in 1962, with no withdrawal clause, which was contentious so soon after the war. In 1966 the President of the Council, Charles de Gaulle, Bonaparte’s wartime chief of staff and an imperial loyalist who had never accepted a foreign crown on Norman soil, withdrew France from ATO’s integrated planning on the ground that its allies could not treat Normandy as French for military purposes and as not French for constitutional ones. France kept its guarantee, its Council seat and its assessment, and returned to planning only in the 1990s, under a reformist republican premier, as the cold war eased, without the Norman question being settled.

The students and workers of 1968 occupied the universities and the factories over wages, conditions and the universities themselves, and the Empire outlasted them without their having much to say about it. France signed the pan-European accord of 1975 alongside Germany, Britain and Russia.

François Mitterrand, the longest-serving republican premier, governed through much of the 1980s. His ministry abolished the death penalty in 1981 and nationalised the banks and much of heavy industry. Late in his life it was revealed that he had served the Rénovation Nationale state as a young man, and the scandal overshadowed his reputation in a way the nationalisations never did.

In the 1990s France extended Normandy the credit line that carried the Norman livre through its currency crisis, establishing a practical dependence the Norman government has spent a generation resenting. Conscription ended in 1997, the year Napoleon VI died and his son acceded as Napoleon VII.

Napoleon VII and the present

Napoleon VII has been genuinely popular, more than his father, and for most of his reign he has been exactly the apolitical symbol the constitution describes.

France won the football World Cup in 1998. The suburbs of Paris and the other cities, where the families of North African immigrants live, rose in riots in 2005 over policing and exclusion, and the conditions that produced them remain. After the May Day Bombings of 2006, France stood with the United Kingdom of America under the Atlantic treaty without hesitation, the first time since 1945 that it had been asked to stand with the Realm on anything, and the Realm has remembered it. In the 2010s the imperial succession was reformed to absolute primogeniture, a change argued over at length because the heir is the Emperor’s daughter. Notre-Dame was badly damaged by fire in 2019, and Paris hosted the Olympic Games in 2024.

2027 was the most consequential year in France since 1945. France was a founding power of the European Concert under the Treaty of Straßburg, a Franco-German initiative, and as the price of joining on equal terms it renounced its claim to Alsace and signed a treaty renouncing nuclear weapons, converting the last of the Versailles limits into obligations it had given itself. The remaining postwar limits on its forces fell away with the treaty. France denounced the Realm’s purchase of the Baja peninsula under the Treaty of La Paz as monarchical neo-imperialism, and signed, in November, the memorandum at Straßburg for a successor to Concorde, the first large joint project between France and the Realm since the war. And the Estates-General passed the Cherbourg statute, which Napoleon VII refused.

Geography

The French Empire occupies approximately 510,000 square kilometres of western Europe, a compact block of territory reaching from the Channel coast to the Mediterranean and from the Atlantic to the western slope of the Alps. It is bounded by Belgium and the Benelux Union to the north, by Germany across the Vosges to the east, by Switzerland and Italy to the south-east, by Spain across the Pyrenees to the south-west, and by three separate bodies of water. The constituent duchies of Normandy and Brittany lie within that territory, so the imperial extent includes the whole of the north-western peninsula and the lower Seine, while Nord-Pas-de-Calais, ceded at Versailles, does not.

Relief and drainage

Most of the country is low or moderate in relief. The Paris basin, a broad saucer of sedimentary rock drained by the Seine and its tributaries, is the agricultural and demographic heart of the state and the reason a single city has dominated French administration for a thousand years. West of it the older, harder rock of the Armorican massif underlies Brittany and western Normandy in a landscape of low hills, hedged fields and drowned river valleys. South-west of the capital the Aquitaine basin opens toward the Atlantic in a second lowland, sandier and warmer, ending in the pine forests and dunes of the Landes.

The high ground is arranged around the edges and through the middle. The Massif Central, an ancient volcanic upland of extinct cones, high pasture and deep gorges, occupies the interior south and divides the Atlantic drainage from the Mediterranean. The Alps rise along the south-eastern frontier, which since Savoy passed to Italy runs lower down their western slope than it once did. The Pyrenees form an abrupt wall along the Spanish frontier. The Jura and the Vosges run toward the north-east, and since 1871 the crest of the Vosges rather than the Rhine has marked the limit of French administration, with Alsace lying beyond it in Germany. Corsica, mountainous and forested, lies off the Mediterranean coast.

Four river systems organise the country. The Seine drains the Paris basin north-westward through Normandy to the Channel and is the most heavily worked waterway in the state. The Loire, the longest French river, curves from the Massif Central through the château country and reaches the Atlantic through Breton territory at Nantes. The Garonne enters the sea through the Gironde estuary at Bordeaux. The Rhône, fed by Alpine snowmelt, runs south from Lyon in a deep industrial corridor to its delta at the Camargue. A dense inherited network of canals links the four.

Coasts and climate

France has three coasts of quite different character: the Channel shore of Normandy, cliffed and tidal, facing Britain across a narrow sea; the Atlantic shore from Brittany to the Basque country, rocky in the north and long-beached in the south; and the Mediterranean shore of the Gulf of Lion and Provence, sheltered, warm and lined with ports. Because the Channel coast east of the Seine is Belgian and the coast west of it is Norman, France has no deep-water Channel port under its ordinary administration, which is the geographical root of the Cherbourg crisis.

The west and north-west are oceanic: mild, wet and cloudy. The Paris basin and the east are progressively more continental, with colder winters and warmer summers. The south is Mediterranean, hot and dry in summer and scoured by the mistral down the Rhône corridor. The Alps, Pyrenees and higher Massif Central carry heavy winter snow, which feeds both the hydroelectric system built after the partition and a large winter tourist economy.

Regions and urbanisation

Administration is department-based and strongly centralised, with the two constituent duchies standing outside the departmental hierarchy and legislating for themselves within their competences. Roughly four-fifths of the population is urban. The Paris agglomeration holds close to a fifth of the imperial population by itself, and Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse and Bordeaux anchor the other great urban regions. Several of the cities an older map would show are no longer French: Lille is Belgian, Nice Italian and Straßburg German, while Nantes is Breton and Rouen Norman.

Between the urban centres runs a broad and thinly peopled diagonal from the Ardennes through Champagne, Burgundy’s uplands and the Massif Central to the edge of the Landes. It is the emptiest part of the Empire, a country of high pasture, forest and depopulating market towns, where rural decline has been a subject of imperial policy for three generations and where the provincial grievance against Paris is loudest.

Government and politics

The French Empire is a secular, centralised, constitutional parliamentary empire. Executive authority is parliamentary, the Emperor is apolitical, and the chronic French tension between revolutionary and conservative politics is managed through institutional design rather than suppressed.

Civic Dualism

The governing doctrine of the state is Civic Dualism: the revolutionary and the imperial inheritances are held as equal and legitimate, and neither owns France. The Republic’s secularism, centralism and rights-culture survive in law and administration; the Empire’s continuity, ceremony and symbolic authority survive in the constitutional form. The two halves are managed and not resolved, which is the point, and French civic instruction teaches the doctrine to every schoolchild as a description of how the country works rather than as a creed.

The constitution

The constitution of 1946 was drafted between the Council of the Republic, the parties and the Emperor-elect, and carried narrowly by referendum. It entrenches the rights of the citizen, secularism, the responsibility of ministers to the Chamber and the Emperor’s exclusion from government. The reform of around 1960 added the constructive vote of no confidence, the Constitutional Council and the limitation of the Senate. The constitution bans any fascist party outright: the name and the symbols of Rénovation Nationale and the oath to the Chef are criminal, and so, by statute, is denial of the genocide.

A movement for a referendum on the monarchy has existed since 1946 and has forced several. Each has lost comfortably.

The Emperor

The Emperor of the French is head of state and the constitutional symbol of the nation’s continuity. He is the national symbol, not the national owner, and he does not govern. His powers are few and exercised on advice:

• He appoints the President of the Council, the person who commands the Chamber of Deputies.
• He dissolves the Chamber on the advice of the President of the Council.
• He may refer a law to the Constitutional Council before giving assent, a power used a handful of times.
• He gives assent to laws, which until 2027 was treated as a formality.
• He is nominal commander of the armed forces.

There is no coronation. An Emperor accedes by swearing a civic oath before the Estates-General in the Chamber of Deputies and then attending a ceremony at Les Invalides, beside the tomb of Napoleon I; there is no church, no crown and no anointing. The Emperor lives and works at the Élysée, chosen deliberately in 1945 because it had been the house of the Presidents of the Republic. The imperial household is funded by a civil list voted every year by the Estates-General, and the republicans vote against it every year.

Since the reform of the 2010s the succession passes by absolute primogeniture, and the heir is the Emperor’s daughter. Succession to the imperial Crown carries the dukedom of Brittany with it automatically. The reign of the present Emperor is described under Napoleon VII and the present.

The refusal of assent

In 2027 the Estates-General passed a statute authorising an exclusively French submarine enclave at Cherbourg, in the Duchy of Normandy, as the base for France’s Channel fleet of nuclear-powered, conventionally armed attack submarines, since France has no other deep-water Channel port. The enclave would have been exempt from Norman labour, environmental, planning and criminal law. The statute required consultation with the Norman government but not its consent, and the government of Mathieu Hébert, President of the Norman Council, objected formally.

Napoleon VII refused his assent, against the formal advice of his ministers, the first substantive use of the power in the Empire’s history. He had opposed the enclave openly, and he published his reason in a single paragraph.

The ministry of Isabelle Fournier, which had sponsored the statute, sought a vote of confidence and lost it, and she remains President of the Council in a caretaker capacity. Her Defence Minister, General Pierre Vaillant, has kept preparatory work going under an older executive order, which the Norman law officers say cannot authorise anything on Norman soil. Critics of the Emperor have demanded his abdication or some formal discipline, and none is available. Nobody has been able to form a ministry since. The reformist republicans will not serve under an Emperor they say has broken the constitution by using a power it gives him, and the centre-right cannot govern without them; the nationalist right holds the balance and will support no ministry that abandons the enclave. Most of the public approves of the refusal and most of the political class does not, which is the most dangerous arrangement of opinion the Empire has known.

The caretaker ministry has meanwhile granted an offshore wind concession off Brest without the approval of the Breton government, opening a second front in the duchies: Brittany’s first open quarrel with the French capacity of the man who is also its own Duke.

The Estates-General

The Estates-General is the legislature, and it has two chambers:

• The Chamber of Deputies, of 577 members elected in single-member constituencies by two-round voting. It makes and unmakes ministries and has the final word on legislation.
• The Senate, elected indirectly by the councils of the departments. Since the reform of around 1960 it can delay legislation but not block it.

The name was chosen in 1946 for its continuity claim: that French constitutional life did not begin in 1789 and is older and more durable than any regime. In ordinary speech, and in most foreign usage, it is simply the French Parliament. The duchies send representatives to it for the matters France reserves.

The President of the Council

The President of the Council is the head of government, a Prime Minister in all but name, appointed by the Emperor as the person who can command the Chamber and removable only by a constructive vote of no confidence. Since 1960, ministries have alternated between the imperial centre-right and the reformist republicans. The abolitionist republicans have never governed.

The Presidents of the Council the Realm has most reason to remember are Pierre Mendès France (1950s), who ended the French war in Indochina and opened the North African negotiations; Charles de Gaulle (1960s), who took France out of ATO planning; and François Mitterrand (1980s), the longest-serving republican premier. The caretaker President is Isabelle Fournier of the Union impériale.

Political parties

The republicans are divided between reformers and abolitionists, and the division is older than the Empire: the reformers accepted the 1946 settlement as the price of a secular parliamentary state, and the abolitionists never have. The foreign minister of the caretaker ministry is Sophie Delmas and its Defence Minister General Pierre Vaillant.

The Orléanist question

The House of Orléans reigns as the grand-ducal house of Louisiane in the United Kingdom of America and renounced any claim to the French throne in 1848. French Orléanists have never accepted the renunciation, and the Alliance orléaniste presses the claim in the Estates-General without the house’s authority and against its repeated disavowals. It is a real parliamentary faction, small, persistent and articulate, and it is a standing irritant in relations with the United Kingdom of America, which Paris finds easier to resent than to answer: the claimants are French citizens making a French argument about a family that lives under another Crown and has disowned them. The French chancery uses the grand-ducal style for the Grand Duke punctiliously and with visible enjoyment.

Law and the courts

The Constitutional Council is the single supreme court of the Empire, the final court of appeal in all matters as well as the judge of constitutionality, of disputes between France and the duchies, and of referrals from the Emperor. It was created by the reform of around 1960 and absorbed the functions older French courts had held. Law is codified in the Napoleonic tradition. The death penalty was abolished in 1981. Laïcité is strict: there is no established church, no religious instruction in state schools, and the Emperor’s ceremonies are civic and historical.

The duchies

The two constituent duchies are treated in their own articles. Normandy, capital Rouen, has about 3.8 million people, its own government and currency board, and the Hanoverian monarch as its Duke; France reserves defence, foreign policy and the currency relationship, and Normandy pays France a share of its tax receipts for them. Brittany, governed from Rennes with Nantes as its ducal capital, uses the French franc, legislates in Breton, Gallo and French, and has the Emperor as its Duke in a separate capacity. Both duchies have a neutral exception from France’s alliance commitments. Each holds a seat in the League of Nations for its own purposes only, which creates no general sovereignty; both are represented through France in the Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Concert, where Normandy is also an observer.

Outside Paris, ordinary France is largely indifferent to the duchies. In Paris they are the settlement’s most visible price, and in the Estates-General the Norman arrangement in particular has never stopped being argued. Corsica has asked for a duchy of its own and been refused by the Estates-General, on the ground that the duchies were the price of Versailles and not a reward to be distributed.

Foreign relations

Germany. The German Empire beat France twice and is now its principal partner in the European Concert, and the relationship, cold in feeling and close in practice for most of the postwar period, has grown warmer since 2027, which the French right detests. France’s renunciation of Alsace in the Treaty of Straßburg closed the last territorial question between them.

Concord Station. France is not a partner in Concord Station, the station shared by the United Kingdom of America, Britain, Germany, Japan and China, whose name echoes Concorde and which a French minister called “a compliment paid with a missing letter”. The only French astronaut aboard, Thomas Pesquet, flew in 2017 as a German guest, and French opinion of the station has remained indifferent.

Britain. Twice its enemy and now a fellow founding power of the Concert. The two share Concorde, the Channel Tunnel, which comes ashore at Calais in Belgium, so that France’s own link to Britain runs through a foreign country, and a long habit of mutual disparagement.

The United Kingdom of America. The Realm was one of the powers that wrote the settlement of 1945, and the relationship was for a generation correct and distant. It has warmed. France cultivates a kinship with the Realm through Louisiane, the French-speaking grand duchy it funds with cultural grants, teacher exchanges and a warm claim of kinship, and the memorandum of 2027 on a successor to Concorde is read on both sides as a thaw. France was the loudest critic of the Realm’s purchase of the Baja peninsula, and the Orléanist claim remains an irritant.

Belgium and the Benelux Union. Nord-Pas-de-Calais is Belgian, and the question of its return is dead there and alive only in Paris.

Italy. Relations are correct, cold and structurally difficult. France has renounced Nice and Savoy officially; a nationalist fringe has not.

Russia. France has been firmly within the Atlantic Treaty Organization throughout the cold war against the Russian Republic, and its withdrawal from integrated planning in 1966 was about Normandy and never about Moscow.

The international order. France is a founding member of the Atlantic Treaty Organization and a founding power of the European Concert, which it grips more tightly than any other member because membership on equal terms with the Germany that beat it is the most concrete form French rehabilitation has taken. It is a member of the League of Nations without a veto. French is an official language of the League and a working language of ATO. France leads an association of French-speaking states, in which its former colonies take part and to which Louisiane sends observers.

The former colonies. France has apologised for all of its colonial rule, both the forced labour and extraction of the fascist period and the harder rule of the Empire’s own first fifteen years, and maintains forces in several African states at their governments’ request.

Armed forces

The armed forces of the Empire are the Army, the Navy and the Air Force, with the Foreign Legion as a distinct corps of the Army; Louis Bonaparte served in it under an assumed name. Conscription ended in 1997. The Versailles limits on French forces were lifted in stages and the last fell away in 2027, when the prohibition on weapons of mass destruction was replaced by France’s own treaty renunciation of nuclear weapons.

• The Navy is a large fleet with an aircraft carrier and a force of nuclear-powered, conventionally armed attack submarines, which is the reason the Cherbourg enclave was proposed.
• The Army keeps a brigade in Germany under ATO command and forces in several African states at their request.
• France has no nuclear weapons and shelters under the alliance’s deterrent. What French and Norman documents call French nuclear doctrine concerns civil nuclear power and the terms on which allied forces may be hosted.

Economy

Postwar France rebuilt on a reduced territorial base, and the rebuilding shaped the Empire’s economic character as much as Versailles shaped its constitution.

Structure and output

Output of approximately A£3.9 trillion across approximately 58 million people gives an income per head of about A£68,000, roughly five-sixths of the American figure, on a territory smaller than the one France governed in 1914. Human development stands at 0.933 and the Gini coefficient at 0.32. The currency is the French franc, which Brittany uses directly and to which the Norman livre is pegged; there is no Concert common currency.

The Thirty Glorious Years from the late 1940s to the 1970s turned a ruined and partitioned country into one of the richest in Europe, and the prosperity did more to reconcile France to the Empire than any constitutional argument. The economy’s weaknesses now are high public debt, youth unemployment, the emptying interior and a dependence on German demand that the Concert has deepened.

Industry

Losing Nord-Pas-de-Calais cost France its historic coal and textile heartland, and postwar industrial policy compensated deliberately. The state built Aérospatiale at Toulouse into the centre of European aviation, has owned Renault since 1945, and runs the state electricity monopoly. Peugeot and Citroën, Michelin and the great luxury houses of Paris are among the Empire’s best-known firms. Lorraine keeps the iron and steel the partition left it, and the Lyon and Saint-Étienne corridor its engineering and chemicals.

Energy

About half of France’s electricity is nuclear, from a fleet the state monopoly built after the 1970s, and a larger share than elsewhere in Europe is hydroelectric, from the Alpine and Massif Central schemes of the partition years. That the country forbidden nuclear weapons became one of the continent’s largest producers of nuclear power is a point of quiet national pride.

Agriculture and wine

Agriculture remains a foundation of French identity out of proportion to its share of output. The state treats wine and gastronomy as instruments of national prestige, a deliberate postwar strategy to rebuild French standing through culture where diplomacy could not, and French officials abroad conduct a good deal of business over dinner. The great wine regions of Burgundy, Bordeaux, Champagne, the Rhône and Languedoc are protected by name-of-origin rules the Empire defends abroad with a tenacity ordinarily reserved for frontier questions.

Overseas territories

France keeps Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion, French Guiana and Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, which are administered as departments of the Empire and send deputies to the Chamber. The rest of the colonial empire was lost: the mainland African colonies, the Pacific islands and the Indian posts in 1919, Madagascar to the Allies in the second war, Indochina by war in 1954, and North Africa by negotiation in the 1950s and 1960s.

Demographics and society

Population

The Empire holds approximately 58 million people, including the duchies, unevenly distributed between a crowded north and the emptying interior south. Growth is slow, sustained by long-standing family policy and by arrival from North Africa, the overseas departments and the wider Mediterranean. Life expectancy is a little above eighty. Internal migration runs from the rural interior toward Paris, the Rhône corridor and the Mediterranean south.

Languages

French is the official language of the Empire and the sole language of the central state. Occitan, Basque, Corsican and, in smaller numbers, Catalan and Franco-Provençal survive as regional languages, tolerated administratively and underfunded culturally. Breton and Gallo hold a different position, because the Duchy of Brittany legislates in them.

Religion

The Empire inherited the Revolutionary tradition of laïcité and the Bonapartist restoration preserved it strictly. The Catholic Church, suppressed under fascism, emerged from the period with a clean record and very little else, and regular practice has declined steadily. France’s Jewish community, devastated by the genocide, has rebuilt slowly, supported by restitution that French liberal opinion considers inadequate. Muslim communities, rooted in migration from North Africa, are a large and permanent part of French life, concentrated in Marseille, the Paris suburbs and the industrial cities, and whether the religious headscarf should be permitted in state schools is still argued without a ban having been passed.

Welfare and work

France has universal health insurance, strong trade unions, frequent strikes and a thirty-five-hour working week. The pension age is the most reliably explosive question in French domestic politics, and every attempt to raise it has produced a strike.

Education

French education is centralised, secular and demanding. The baccalauréat ends secondary school and the grandes écoles train the administrative, engineering and business elite. The fascist period and the genocide are compulsory in every school, civic instruction teaches Civic Dualism, and schoolchildren are taught what the Belgian border cost.

Cities

Paris is the capital, the imperial seat and the intellectual and cultural centre of the country in a sense no other French city rivals. Its centre came through the war intact, which is why it looks as the nineteenth century left it. Lyon is the second city and the industrial and gastronomic counterweight. Marseille, the great Mediterranean port, carries the Empire’s most visible immigrant history. Bordeaux anchors the wine economy and Toulouse the aviation industry.

Culture

The press and broadcasting

The press is partisan by habit and constitutionally protected by reaction: a state that watched its newspapers brought to heel through the paper supply writes its press guarantees with that year in mind. Le Monde, founded in 1944 as a clandestine resistance paper, is the paper of record. Le Figaro is imperialist and conservative, La Lanterne openly republican and anti-monarchical, and La Gazette de France the Orléanist daily. The state broadcaster operates under a charter of independence from the ministry of the day. Public argument about whether the Empire ought to exist at all is conducted openly in print and treated as evidence that Civic Dualism is working.

Arts and letters

Literature, philosophy and the essay hold a public standing in France that few states grant them. The postwar decades produced a literature preoccupied with complicity and conduct under an unfree government: Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about what ordinary people had done under the Rénovation Nationale state, and Simone de Beauvoir about what the settlement had and had not changed for women. Édith Piaf was the voice of the postwar city, and the New Wave directors, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard among them, made cinema a national art, supported by the state accordingly.

Food and drink

Regional cuisine is the most successful of France’s cultural exports and the most deliberately cultivated, and beneath the export version cooking remains fiercely regional: butter and cream in the north-west, olive oil in the Mediterranean south, goose and duck in the south-west, charcuterie in the Alps and Jura.

Sport

Cycling is the sport of the summer, and the Tour de France has passed through Belgium’s Nord since 1945 without anybody in France quite ceasing to regard it as a French stage. Football is the mass game of the cities and the overseas departments, and France won the World Cup in 1998. Rugby holds the south-west almost to the exclusion of anything else. Paris hosted the Olympic Games in 2024.

Public memory

France remembers the Second Great War not as a memory of an enemy but as a memory of itself. The resistance is commemorated without difficulty and the extent of complicity with a great deal of it.

The Memorial to the Deported stands in Paris beside the Chamber of Deputies, facing the Pont de la Concorde, where the police fired on the veterans in 1934, so that the place where the Republic lost its nerve and the memorial to what followed look at each other. The Day of Remembrance falls on the anniversary of the day in 1945 when the Allies opened Drancy-le-Nord, and the ceremony is led by the President of the Council and not by the Emperor, deliberately, because the genocide was the work of the French state and it is the state that answers for it. Sympathy for the Nationaux is criminal and near-invisible, and the nationalist right is careful to keep well clear of it.

Symbols

• Flag: the plain tricolour of blue, white and red. The gold imperial eagle appears only on the Emperor’s personal standard.
• Anthem: La Marseillaise, unchanged. Partant pour la Syrie, the anthem of the Second Empire, is the ducal anthem of Brittany and is not used for the Empire.
• Motto: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, kept by the constitution of 1946.
• National days: 14 July, the national day; 15 August, the Saint-Napoléon, a second public holiday; and the Day of Remembrance of the deported.

Assessment

The nation outlasts its forms. France has been a kingdom, two empires, three republics, a fascist state that kept the Republic’s name, and an empire again, and in every one of them it has been France. The French believe this more deeply than anything else about themselves, and the history bears them out. It is also the most comfortable thing a French person can believe, because it allows every regime’s crimes to belong to the regime rather than to the nation.

The Republic was destroyed by lawful instruments. Nobody seized it. A President used the emergency article the republicans had written in 1889, a demagogue used them exactly as written, and within a year there was nothing left to dismiss him with. The French case is the one every constitution-maker since has had to answer, and the answer the Empire gave, a constructive vote of no confidence and a Constitutional Council, is a direct reply to it.

Six million people were murdered, and ordinary French officials did it. The genocide was not the work of a few men in Paris. It was compiled by prefects, executed by police, scheduled by railway clerks and certified by mayors, and France has made the teaching of that fact compulsory, which is the most creditable thing it has done with its memory.

An imposed settlement worked. France did not choose its Emperor, its partition or its duchies. The victors chose them, and for eighty years they have produced a prosperous, secular, stable and argumentative democracy that has kept every promise the Tribunal’s generation doubted it would keep.

And Cherbourg is the settlement’s first real test. An Emperor who had never governed refused a law for the settlement’s sake, the public approved and the politicians did not, and no ministry can be formed. Whether a symbol above party can act without becoming a party is the question the 1946 constitution postponed, and France is now answering it.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Duchy of Normandy, the constituent duchy reigned over by the Hanoverian monarch
• Duchy of Brittany, the constituent duchy whose Duke is the Emperor himself
• Napoleon VII, the reigning Emperor, whose refusal of assent left France without a ministry
• Napoleon VI, the resistance commander who became Emperor
• The French Revolution
• French Third Republic, the republic of 1870 to 1934 and the emergency article of 1889
• The First Great War and The Second Great War
• Grand Duchy of Louisiane, the French-speaking grand duchy of the Orléans
• European Concert and Atlantic Treaty Organization

Categories

France · French Empire · Bonapartist · Constitutional Monarchy · Fascism · The Second Great War · Europe · Foreign Nations