© Carl Court/Getty ImagesFILE PHOTO. A protester holds a placard next to fire during a rally against pension reforms on March 28, 2023 in Paris, France.
France is a medium-sized country with a wide range of accents, landscapes, and culinary traditions. In many ways, France, more than any other European country, is a symbol of the European Union. A crossroads for Celtic, Frankish, Iberian, and Latin populations, its foundations are not so much to be found in a cultural identity - they lay more in the administrative process that eventually led to the creation of the state.
A history of centralization of powerThe history of France is a violent and slow one. The term 'France' did not appear officially until around 1190, when Philippe Auguste started to use the expression 'Rex Franciae' (King of France) instead of 'Rex Francorum' (King of the Franks). If it is possible to take this period as the time of the emergence of a national consciousness, one needs to remember that at the time, the country did not include Provence, Savoy, part of Burgundy, the Alsace-Lorraine, whereas all the west of France, from Normandy to the Pyrenees, was under the influence of the British House of the Plantagenets.
The French historian Barthelemy Pocquet du Haut-Jusse wrote in 1946: "Above all, let us not forget that France in the twelfth century was a monarchy only in appearance. Under the honorary presidency of a good-natured royalty, a robust confederation of large fiefdoms had been created in the tenth century, flourishing in the twelfth."
Maps indicate that in this period, the royal domain was limited to Paris and its southern region.
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