Category:Heads of State of France

These characters served as the head of state of France in OTL, or in one or more Harry Turtledove timelines, or both. This category should serve as a catch-all for miscellaneous French heads of state. Monarchs and presidents should be listed in their own categories.

Throughout the majority of its history, France has been a monarchy and is generally considered to have begun with the Frankish Kingdom in 486. It continued on until 1792, when the reigning monarch, Louis XVI was overthrown, and the First Republic was established. However, this soon fell to the First Empire of Napoleon in 1804. Napoleon was overthrown in 1814, and made an ultimately unsuccessful bid to regain the crown the following year. In the meantime, the House of Bourbon was restored. This Bourbon Restoration then lasted until the so-called July Monarchy of 1830, which saw Louis-Phillipe I displace Charles X and proclaim himself "Monarach of the French" in a bid to create a more populist monarchy. This monarchy held until the Revolution of 1848 and the brief Second Republic, which fell in short order to Napoleon III's Second Empire in 1852, which in turn fell in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and was succeeded by the Third Republic. No serious attempts to restore the monarchy have been made since the fall of the Second Empire.

The Third Republic continued until World War II. The head of state was the President, a largely ceremonial office. As a consequence of France's initial defeat in 1940, the Third Republic was terminated, and the authoritarian French State was created, with Philippe Pétain as its only Chief of State. With France's liberation in 1944, a Fourth Republic was created in 1946, with a ceremonial president as the head of state. However, that republic suffered many of the same problems as the Third Republic. In 1958, a new constitution was created, and the Fifth Republic came into being. The presidency of the Fifth Republic wields a great deal of power.