France



France is a country whose metropolitan territory is located in Western Europe and that also comprises various overseas islands and territories located on other continents. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine River to the Atlantic Ocean.

France is the largest state in the European Union by area and the third largest in Europe behind Russia and Ukraine. France has been a major power for many centuries with strong economic, cultural, military and political influence. During the 17th and 18th centuries, France colonized great parts of North America; during the 19th and early 20th centuries, France built the second largest empire of the time, including large portions of North, West and Central Africa, Southeast Asia, and many Pacific islands.

For most of its history, France was an absolutist monarchy. After the French Revolution unseated the monarch of France in the last decade of the 18th century, France weent through a series of governmental systems and constitutions. Since 1958, it has been under the government of the Fifth Republic.

France in Agent of Byzantium
By the early 14th Century, the Byzantine Empire had recaptured most of the southern coast of France from the Franks.

France in Atlantis
France may lay claim to the discovery of Atlantis.

In 1452, the first humans to visit Atlantis were a Breton fishing crew, led by Francois Kersauzon. Subsequently, settlements led by Kersauzon were established in the continent, co-existing relatively peacefully with those established by the English and the Basques. After the province of Brittany was annexed to France in the next decades, the Breton colonies became French possessions. Thus, in a sense, France can claim to have "discovered" Atlantis.

In the 1750s, conflict in Europe spread to Atlantis. France and England were at war, and so the Atlanteans of each respective country went to war as well. Spain sided with France. Within a matter of months, the English defeated the French forces, and drove France out of Atlantis. France also lost most of its possessions in Terranova and India. From then on, France would be second-best to Great Britain as a power in the world.

When the Atlantean War of Independence broke out a dozen years later, France watched eagerly. Upon the Army of the Atlantean Assembly's victory at the Battle of Grigsby's Field and the publication of the Proclamation of Liberty, King Louis XVI declared war on Britain, and sent troops in Atlantis under the command of the Marquis de La Fayette. France's support proved quite important to Atlantis' ultimate victory over and independence from Britain.

In the early 19th century, France and Britain were again at war. The United States of Atlantis used the opportunity to support independence movements in the British colonies remaining in Terranova. Britain was not so completely distracted by France that it couldn't launch the punishing War of 1809 against Atlantis.

France in "Before the Beginning"
France played a substantial role in changing the course of human history when Inspector Jacob Dreyfus demonstrated that the Jews were indeed God's chosen people. France was one of the first countries to convert en masse to Judaism.

France in Curious Notions
France and its allies Britain and Russia were defeated by Germany in the brief war of 1914. France and Britain went to war with Germany in the late 1930s, but were again defeated, which cleared the way for Germany to take full control of Europe.

In the 1940s, the airship Hindenburg crashed in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of France. The wreckage was discovered in the late 21st Century.

France in The Disunited States of America
France remained one of the world's great powers well into the late 21st Century.

France in The Gladiator
France saw the first popular front in response to Nazi occupation during World War II. While it failed then, decades later, France saw another popular front which turned the country away from the United States and towards the Soviet Union, making France among the first countries in Western Europe to adopt communism.

France in In High Places
As with the rest of Europe, the Kingdom of France lost some 80% of its population to the Great Black Deaths. In the aftermath of that disaster, a charismatic leader named Henri arose in 1381 with a new message, but the Pope in Avignon and the King of France opposed Henri and executed him as a heretic when declared himself a son of God. The day after the execution, both men were killed in an accident. Henri's followers saw the accidental death of the Pope and the King as a miracle, and his faith was affirmed.

Muslims had invaded and captured much of southern France, including Lyon and Marseille, and creating two kingdoms, one principality, and one emirate, leaving a rump Kingdom of Versailles in the north. When Crosstime Traffic agents arrived to secretly explore this alternate, they found that - unlike in the Home timeline and various other alternates - here "France" was merely a name from old history, which did not refer to any present day entity. However, the language spoken in the Kingdom of Versailles was still known as "French".

France in A Different Flesh
The Kingdom of France's model of absolute monarchy and the divine right of kings was copied in England in the mid 17th century. English people uncomfortable with this made a mass exodus to North America, leading to the eventual founding of the Federated Commonwealths of America.

France in The Guns of the South
In 1864, while the United States were entangled in the Second American Revolution, France installed a monarchy in Mexico. In 1867, French troops assisted in quelling a republican uprising in Mexico, thus ensuring the survival of their client state.

John Slidell was the first Confederate envoy to France.

France in The Hot War
The French Fourth Republic had contributed troops to the UN forces during the Korean War. France also maintained an occupation zone in West Germany. Consequently, when the United States used atomic bombs in Manchuria on January 23, 1951, France was the target of a Soviet retaliatory attack on February 1, which destroyed Nancy and Rouen. The United Kingdom and West Germany also suffered the loss of two cities each.

French President Vincent Auriol immediately contacted U.S. President Harry Truman, as did British Prime Minister Clement Attlee. Both invoked the NATO treaty. Truman, in the hopes of mollifying his allies, ordered a mission to bomb Pechenga, the base where the Soviet bombers had flown out of. Truman even used flyers from Britain and France.

However that led to a series of tit-for-tat bombings between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. until the Soviet Union and its allies invaded West Germany on February 17, 1951. French troops joined the rest of NATO in fighting the Soviet onslaught. However, throughout February and March, the Soviets, using their numerical superiority, made substantial gains in West Germany. As the U.S. was relying heavily on France's shipping and transportation hubs, the Soviets destroyed Bordeaux with an atomic bomb in late April, 1951. Even more devastating for France was the atomic attack on Paris in June, 1951.

France in In the Presence of Mine Enemies
France was an occupied (as opposed to annexed) territory of the Greater German Reich, conquered at the beginning of the Second World War in 1940. As the French were considered Aryan, they avoided persecution. With the Axis victorious in Europe, France's colonies in Africa were divided among the Reich and Italy and its Asian colonies were carved up by Japan.

Under German rule, the motto of the French state Liberty, Equality, Fraternity! was replaced with Work, Family, Country. Though the older phrase was illegal, many French especially the pre-war generation remembered it as late as 2010. When Führer Heinz Buckliger instituted reforms in the empire, people too young to remember France's independence made use of the old motto as a rallying cry as they protested in the streets.

The premier of France denounced the 2011 Putsch against Buckliger, although not as strongly as some other countries did.

France in "Ils ne passeront pas"
France steadfastly refused to let German forces pass Verdun, making that battle the longest and most horrible battle of World War I. Indeed, French soldiers Pierre Barres and Jacques Fonsagrive had been through such atrocity that when God's judgment came (as foretold in the Book of Revelation), they assumed they'd been the victims of a German weapon, and reacted quite blasely, killing all of the demonic creatures that appeared in No Man's Land.

France in Joe Steele
The government and people of France were initially hesitant to face the threat posed by Adolf Hitler's Germany. In September 1938, despite pledges of support from U.S. President Joe Steele and Soviet leader Leon Trotsky, French Premier Edouard Daladier and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain agreed to transfer the Sudetenland to Germany after repeated demands by Hitler.

Almost a year later, Hitler was making territorial demands on Poland. Britain and France attempted to cement an alliance with Trotsky in August, 1939, who instead entered into a non-aggression pact with Hitler. Germany declared war on Poland on September 1, 1939, and Britain and France declared war on Germany. The Soviet Union attacked Poland two weeks later. The Allied war effort was tentative at best, and by May 1940, Germany had occupied Norway and Denmark, and had begun the invasion of the Low Countries. In the face of these losses, Chamberlain had lost the confidence of the House of Commons, and resigned. He was succeeded by Winston Churchill.

Germany invaded France in May 1940. After six weeks, France capitulated, and British forces were driven from the Continent. France remained under German occupation until 1944, when a multi-national coalition successfully invaded France. While bloody, it was successful leading to the eventual liberation of France and the defeat of Germany. While France fell under the influence of the U.S., there were sufficient leftist elements, that Trotsky soon stirred up trouble in France with leftist popular fronts.

France in "Les Mortes d'Arthur"
France was the leading country of United Europe with French being its official language. In addition, French had once more become the lingua franca of international relations. No one was considered educated unless they could speak good French. Otherwise, they were viewed as parochial.

France in Ruled Britannia
The Kingdom of France was one of the two great Catholic powers in western Europe; the other was Spain. Despite their shared religion, the Hapsburg dynasty that ruled Spain considered France an enemy, due to the fact that France was physically between Spain and its European territories. Philip II fought a war with France during his reign. France provided limited support for the Protestant anti-Hapsburg rebellion in the Netherlands in the 1570s and 80s.

France in "Someone Is Stealing the Great Throne Rooms of the Galaxy"
France was a second-rate country on a third-rate continent on the most insignificant planet in the galaxy. Its palace at Versailles became the scene of the fourth theft of a throne room and antechamber during a wave of similar crimes.

The Space Patrol ordered Rufus Q Shupilluliumash to begin investigating the series of crimes in France. He was promptly arrested by the French gendarmerie, without even having insulted the French as he did the people on almost every other planet he visited. He found the food terrible. When he expressed this to his local Space Patrol colleagues, they chorused "And the portions are so small!" Rufus wondered how they knew what the prison food was like.

France in Southern Victory
France, along with Britain, was a staunch ally of the Confederate States for most of that country's history. During the period of the Second Empire, Emperor Napoleon III supported the Confederate States in the War of Secession, allowing France to install Maximilian I as Emperor of Mexico in violation of the Monroe Doctrine, which the defeated United States was unable to enforce.

France went down to defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, losing the province of Alsace and and most of the province of Lorraine. The rapid Prussian victory over one of the architects of the Union's humiliating defeat was one of the factors leading to the eventual alliance between the United States and the German Empire.

Now reconstituted as the Third Republic, France also supported the Confederates in the Second Mexican War but, unlike Britain, committed very few military forces to North America beyond a naval raid on Los Angeles, California.

France later joined the CS, Britain, and Russia in the Quadruple Entente and was invaded and defeated by Germany in the Great War, after three years of bloody stalemate. The pivotal moment came at the Battle of Verdun, when the French military was defeated by Germany despite the French government's announcement that it would fight on to victory. Humiliated and disillusioned, the French military began a mutiny in 1917. In Spring 1917, Russia exited the war, and France quickly sued for peace itself.

Following the war, and the harsh peace terms imposed by the Germans, the Third Republic collapsed as the French turned to the revanchist monarchist party Action Francaise to restore France to its former position of power. In 1930, Charles XI became King of France and cooperated with his fellow Entente revanchist leaders in the rearmament of the Entente. Confederate President Jake Featherston sent Anne Colleton to France as special ambassador plenipotentiary in 1934. She returned to Virginia in July 1936 aboard the new ocean liner Charles XI with an agreement from the French government.

With Britain, France supported the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War and defeated the German-backed Monarchists. In 1940, Charles called for plebiscites in Alsace-Lorraine, which had been the separate French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. Upon the death of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany in 1941, France launched an attack on Germany which it had coordinated with similar attacks by Britain and Russia.

The Entente was able to maintain the offensive until 1943. Although initially the most belligerent of the Entente, France quickly became a junior partner to Britain. Germany halted the Anglo-French force drive in the Netherlands, and turned it back. Early in 1944, Paris became the second Entente capital destroyed by a German superbomb. Charles XI was killed. His successor, Louis XIX, was initally defiant, but soon sued for peace.

France in "The Catcher in the Rhine"
On his visit to France, a young American tourist, to his horror, was served snails. The experience left the young tourist with a poor impression of the French.

France in The Man With the Iron Heart
France had been humiliated by its defeat and occupation by Germany at the outset of World War II. It lay under German rule until 1944, when joint American and British forces (along with some French patriots who'd escaped their home) invaded France and began pushing Germany back. Simultaneously, German forces were being devastated in the war against the Soviet Union to the east.

By 1945, the war was over, and France occupied a portion of Western Germany. Unfortunately, the knowledge that France had had to be liberated by the Anglo-Americans was embittering to most of the French government and military. Charles de Gaulle followed a policy of minimal cooperation with his allies, while at the same time imposing a vengeful peace on its zone of Germany.

With the arrival of the German Freedom Front under Reinhard Heydrich, France found itself in the same quagmire as the US, Britain and the USSR. It responded with as much viciousness to the GFF as possible, often rivaling the USSR. Unlike the Anglo-Americans, France showed no inclination to pull out of Germany, even after a GFF agent leveled the Eiffel Tower in Paris in 1946. Even as the Americans actually left in 1948, the French tightened their grip on their occupation zone.

France in The Two Georges
France and Spain were partners in the Holy Alliance. As such, France controlled North Africa west of the Ottoman Empire and Central Africa excluding the coastal regions which were British African Possessions and Portuguese Angola and Mozambique. It did include the Island of Madagascar. France also controlled Indochina. It had lost New France (renamed the province of Quebec) to Great Britain during the Seven Years' War and so had no North American possessions.

France in The War That Came Early
In September 1938, the French Third Republic, like Britain, was obligated by treaty to protect Czechoslovakia from German aggression, French Premier Edouard Daladier and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain were desperate to avoid the need to fight another war against Germany. Thus, both were prepared to allow Adolf Hitler to seize the Sudetenland unchallenged. However, when news of the assassination of Konrad Henlein reached the conference, Daladier and Chamberlain both assumed Hitler had arranged the event to give himself an excuse to invade Czechoslovakia. He had not, but he seized upon the opportunity to do so anyway, prompting France and Britain to go to war with Germany.

French troops did cross over into German territory in October, 1938. French military intelligence was convinced that Germany was far stronger militarily than it actually was, so little fighting was done on German soil. Once Czechoslovakia was subdued, Germany turned on France with a vengeance. Simultaneously, Germany invaded the Low Countries before invading France proper in an attempt to impliment the Schlieffen Plan, much as it had in 1914. Throughout much the remainder 1938 and into the Spring of 1939, it did appear that the German's would successfully take Paris. Paris proper was even subject to aerial bombardment. However, Anglo-French forces were able to finally bring the German drive to halt in April, 1939.

After nearly two years of warfare which saw only the slowest of gains in forcing German troops out of France, as well as the loss of Norway to German occupation, Chamberlain and Daladier accepted a mid-1940 proposal made by Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess in which both Britain and France ended their war with Germany, and joined Germany's war against the Soviet Union. By the end of 1940, French troops were fighting in Poland and in the Soviet Union proper. This move was not universally popular.

Still, the new coalition was quite successful as 1940 passed into 1941. By mid-1941, French troops were part had pushed deep into Russian territory. However, Daladier made certain to keep his country's options open. In the Spring of 1941, the British military, in an unprecedented move, overthrew the government of Neville Chamberlain's successor, Sir Horace Wilson The interim government then declared war on Germany.

France did not follow immediately follow suit. Indeed, for much of the rest of the year, Britain was concerned that Hitler might convince France to attack the U.K. France did not follow this plan, instead continuing France's war in Russia, while simultaneously taking steps in the event of renewed war with Germany. In the summer, France began supplying the Spanish Republic again. Closer to home, Daladier ordered the Maginot Line expanded from the Belgian border to the English Channel. The move was not unnoticed.

France also began negotiations with the British and the Soviet Union. By the end of 1941, negotiations had been completed, and France ceased to be at war with the USSR. This became official one night when French forces launched green flares into the sky. French troops, despite German efforts, quickly surrendered en masse to the Soviets as part of the political realignment. They were then returned to French territory.

After the dissolution of the Hess Agreement, the Second World War continued on as a series of almost isolated conflicts among a relatively stable line-up of belligerents from 1942 to late 1943. Britain, France, and the USSR concentrated on defeating Germany in Europe and in North Africa. Japan battled the Western powers in the Pacific. The Spanish Civil War raged on with increased Western support. While Britain and France were at war with Japan, they could spare few resources for the fight, and the U.S. had to shoulder the burden. Conversely, while the U.S. was able to provide financial aid and supplies to the Allies, no state of war existed between the U.S. and Germany.

With the return of a two-front war, Hitler's popularity at home waned throughout in 1942 and 1943. In the West, the Allies made substantial gains in the Low Countries. In the East, Soviet troops pushed through Ukraine towards Poland. The approaching Allied pincers continued to gradually but steadily throughout the next year and a half.

After Hitler declared war on the United States in March, 1944, several military leaders formed the Committee for the Salvation of the German Nation, with General Heinz Guderian as their leader. When Hitler decided to broadcast a speech from Münster in an attempt to regain the country's trust, the group successfully assassinated him with a bomb, despite the heavy security measures the SS put into place. A civil war broke out almost immediately. Several of Hitler's would-be successors were arrested or killed. Ultimately, Guderian and the Committee triumphed, and fighting ceased on all fronts in Europe.

Germany negotiated a peace treaty with Britain, France and the Soviet Union. (The U.S. also participated in the negotiations, but in a very junior capacity in light of the lack of U.S. troops in Europe.) Germany agreed to withdraw from the Low Countries, Denmark and Norway along with the areas of the USSR it still occupied (mostly Belarus and Ukraine). In return, the pre-war annexation of Austria was confirmed and the Sudetenland annexation which was the causa belli was allowed. Czechoslovakia was broken up into the puppet state of Slovakia and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

In the end, France paid a steep price for almost no gain.

France in "Uncle Alf"
The French Third Republic met defeat at the hands of Germany in 1914, when General Alfred von Schlieffen personally oversaw his plan for a two-front war.

In 1929, France was still occupied by the Kaiserreich and quite restive. Feldwebel Adolf Hitler of the Feldgendarmerie was sent to Lille, France to capture communist agitator, Jacques Doriot. He was disgusted by the degraded status of the French, and was quite confident that Germany had done the right thing in occupying the country.

France in Worldwar
The French Third Republic had been a member of the Allies until it was defeated in 1940 during a blitzkrieg campaign at the onset of World War II. In the aftermath, France and her empire was dived into Free France, which sided with the Allies, and Vichy France, which sided with the Germans.

When the Race arrived in June, 1942, Spain was one of their landing points. After subduing Spain, they then invaded Vichy France from across the Pyrenees Throughout the war, the Race fought the Germans for control of France, with the help of the Royal Air Force, operating out of the UK. The only major operations in France occurred during 1943, when the Race lunched an offensive that drove to the Rhine river. This was halted due to the defection of Shiplord Straha, to the US, so southern France was instead used as a launching pad for the failed Invasion of the UK. After this fiasco, the Race continued with its drive into southern Germany, only to be blunted by Germany's first explosive-metal bomb. For the rest of the war, France remained a major theater of operations mainly for the RAF, until the Peace of Cairo in 1944. There, the whole of France was recognized as German territory and the Race withdrew back into Spain. Vichy France was disbanded and absorbed into Germany while the rest of its empire was annexed by the Race. Free France was its self reduced to the South Pacific islands of French Polynesia, with their headquarters in Tahiti.

In the years after the peace, southern France was a largely lawless area where smugglers, pickpockets, ginger dealers, thieves, political subversives, German secret policemen and members of the Race lived in close quarters. In 1965, tensions between Germany and the Race erupted into the Race-German War. France was drawn into the conflict when the Race attempted to open a secondary front by invading southern France from Spain. Although this invasion was soundly defeated, France suffered atomic strikes in the cities of Lyon and Marseilles.

As the war quickly proved disastrous for Germany, the surviving German government sought peace, using the Soviet Union as a mediator. Among the terms of the Treaty of Moscow was the creation of an independent Fourth Republic of France, with Jacques Doriot as its most important human official. Although the Race didn't occupy France, the Fourth Republic relied on the Race's protection from external threats. Internally, it was in many respects its own worst enemy: groups informally known as "purification squads" made it their business to hunt down and round up any French citizens who collaborated with the Germans. Given the duration of the German occupation, virtually everyone had some dealings with Germans, and so could be called a collaborator with very little evidence.