Portal:France

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Map of France in the world and position of its largest single land territory in continental Europe

France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. It also includes overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, giving it one of the largest discontiguous exclusive economic zones in the world. Metropolitan France shares borders with Belgium and Luxembourg to the north, Germany to the north east, Switzerland to the east, Italy and Monaco to the south east, Andorra and Spain to the south, and a maritime border with the United Kingdom to the north west. Its metropolitan area extends from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea. Its overseas territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the North Atlantic, the French West Indies, and many islands in Oceania and the Indian Ocean. Its eighteen integral regions (five of which are overseas) span a combined area of 643,801 km2 (248,573 sq mi) and have a total population of 68.4 million . France is a unitary semi-presidential republic with its capital in Paris, the country's largest city and main cultural and commercial centre; other major urban areas include Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, Lille, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Nantes, and Nice.

Metropolitan France was settled during the Iron Age by Celtic tribes known as Gauls before Rome annexed the area in 51 BC, leading to a distinct Gallo-Roman culture. In the Early Middle Ages, the Germanic Franks formed the Kingdom of Francia, which became the heartland of the Carolingian Empire. The Treaty of Verdun of 843 partitioned the empire, with West Francia evolving into the Kingdom of France. In the High Middle Ages, France was a powerful but decentralized feudal kingdom, but from the mid-14th to the mid-15th centuries, France was plunged into a dynastic conflict with England known as the Hundred Years' War. In the 16th century, the French Renaissance saw culture flourish and a French colonial empire rise. Internally, France was dominated by the conflict with the House of Habsburg and the French Wars of Religion between Catholics and Huguenots. France was successful in the Thirty Years' War and further increased its influence during the reign of Louis XIV.

The French Revolution of 1789 overthrew the Ancien Régime and produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which expresses the nation's ideals to this day. France reached its political and military zenith in the early 19th century under Napoleon Bonaparte, subjugating part of continental Europe and establishing the First French Empire. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars significantly shaped the course of European history. The collapse of the empire initiated a period of relative decline, in which France endured the Bourbon Restoration until the founding of the French Second Republic which was succeeded by the Second French Empire upon Napoleon III's takeover. His empire collapsed during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. This led to the establishment of the Third French Republic, and subsequent decades saw a period of economic prosperity and cultural and scientific flourishing known as the Belle Époque. France was one of the major participants of World War I, from which it emerged victorious at great human and economic cost. It was among the Allied powers of World War II, but it surrendered and was occupied by the Axis in 1940. Following its liberation in 1944, the short-lived Fourth Republic was established and later dissolved in the course of the defeat in the Algerian War. The current Fifth Republic was formed in 1958 by Charles de Gaulle. Algeria and most French colonies became independent in the 1960s, with the majority retaining close economic and military ties with France.

France retains its centuries-long status as a global centre of art, science, and philosophy. It hosts the third-largest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites and is the world's leading tourist destination, receiving 100 million foreign visitors in 2023. France is a developed country with a high nominal per capita income globally, and its advanced economy ranks among the largest in the world. It is a great power, being one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and an official nuclear-weapon state. France is a founding and leading member of the European Union and the eurozone, as well as a key member of the Group of Seven, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and Francophonie. (Full article...)

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Map showing the course of the battle from 8–17 August 1944

The Falaise pocket or Battle of the Falaise pocket (German: Kessel von Falaise; 12–21 August 1944) was the decisive engagement of the Battle of Normandy in the Second World War. Allied forces formed a pocket around Falaise, Calvados, in which German Army Group B, consisting of the 7th Army and the Fifth Panzer Army (formerly Panzergruppe West), were encircled by the Western Allies. The battle resulted in the destruction of most of Army Group B west of the Seine, which opened the way to Paris and the Franco-German border.

Six weeks after the 6 June 1944 Allied invasion of Normandy, German forces were in turmoil, having expended irreplaceable resources defending the frontline and with Allied air superiority threatening the availability of food and ammunition. However, on the Allied side, British forces had expected to liberate Caen immediately after the invasion, an operation which ended up taking nearly two months, and US forces had expected to control Saint-Lô by the 7 June, yet German resistance delayed this until after Caen's liberation. (Full article...)
Émile Michel Hyacinthe Lemoine (1840–1912) was a French civil engineer and a mathematician, a geometer in particular. He was educated at a variety of institutions, including the Prytanée National Militaire and, most notably, the École Polytechnique. Lemoine taught as a private tutor for a short period after his graduation from the latter school.

Lemoine is best known for his proof of the existence of the Lemoine point (or the symmedian point) of a triangle. Other mathematical work includes a system he called Géométrographie and a method which related algebraic expressions to geometric objects. He has been called a co-founder of modern triangle geometry, as many of its characteristics are present in his work.

For most of his life, Lemoine was a professor of mathematics at the École Polytechnique. In later years, he worked as a civil engineer in Paris, and he also took an amateur's interest in music. During his tenure at the École Polytechnique and as a civil engineer, Lemoine published several papers on mathematics, most of which are included in a fourteen-page section in Nathan Altshiller Court's College Geometry. Additionally, he founded a mathematical journal titled, L'intermédiaire des mathématiciens.

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A Rouennaise duckling served with Rouennaise sauce
Pressed duck (French: canard à la presse, caneton à la presse, canard à la rouennaise, caneton à la rouennaise or canard au sang) is a traditional French dish. The complex dish is a specialty of Rouen and its creation attributed to an innkeeper from the city of Duclair. Since the 19th century, it has also been a specialty of the Tour d'Argent restaurant in Paris where it is formally known as the Caneton Tour d'Argent (Tour d'Argent duckling). It consists of various parts of a duck served in a sauce of its blood and bone marrow, which is extracted by way of a press. It has been considered "the height of elegance." (Full article...)

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Year-old jenny foal

The Baudet du Poitou, also called the Poitevin or Poitou donkey, is a French breed of donkey. It is one of the largest breeds, and jacks (donkey stallions) were bred to mares of the Poitevin horse breed to produce Poitevin mules, which were formerly in worldwide demand for agricultural and other work. The Baudet has a distinctive coat, which hangs in long, ungroomed locks or cadenettes.

The Baudet developed in the former province of Poitou, possibly from donkeys introduced to the area by the Romans. They may have been a status symbol during the Middle Ages, and by the early 18th century, their physical characteristics had been established. A studbook for the breed was established in France in 1884, and the 19th and early 20th centuries saw them being used for the production of mules throughout Europe. During this same time, Poitou bloodlines were also used to develop other donkey breeds, including the American Mammoth Jack in the United States. (Full article...)
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18 July 2024 –
Seven people from the same family, including three young children and a teenager, are killed, another is injured and thirty suffer smoke inhalation in an arson attack in Nice, France. (BBC News)
16 July 2024 – 2024 French legislative election
French President Emmanuel Macron approves the resignation request of Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, who will continue to serve as head of the transitional caretaker government. (AP)
13 July 2024 –
Three people are killed and four injured after a mass shooting at a birthday party in Espinasse-Vozelle, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France. The perpetrator kills himself. (France 3 Régions)
11 July 2024 –
A fire damages the spire of the 11th-century Rouen Cathedral, in Normandy, France, while undergoing restoration. No further damage or injuries are reported. (Reuters)

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Hell, as illustrated in Hortus deliciarum.

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