University of Paris
The University of Paris, metonymically known as the Sorbonne, was a university in Paris, active 1150–1793, 1806–1970. Emerging around 1150 as a corporation associated with the cathedral school of Notre Dame de Paris, it was considered the second oldest university in Europe. Chartered in 1200 by King Philip II of France and recognised in 1215 by Pope Innocent III, it was often nicknamed after its theological College of Sorbonne, in turn founded by Robert de Sorbon and chartered by French King Saint Louis around 1257. Internationally reputed for its academic performance in the humanities since the Middle Ages – notably in theology and philosophy – it introduced several academic standards and traditions that have endured since and spread internationally, such as doctoral degrees and student nations. Vast numbers of popes, royalty and intellectuals were educated at the University of Paris. A few of the colleges of the time are still visible close to Pantheon and Luxembourg Gardens: Collège des Bernardins, Hotel de Cluny, College Sainte Barbe, College d'Harcourt, Cordeliers.
In 1793, during the French Revolution, the university was closed and by Item-27 of the Revolutionary Convention, the college endowments and buildings were sold. A new University of France replaced it in 1806 with four independent faculties: the Faculty of Humanities, the Faculty of Law, the Faculty of Science, the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Theology. In 1970, following the May 1968 events, the university was divided into 13 autonomous universities. Although all the thirteen universities that resulted of the original University of Paris split can be considered its inheritors, just three universities of the post-1968 universities embodied direct faculties successors while inheriting the name "Sorbonne", as well as its physical location in the Latin Quarter: the Pantheon-Sorbonne University. From 2010, University of Paris successors started to reorganise themselves into different groups of universities and institutions that were upgraded to "pôles de recherche et d'enseignement supérieur".
As a result, various university groups exist in the Paris area, among them Sorbonne Paris Cité, Sorbonne Universities, the University of Paris-Saclay, Paris Lumiéres, Paris-Seine, so on. In January 2018, two of the inheritors of the old University of Paris, Paris-Sorbonne University and Pierre and Marie Curie University, merged into a single university called Sorbonne University. In 2019, two other inheritors of the University of Paris, namely Paris Diderot University and Paris Descartes University, are expected to merge. In 1150, the future University of Paris was a student-teacher corporation operating as an annex of the Notre-Dame cathedral school; the earliest historical reference to it is found in Matthew of Paris' reference to the studies of his own teacher and his acceptance into "the fellowship of the elect Masters" there in about 1170, it is known that Pope Innocent III completed his studies there in 1182 at the age of 21. The corporation was formally recognised as an "Universitas" in an edict by King Philippe-Auguste in 1200: in it, among other accommodations granted to future students, he allowed the corporation to operate under ecclesiastic law which would be governed by the elders of the Notre-Dame Cathedral school, assured all those completing courses there that they would be granted a diploma.
The university had four faculties: Arts, Medicine and Theology. The Faculty of Arts was the lowest in rank, but the largest, as students had to graduate there in order to be admitted to one of the higher faculties; the students were divided into four nationes according to language or regional origin: France, Normandy and England. The last came to be known as the Alemannian nation. Recruitment to each nation was wider than the names might imply: the English-German nation included students from Scandinavia and Eastern Europe; the faculty and nation system of the University of Paris became the model for all medieval universities. Under the governance of the Church, students wore robes and shaved the tops of their heads in tonsure, to signify they were under the protection of the church. Students followed the rules and laws of the Church and were not subject to the king's laws or courts; this presented problems for the city of Paris, as students ran wild, its official had to appeal to Church courts for justice.
Students were very young, entering the school at 13 or 14 years of age and staying for six to 12 years. Three schools were famous in Paris: the palatine or palace school, the school of Notre-Dame, that of Sainte-Geneviève Abbey; the decline of royalty brought about the decline of the first. The other two did not have much visibility in the early centuries; the glory of the palatine school doubtless eclipsed theirs, until it gave way to them. These two centres were much frequented and many of their masters were esteemed for their learning; the first renowned professor at the school of Ste-Geneviève was Hubold, who lived in the tenth century. Not content with the courses at Liège, he continued his studies at Paris, entered or allied himself with the chapter of Ste-Geneviève, attracted many pupils via his teaching. Distinguished professors from the school of Notre-Dame in the eleventh century incl
Physics
Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its motion, behavior through space and time, that studies the related entities of energy and force. Physics is one of the most fundamental scientific disciplines, its main goal is to understand how the universe behaves. Physics is one of the oldest academic disciplines and, through its inclusion of astronomy the oldest. Over much of the past two millennia, chemistry and certain branches of mathematics, were a part of natural philosophy, but during the scientific revolution in the 17th century these natural sciences emerged as unique research endeavors in their own right. Physics intersects with many interdisciplinary areas of research, such as biophysics and quantum chemistry, the boundaries of physics which are not rigidly defined. New ideas in physics explain the fundamental mechanisms studied by other sciences and suggest new avenues of research in academic disciplines such as mathematics and philosophy. Advances in physics enable advances in new technologies.
For example, advances in the understanding of electromagnetism and nuclear physics led directly to the development of new products that have transformed modern-day society, such as television, domestic appliances, nuclear weapons. Astronomy is one of the oldest natural sciences. Early civilizations dating back to beyond 3000 BCE, such as the Sumerians, ancient Egyptians, the Indus Valley Civilization, had a predictive knowledge and a basic understanding of the motions of the Sun and stars; the stars and planets were worshipped, believed to represent gods. While the explanations for the observed positions of the stars were unscientific and lacking in evidence, these early observations laid the foundation for astronomy, as the stars were found to traverse great circles across the sky, which however did not explain the positions of the planets. According to Asger Aaboe, the origins of Western astronomy can be found in Mesopotamia, all Western efforts in the exact sciences are descended from late Babylonian astronomy.
Egyptian astronomers left monuments showing knowledge of the constellations and the motions of the celestial bodies, while Greek poet Homer wrote of various celestial objects in his Iliad and Odyssey. Natural philosophy has its origins in Greece during the Archaic period, when pre-Socratic philosophers like Thales rejected non-naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena and proclaimed that every event had a natural cause, they proposed ideas verified by reason and observation, many of their hypotheses proved successful in experiment. The Western Roman Empire fell in the fifth century, this resulted in a decline in intellectual pursuits in the western part of Europe. By contrast, the Eastern Roman Empire resisted the attacks from the barbarians, continued to advance various fields of learning, including physics. In the sixth century Isidore of Miletus created an important compilation of Archimedes' works that are copied in the Archimedes Palimpsest. In sixth century Europe John Philoponus, a Byzantine scholar, questioned Aristotle's teaching of physics and noting its flaws.
He introduced the theory of impetus. Aristotle's physics was not scrutinized until John Philoponus appeared, unlike Aristotle who based his physics on verbal argument, Philoponus relied on observation. On Aristotle's physics John Philoponus wrote: “But this is erroneous, our view may be corroborated by actual observation more than by any sort of verbal argument. For if you let fall from the same height two weights of which one is many times as heavy as the other, you will see that the ratio of the times required for the motion does not depend on the ratio of the weights, but that the difference in time is a small one, and so, if the difference in the weights is not considerable, that is, of one is, let us say, double the other, there will be no difference, or else an imperceptible difference, in time, though the difference in weight is by no means negligible, with one body weighing twice as much as the other”John Philoponus' criticism of Aristotelian principles of physics served as an inspiration for Galileo Galilei ten centuries during the Scientific Revolution.
Galileo cited Philoponus in his works when arguing that Aristotelian physics was flawed. In the 1300s Jean Buridan, a teacher in the faculty of arts at the University of Paris, developed the concept of impetus, it was a step toward the modern ideas of momentum. Islamic scholarship inherited Aristotelian physics from the Greeks and during the Islamic Golden Age developed it further placing emphasis on observation and a priori reasoning, developing early forms of the scientific method; the most notable innovations were in the field of optics and vision, which came from the works of many scientists like Ibn Sahl, Al-Kindi, Ibn al-Haytham, Al-Farisi and Avicenna. The most notable work was The Book of Optics, written by Ibn al-Haytham, in which he conclusively disproved the ancient Greek idea about vision, but came up with a new theory. In the book, he presented a study of the phenomenon of the camera obscura (his thousand-year-old
PSL Research University
Université PSL is a French collegiate university organized as a ComUE. PSL is made up of 9 members, it receives support from 3 national research entities. PSL is located in Paris, with its main sites in the Latin Quarter, at the Jourdan campus, at Porte Dauphine, in northern Paris, at Carré Richelieu. PSL awards Bachelor’s, Master’s, PhD diplomas for its member schools & institutes, it offers an education based on research and interdisciplinary instruction, its 20,000 students have access to a broad range of disciplines in science, engineering and social science, the arts. Three of PSL University’s programs, from Bachelor's through PhD level, include CPES multidisciplinary undergraduate degree, ICFP-ENS, SACRe doctoral program. PSL has 181 laboratories and 101 ERC grants, runs cross-cutting flagship programs such as the Scripta Interdisciplinary and Strategic Research Initiative, the PSL Mathematics program, the Q-Life Institut. PSL students and researchers have access to 92 specialized and general libraries and photo libraries as well as online databases and journals.
PSL has framework agreements with the University of Cambridge, UCL, EPFL, New York University, Beijing University, Tsinghua University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. In the early 2000s, after the Shanghai rankings were published in 2003 and the French secretary of state for science research and development took stock of the state of research in France. In 2004, institutions in the Latin Quarter began thinking of how to join forces to boost their international visibility; the French law on research enacted in 2006, which encouraged the formation of research networks, paved the way for new projects such as Paris Universitas, PRES ParisTech and an early version of the PSL project. This new organization combined five institutions of higher education in the Latin Quarter: Chimie ParisTech, Collège de France, École normale supérieure, École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la ville de Paris, the Observatoire de Paris. Together, they adopted the status of a scientific cooperation foundation.
The new entity, called “Paris Sciences et Lettres - Quartier Latin,” was conceived as a scientific alliance. In 2011, the five institutions submitted a joint application for the Initiatives for Excellence as part of France’s Investments for the Future program, causing the project to evolve into a new form of French university; this university would have 70% of its students at the Master’s and PhD level and offer a Bachelor's program, with an emphasis on equal opportunity students. In 2011, the five institutions submitted a joint application for a government funding opportunity among higher education institutions. Between 2011 and 2012, ten new institutions joined the foundation: Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique, Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, La Fémis, Pierre-Gilles de Gennes Foundation for Research, Institut Curie, Institut Louis-Bachelier, MINES ParisTech and Université Paris-Dauphine · ·.
Their arrival reinforced PSL’s scientific potential in the fields of engineering, the arts, management. In 2014, another four institutions specializing in humanities and social science joined the association: École Française d'Extrême-Orient, École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, École Nationale des Chartes, École Pratique des Hautes Etudes. In 2015, PSL organized itself into a university community. PSL began awarding PhDs at that point. In 2010, the French government launched a call for proposals to boost higher education: the Investing for the Future program. PSL has responded to several calls for proposals. In 2011, with the Initiatives for Excellence call for proposals, PSL was one of the first three projects selected, along with Université de Bordeaux and Université de Strasbourg. Although the project’s diverse participants have sometimes been cited as a weakness, PSL’s proponents emphasize the complementary nature of its institutions and the potential for collaboration; this funding has supported the creation of 11 Laboratories of excellence within PSL: CelTisPhyBio, DCBIOL, DEEP, DYNAMO, ENS-ICFP, ESEP, IEC, IPGG, MemoLife, TransferS, WIFI.
In 2014, the Corail, HaStec, TEPSIS Labex laboratories joined the list with EHESS and EPHE becoming members of PSL. In 2011, PSL’s institutions presented projects under the "Equipped with excellence" program. Of the 10 initial submissions, they were granted 8 Equipex facilities: BEDOFIH, D-FIH, Equip@Meso, ICGex, IPGG, Paris-en-Resonnance, Ultrabrain; these projects received funding in amounts ranging from €2 to €10 million. In 2017, PSL was awarded funding for two university research schools. In 2017, after a detailed process of consideration, 9 institutions agreed to set up an integrated budget and a multi-year strategy for academic recruitment, as well as to create a number of shared platforms and services. Chimie ParisTech, École Nationale des Chartes, École Normale Supérieure, École Pratique des Hautes Etudes, ESPCI Paris, Institut Curie, Observatoire de Paris, MINES ParisTech, Université Paris-Dauphine decided to jointly form PSL U
History
History is the study of the past as it is described in written documents. Events occurring before written record are considered prehistory, it is an umbrella term that relates to past events as well as the memory, collection, organization and interpretation of information about these events. Scholars who write about history are called historians. History can refer to the academic discipline which uses a narrative to examine and analyse a sequence of past events, objectively determine the patterns of cause and effect that determine them. Historians sometimes debate the nature of history and its usefulness by discussing the study of the discipline as an end in itself and as a way of providing "perspective" on the problems of the present. Stories common to a particular culture, but not supported by external sources, are classified as cultural heritage or legends, because they do not show the "disinterested investigation" required of the discipline of history. Herodotus, a 5th-century BC Greek historian is considered within the Western tradition to be the "father of history", along with his contemporary Thucydides, helped form the foundations for the modern study of human history.
Their works continue to be read today, the gap between the culture-focused Herodotus and the military-focused Thucydides remains a point of contention or approach in modern historical writing. In East Asia, a state chronicle, the Spring and Autumn Annals was known to be compiled from as early as 722 BC although only 2nd-century BC texts have survived. Ancient influences have helped spawn variant interpretations of the nature of history which have evolved over the centuries and continue to change today; the modern study of history is wide-ranging, includes the study of specific regions and the study of certain topical or thematical elements of historical investigation. History is taught as part of primary and secondary education, the academic study of history is a major discipline in university studies; the word history comes from the Ancient Greek ἱστορία, meaning'inquiry','knowledge from inquiry', or'judge'. It was in that sense; the ancestor word ἵστωρ is attested early on in Homeric Hymns, the Athenian ephebes' oath, in Boiotic inscriptions.
The Greek word was borrowed into Classical Latin as historia, meaning "investigation, research, description, written account of past events, writing of history, historical narrative, recorded knowledge of past events, narrative". History was borrowed from Latin into Old English as stær, but this word fell out of use in the late Old English period. Meanwhile, as Latin became Old French, historia developed into forms such as istorie and historie, with new developments in the meaning: "account of the events of a person's life, account of events as relevant to a group of people or people in general, dramatic or pictorial representation of historical events, body of knowledge relative to human evolution, narrative of real or imaginary events, story", it was from Anglo-Norman that history was borrowed into Middle English, this time the loan stuck. It appears in the 13th-century Ancrene Wisse, but seems to have become a common word in the late 14th century, with an early attestation appearing in John Gower's Confessio Amantis of the 1390s: "I finde in a bok compiled | To this matiere an old histoire, | The which comth nou to mi memoire".
In Middle English, the meaning of history was "story" in general. The restriction to the meaning "the branch of knowledge that deals with past events. With the Renaissance, older senses of the word were revived, it was in the Greek sense that Francis Bacon used the term in the late 16th century, when he wrote about "Natural History". For him, historia was "the knowledge of objects determined by space and time", that sort of knowledge provided by memory. In an expression of the linguistic synthetic vs. analytic/isolating dichotomy, English like Chinese now designates separate words for human history and storytelling in general. In modern German and most Germanic and Romance languages, which are solidly synthetic and inflected, the same word is still used to mean both'history' and'story'. Historian in the sense of a "researcher of history" is attested from 1531. In all European languages, the substantive history is still used to mean both "what happened with men", "the scholarly study of the happened", the latter sense sometimes distinguished with a capital letter, or the word historiography.
The adjective historical is attested from 1661, historic from 1669. Historians write in the context of their own time, with due regard to the current dominant ideas of how to interpret the past, sometimes write to provide lessons for their own society. In the words of Benedetto Croce, "All history is contemporary history". History is facilitated by the formation of a "true discourse of past" through the production of narrative and analysis of past events relating to the human race; the modern discipline of history is dedicated to the institutional production of this discourse. All events that are remembered and preserved in some authentic form constitute the historical record; the task of histori
Henri Bergson
Henri-Louis Bergson was a French-Jewish philosopher, influential in the tradition of continental philosophy during the first half of the 20th century until the Second World War. Bergson is known for his arguments that processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality, he was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented". In 1930 France awarded him the Grand-Croix de la Legion d'honneur. Bergson's great popularity created a controversy in France where his views were seen as opposing the secular and scientific attitude adopted by the Republic's officials. Bergson was born in the Rue Lamartine in Paris, not far from the Palais Garnier in 1859, his father, the pianist Michał Bergson, was of a Polish Jewish background. His great-grandmother, Temerl Bergson, was a well-known patroness and benefactor of Polish Jewry those associated with the Hasidic movement.
His mother, Katherine Levison, daughter of a Yorkshire doctor, was from an English and Irish Jewish background. The Bereksohns were a famous Jewish entrepreneurial family of Polish descent. Henri Bergson's great-great-grandfather, Szmul Jakubowicz Sonnenberg, called Zbytkower, was a prominent banker and a protégé of Stanisław II Augustus, King of Poland from 1764 to 1795. Henri Bergson's family lived in London for a few years after his birth, he obtained an early familiarity with the English language from his mother. Before he was nine, his parents settled in Henri becoming a naturalized French citizen. Henri Bergson married Louise Neuberger, a cousin of Marcel Proust, in 1891. Henri and Louise Bergson had a daughter, born deaf in 1896. Bergson's sister, Mina Bergson, married the English occult author Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, a founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the couple relocated to Paris as well. Bergson lived the quiet life of a French professor, marked by the publication of his four principal works: in 1889, Time and Free Will in 1896, Matter and Memory in 1907, Creative Evolution in 1932, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion In 1900 the Collège de France selected Bergson to a Chair of Greek and Roman Philosophy, which he held until 1904.
He replaced Gabriel Tarde in the Chair of Modern Philosophy, which he held until 1920. The public attended his open courses in large numbers. Bergson attended the Lycée Fontanes in Paris from 1868 to 1878, he had received a Jewish religious education. Between 14 and 16, however, he lost his faith. According to Hude, this moral crisis is tied to his discovery of the theory of evolution, according to which humanity shares common ancestry with modern primates, a process sometimes construed as not needing a creative deity. While at the lycée Bergson won a prize for his scientific work and another, in 1877 when he was eighteen, for the solution of a mathematical problem, his solution was published the following year in Nouvelles Annales de Mathématiques. It was his first published work. After some hesitation as to whether his career should lie in the sphere of the sciences or that of the humanities, he decided in favour of the latter, to the dismay of his teachers; when he was nineteen, he entered the École Normale Supérieure.
During this period, he read Herbert Spencer. He obtained there the degree of licence ès lettres, this was followed by that of agrégation de philosophie in 1881 from the University of Paris; the same year he received a teaching appointment at the lycée in Angers, the ancient capital of Anjou. Two years he settled at the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand, capital of the Puy-de-Dôme département; the year after his arrival at Clermont-Ferrand Bergson displayed his ability in the humanities by the publication of an edition of extracts from Lucretius, with a critical study of the text and of the materialist cosmology of the poet, a work whose repeated editions attest to its value in promoting Classics among French youth. While teaching and lecturing in this part of his country, Bergson found time for private study and original work, he crafted his dissertation Time and Free Will, submitted, along with a short Latin thesis on Aristotle, for his doctoral degree, awarded by the University of Paris in 1889.
The work was published in the same year by Félix Alcan. He gave courses in Clermont-Ferrand on the Pre-Socratics, in particular on Heraclitus. Bergson dedicated Time and Free Will to Jules Lachelier public education minister, a disciple of Félix Ravaisson and the author of a philosophical work On the Founding of Induction. Lachelier endeavoured "to substitute everywhere force for inertia, life for death, liberty for fatalism". Bergson settled again in Paris in 1888, after teaching for some months at the municipal college, known as the College Rollin, he received an appointment at the Lycée Henri-Quatre, where he remained for eight years. There, he gave a course on his theories. Alth
Collegium Trilingue
The Collegium Trilingue also called Collegium trium linguarum, or, after its creator Collegium Buslidianum, was founded in 1517 under the patronage of the humanist, Hieronymus van Busleyden. The College, in fact inspired by Erasmus, a friend of Busleyden, was inaugurated in September 1518, it was not formally part of the University of Leuven, but had been founded by a group of humanists who wanted to spread humanism and the revival of the classics, which were not popular at the time at the medieval University of Leuven. They promoted the teaching of the three ancient languages: Latin and Hebrew. Leon E. Halkin writes that "Erasmus does not teach himself, but he recruits the best teachers of Latin and Hebrew". Under this model, King Francis I of France founded the Royal College in 1530, he sought to attract Erasmus. We give below the complete list of the professors of the Collegium Trilingue. 1518-1519 Adrianus Barlandus 1519-1539 Conrad Goclenius 1539-1557 Petrus Nannius 1557-1578 Cornelius Valerius 1586-15xx Guilielmus Huismannus 1606-1606 Justus Lipsius 1607-1646 Erycius Puteanus 1646-1649 Nicolaus Vernulaeus 1649-1664 Bernadus Heimbachius 1664-1669 Christianus a Langendonck 1669-1683 Joannes Baptista Victor de Schuttelaere 1683-1688 Dominicus Snellaerts 1683-1693 Leonardus Gautius 1689-1701 Bernardus Desirant 1705-1720 Jean Francois de Laddersous 1730-1741 Christianus Bombaeus 1722-1738 Gerard Jean Kerckherdere 1741-1768 Henri Joseph van der Steen 1518-1545 Rutgerus Rescius 1545-1560 Hadrianus Amerotius 1560-1578 Theodoricus Langius 1578-1590 Guilielmus Fabius 1591-1596 Gerardus Corselius 1606-1607 Henricus Zoesius 1609-1632 Petrus Castellanus 1632-1643 Petrus Stockmans 1643-1652 Mathieu Theige 1652-1654 Jean Normenton 1654-1664 Bernardus Heymbachius 1664-1680 Jean de Hamere 1681-1690 Rutger van den Burgh 1683-1722 Francois Martin 1723-1732 Franciscus Audenaert 1723-1740 Francois Claude de Guareux 1741-1782 Jean-Baptiste Zegers 1782-1787 Jean Hubert Joseph Leemput 1790-1791 Jean-Baptiste Cypers 1791-1797 Antoine van Gils 1518-1519 Mattheus Adrianus 1519-1519 Robert Wakefield 1519-1519 Robert Shirwood 1520-1531 Johannes Campensis 1532-1568 Andreas Gennepius 1568-1569 Johannes Guilielmus Harlemicus 1569-1577 Petrus Pierius a Smenga 1612-1655 Valerius Andreas 1656-1679 Joannes Sauterus 1679-1704 Jean Herrys 1704-1723 Jean Guillaume van Hove 1726-1750 Gilbert Joseph Hagen 1755-1772 Jean-Noël Paquot 1774-1782 Gerard Deckers 1782-1786 Joseph Benoit de Mazière 1790-1797 Etienne Heuschling Félix Nève, Mémoire historique et littéraire sur Le Collége des Trois-Langues à l'Université de Louvain, M. Hayez, Brussels, 1856.
Henry de Vocht, History of the foundation and the rise of the Collegium Trilingue Lovaniense, 1517-1550, in Humanistica Lovaniensia, n° 10-13, 1951-1955. Henry de Vocht, Les Débuts du Collège Trilingue de Louvain, 1517-1550, Louvain, 1958. List of colleges of Leuven University Collège de France Old University of Leuven Catholic University of Leuven Academic libraries in Leuven
France
France the French Republic, is a country whose territory consists of metropolitan France in Western Europe and several overseas regions and territories. The metropolitan area of France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean, it is bordered by Belgium and Germany to the northeast and Italy to the east, Andorra and Spain to the south. The overseas territories include French Guiana in South America and several islands in the Atlantic and Indian oceans; the country's 18 integral regions span a combined area of 643,801 square kilometres and a total population of 67.3 million. France, a sovereign state, 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 Lyon, Toulouse, Bordeaux and Nice. During the Iron Age, what is now metropolitan France was inhabited by a Celtic people. Rome annexed the area in 51 BC, holding it until the arrival of Germanic Franks in 476, who formed the Kingdom of Francia.
The Treaty of Verdun of 843 partitioned Francia into Middle Francia and West Francia. West Francia which became the Kingdom of France in 987 emerged as a major European power in the Late Middle Ages following its victory in the Hundred Years' War. During the Renaissance, French culture flourished and a global colonial empire was established, which by the 20th century would become the second largest in the world; the 16th century was dominated by religious civil wars between Protestants. France became Europe's dominant cultural and military power in the 17th century under Louis XIV. In the late 18th century, the French Revolution overthrew the absolute monarchy, established one of modern history's earliest republics, saw the drafting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which expresses the nation's ideals to this day. In the 19th century, Napoleon established the First French Empire, his subsequent Napoleonic Wars shaped the course of continental Europe. Following the collapse of the Empire, France endured a tumultuous succession of governments culminating with the establishment of the French Third Republic in 1870.
France was a major participant in World War I, from which it emerged victorious, was one of the Allies in World War II, but came under occupation by the Axis powers in 1940. Following liberation in 1944, a Fourth Republic was established and dissolved in the course of the Algerian War; the Fifth Republic, led by Charles de Gaulle, remains today. Algeria and nearly all the other colonies became independent in the 1960s and retained close economic and military connections with France. France has long been a global centre of art and philosophy, it hosts the world's fourth-largest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites and is the leading tourist destination, receiving around 83 million foreign visitors annually. France is a developed country with the world's sixth-largest economy by nominal GDP, tenth-largest by purchasing power parity. In terms of aggregate household wealth, it ranks fourth in the world. France performs well in international rankings of education, health care, life expectancy, human development.
France is considered a great power in global affairs, being one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council with the power to veto and an official nuclear-weapon state. It is a leading member state of the European Union and the Eurozone, a member of the Group of 7, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Trade Organization, La Francophonie. Applied to the whole Frankish Empire, the name "France" comes from the Latin "Francia", or "country of the Franks". Modern France is still named today "Francia" in Italian and Spanish, "Frankreich" in German and "Frankrijk" in Dutch, all of which have more or less the same historical meaning. There are various theories as to the origin of the name Frank. Following the precedents of Edward Gibbon and Jacob Grimm, the name of the Franks has been linked with the word frank in English, it has been suggested that the meaning of "free" was adopted because, after the conquest of Gaul, only Franks were free of taxation.
Another theory is that it is derived from the Proto-Germanic word frankon, which translates as javelin or lance as the throwing axe of the Franks was known as a francisca. However, it has been determined that these weapons were named because of their use by the Franks, not the other way around; the oldest traces of human life in what is now France date from 1.8 million years ago. Over the ensuing millennia, Humans were confronted by a harsh and variable climate, marked by several glacial eras. Early hominids led a nomadic hunter-gatherer life. France has a large number of decorated caves from the upper Palaeolithic era, including one of the most famous and best preserved, Lascaux. At the end of the last glacial period, the climate became milder. After strong demographic and agricultural development between the 4th and 3rd millennia, metallurgy appeared at the end of the 3rd millennium working gold and bronze, iron. France has numerous megalithic sites from the Neolithic period, including the exceptiona
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