Bourbon Restoration
The Bourbon Restoration was the period of French history following the first fall of Napoleon in 1814, his final defeat in the Hundred Days in 1815, until the July Revolution of 1830. The brothers of the executed Louis XVI came to power, reigned in conservative fashion, they were nonetheless unable to reverse most of the changes made by the French Revolution and Napoleon. At the Congress of Vienna they were treated respectfully, but had to give up nearly all the territorial gains made since 1789. Following the French Revolution, Napoleon became ruler of France. After years of expansion of his French Empire by successive military victories, a coalition of European powers defeated him in the War of the Sixth Coalition, ended the First Empire in 1814, restored the monarchy to the brothers of Louis XVI; the Bourbon Restoration lasted from 6 April 1814 until the popular uprisings of the July Revolution of 1830. There was an interlude in spring 1815—the "Hundred Days"—when the return of Napoleon forced the Bourbons to flee France.
When Napoleon was again defeated by the Seventh Coalition, they returned to power in July. During the Restoration, the new Bourbon regime was a constitutional monarchy, unlike the absolutist Ancien Régime, so it had some limits on its power; the new king, Louis XVIII, accepted the vast majority of reforms instituted from 1792 to 1814. Continuity was his basic policy, he did not try to recover property taken from the royalist exiles. He continued in peaceful fashion the main objectives of Napoleon's foreign policy, such as the limitation of Austrian influence, he reversed Napoleon regarding Spain and the Ottoman Empire, in order to restore the friendship that had prevailed until 1792. The period was characterized by a sharp conservative reaction, consequent minor but consistent occurrences of civil unrest and disturbances. Otherwise, the political establishment was stable until the late reign of Charles X, it saw the reestablishment of the Catholic Church as a major power in French politics. Throughout the Bourbon Restoration, France experienced a period of stable economic prosperity and the preliminaries of industrialization.
The eras of the French Revolution and Napoleon brought a series of major changes to France which the Bourbon Restoration did not reverse. First of all, France became centralized, with all important decisions made in Paris; the political geography was reorganized and made uniform. France was divided into more than 80 departments; each department had an identical administrative structure, was controlled by a prefect appointed by Paris. The complex multiple overlapping legal jurisdictions of the old regime had all been abolished, there was now one standardized legal code, administered by judges appointed by Paris, supported by police under national control; the Catholic Church lost all its lands and buildings during the Revolution, these were sold off or came under the control of local governments. The bishop still ruled his diocese, communicated with the pope through the government in Paris. Bishops, priests and other religious people were paid salaries by the state. All the old religious rites and ceremonies were retained, the government maintained the religious buildings.
The Church was allowed to operate its own seminaries and to some extent local schools as well, although this became a central political issue into the 20th century. Bishops were much less powerful than before, had no political voice. However, the Catholic Church reinvented itself and put a new emphasis on personal religiosity that gave it a hold on the psychology of the faithful. Public education was centralized, with the Grand Master of the University of France controlling every element of the national educational system from Paris. New technical universities were opened in Paris which to this day have a critical role in training the elite. Conservatism was bitterly split into the returning old aristocracy and the new elites arising after 1796; the old aristocracy felt no loyalty to the new regime. The new elite, the "noblesse d'empire," ridiculed the older group as an outdated remnant of a discredited regime that had led the nation to disaster. Both groups shared a fear of social disorder, but the level of distrust as well as the cultural differences were too great, the monarchy too inconsistent in its policies, for political cooperation to be possible.
The old aristocracy recovered much of the land they had owned directly. However, they lost all their old seigneurial rights to the rest of the farmland, the peasants were no longer under their control; the old aristocracy had dallied with the ideas of the rationalism. Now the aristocracy was supportive of the Catholic Church. For the best jobs, meritocracy was the new policy, aristocrats had to compete directly with the growing business and professional class. Public anti-clerical sentiment became stronger than before, but was now based in certain elements of the middle class and the peasantry; the great masses of French people were peasants in the countryside or impoverished workers in the cities. They gained a new sense of possibilities. Although relieved of many of the old burdens and taxes, the peasantry was still traditional in its social and economic behavior. Many eagerly took on mortgages to buy as much land as possible for their children, so debt was an important factor in their calculations.
The working class in the cities was a small element, had been freed of many restrictions imposed
Battle of Hanau
The Battle of Hanau was fought on between Karl Philipp von Wrede’s Austro-Bavarian corps and Napoleon's retreating French during the War of the Sixth Coalition. Following Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Leipzig earlier in October, Napoleon began to retreat from Germany into France and relative safety. Wrede attempted to block Napoleon’s line of retreat at Hanau on 30 October. Napoleon defeated Wrede's forces. On 31 October Hanau was in French control; the Battle of Hanau was a minor battle, but an important tactical victory allowing Napoleon’s army to retreat onto French soil to recover and face the invasion of France. The Battle of Leipzig, the largest and bloodiest encounter of the Napoleonic Wars, began on 16 October 1813, raged for three days and ended with a decisive victory for the Sixth Coalition. Napoleon hastily retreated westwards, his strategy was to regroup all his available forces on the shores of the Rhine, where his lines of communication would be shorter and his rear less to be threatened.
The Emperor's concern was that his battered army might be forced to fight against superior forces again, so he ordered that the retreat be carried out at great speed. Had the coalition managed to advance with more vigour in the days following the Battle of Leipzig, the disorganised French army would have been destroyed, but the coalition armies themselves had suffered such high losses at Leipzig that they were in no position to launch an effective pursuit. With military action confined to secondary rearguard actions, Napoleon was able to install his headquarters at Erfurt on 23 October and began to reorganise his forces. On 26 October, he sent orders to the various corps, directing them to Frankfurt via Eisenach and Fulda, their assigned destination was the city of Mainz, by the Rhine river. The coalition was buoyed by the news that Bavaria, a former French ally, agreed to join the Sixth Coalition according to the Treaty of Ried concluded just before the Battle of Leipzig; this allowed the coalition to threaten the overall military position of the French by moving a 45,000 - 50,000 Austro-Bavarian army, under the command of Karl Philipp von Wrede, into Napoleon's rear, occupying Würzburg in Franconia.
The small French garrison of Würzburg did not try to resist and instead barricaded themselves at the local citadel, allowing the enemy to occupy the town without a fight. From Würzburg, Wrede moved towards the strategic city of Hanau, along one of Napoleon's main retreat routes. Wrede’s advance guard reached Hanau on 28 October and took possession of the city, blocking Napoleon’s route to Frankfurt. Although Wrede assumed that the main part of the French forces was retreating along a more northerly road to Coblenz and thus expected to face a force of only 20,000 men, he did entertain hopes that he would be able to play a major role in the defeat of Napoleon, he believed that the French army was disorganised, not true, was followed by the main coalition army, the "Army of Bohemia", in reality much further away and not in close contact with Napoleon's forces. The Austrian and Bavarian army at the battle of Hanau comprised two army corps, one Austrian and one Bavarian, numbered no less than 42,000 men: 33,000 infantrymen, 9,000 cavalrymen and 94 artillery pieces.
They were under the overall command of Bavarian General Karl Philipp von Wrede. The Austrian Corps, under the command of Field-Marshal-Lieutenant Baron Fresnet, numbered 24,000 men: 18,000 infantrymen, 6,000 cavalrymen and 34 artillery pieces; these men were organised in three divisions: the 1st division under General Bach, the 2nd division under General Trautenberg, the 3rd division under General Spleny. The Bavarian Corps, under Wrede's direct command, numbered 18,000 men: 15,000 infantrymen, 3,000 cavalrymen, 60 artillery pieces; these men were organised in two divisions, one cavalry reserve and one artillery reserve: the 2nd division was under General Beckers, the 3rd division under General Lamotte, the three-brigade cavalry reserve was under Generals Bieregg, Ellbracht and the artillery reserve was under General Cologne. The French Grande Armée had suffered horrendous casualties at the battle of Leipzig, which left the French Corps at a fraction of its prior strength. Emperor Napoleon I was in personal command of the French forces in the battle.
They numbered between 40,000 and 50,000 men, but only a fraction of them were ready for combat, with Napoleon able to count on little more than 30,000 men: the IInd, Vth and XIth Army Corps, the Ist and IInd Cavalry Reserve Corps and the Imperial Guard. Guard units aside, many of the French battalions at Hanau were only 100-man strong, the cavalry squadrons were much smaller. Of these men, only one division of Marshal Claude Victor-Perrin's IInd Corps, another of Marshal MacDonald XI Corps, were committed to battle with a grand total of some 7,000-8,000 men. Cavalry support came from Sébastiani's IInd Cavalry Corps, some 3,000 sabres, Nansouty's Imperial Guard cavalry, some 4,000 sabres; the entirety of the Imperial Guard infantry and artillery, some 6,000 men and 52 cannons, were committed. Napoleon thus commanded a total of about 20,000 men at the battle of Hanau. On 29 October, having reckoned that his force was strong enough to block the retreat of a disorganised enemy army, Wrede decided to give battle.
He had plenty of time to prepare his dispositions and d
Arc de Triomphe
The Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile is one of the most famous monuments in Paris, standing at the western end of the Champs-Élysées at the centre of Place Charles de Gaulle named Place de l'Étoile — the étoile or "star" of the juncture formed by its twelve radiating avenues. The location of the arc and the plaza is shared between 16th, 17th and 8th; the Arc de Triomphe honours those who fought and died for France in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, with the names of all French victories and generals inscribed on its inner and outer surfaces. Beneath its vault lies the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from World War I; as the central cohesive element of the Axe historique, the Arc de Triomphe was designed by Jean Chalgrin in 1806, its iconographic program pits heroically nude French youths against bearded Germanic warriors in chain mail. It set the tone for public monuments with triumphant patriotic messages. Inspired by the Arch of Titus in Rome, the Arc de Triomphe has an overall height of 50 metres, width of 45 m and depth of 22 m, while its large vault is 29.19 m high and 14.62 m wide.
The smaller transverse vaults are 8.44 m wide. Three weeks after the Paris victory parade in 1919, Charles Godefroy flew his Nieuport biplane under the arch's primary vault, with the event captured on newsreel. Paris's Arc de Triomphe was the tallest triumphal arch until the completion of the Monumento a la Revolución in Mexico City in 1938, 67 metres high; the Arch of Triumph in Pyongyang, completed in 1982, is modelled on the Arc de Triomphe and is taller at 60 m. La Grande Arche in La Defense near Paris is 110 metres high. Although it is not named an Arc de Triomphe, it has been designed on the same model and in the perspective of the Arc de Triomphe, it qualifies as the world's tallest arch. The Arc de Triomphe is located on the right bank of the Seine at the centre of a dodecagonal configuration of twelve radiating avenues, it was commissioned in 1806 after the victory at Austerlitz by Emperor Napoleon at the peak of his fortunes. Laying the foundations alone took two years and, in 1810, when Napoleon entered Paris from the west with his bride Archduchess Marie-Louise of Austria, he had a wooden mock-up of the completed arch constructed.
The architect, Jean Chalgrin, died in 1811 and the work was taken over by Jean-Nicolas Huyot. During the Bourbon Restoration, construction was halted and it would not be completed until the reign of King Louis-Philippe, between 1833 and 1836, by the architects Goust Huyot, under the direction of Héricart de Thury. On 15 December 1840, brought back to France from Saint Helena, Napoleon's remains passed under it on their way to the Emperor's final resting place at the Invalides. Prior to burial in the Panthéon, the body of Victor Hugo was displayed under the Arc during the night of 22 May 1885; the sword carried by the Republic in the Marseillaise relief broke off on the day, it is said, that the Battle of Verdun began in 1916. The relief was hidden by tarpaulins to conceal the accident and avoid any undesired ominous interpretations. On 7 August 1919, Charles Godefroy flew his biplane under the Arc. Jean Navarre was the pilot, tasked to make the flight, but he died on 10 July 1919 when he crashed near Villacoublay while training for the flight.
Following its construction, the Arc de Triomphe became the rallying point of French troops parading after successful military campaigns and for the annual Bastille Day military parade. Famous victory marches around or under the Arc have included the Germans in 1871, the French in 1919, the Germans in 1940, the French and Allies in 1944 and 1945. A United States postage stamp of 1945 shows the Arc de Triomphe in the background as victorious American troops march down the Champs-Élysées and U. S. airplanes fly overhead on 29 August 1944. After the interment of the Unknown Soldier, all military parades have avoided marching through the actual arch; the route taken is up to the arch and around its side, out of respect for the tomb and its symbolism. Both Hitler in 1940 and de Gaulle in 1944 observed this custom. By the early 1960s, the monument had grown blackened from coal soot and automobile exhaust, during 1965–1966 it was cleaned through bleaching. In the prolongation of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, a new arch, the Grande Arche de la Défense, was built in 1982, completing the line of monuments that forms Paris's Axe historique.
After the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel and the Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile, the Grande Arche is the third arch built on the same perspective. In 1995, the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria placed a bomb near the Arc de Triomphe which wounded 17 people as part of a campaign of bombings. In late 2018, the Arc de Triomphe suffered acts of vandalism as part of the Yellow vests movement protests; the astylar design is in the Neoclassical version of ancient Roman architecture. Major academic sculptors of France are represented in the sculpture of the Arc de Triomphe: Jean-Pierre Cortot; the main sculptures are not integral friezes but are treated as independent trophies applied to the vast ashlar masonry masses, not unlike the gilt-bronze appliqués on Empire furniture. The four sculptural groups at the base of the Ar
Munich
Munich is the capital and most populous city of Bavaria, the second most populous German federal state. With a population of around 1.5 million, it is the third-largest city in Germany, after Berlin and Hamburg, as well as the 12th-largest city in the European Union. The city's metropolitan region is home to 6 million people. Straddling the banks of the River Isar north of the Bavarian Alps, it is the seat of the Bavarian administrative region of Upper Bavaria, while being the most densely populated municipality in Germany. Munich is the second-largest city in the Bavarian dialect area, after the Austrian capital of Vienna; the city is a global centre of art, technology, publishing, innovation, education and tourism and enjoys a high standard and quality of living, reaching first in Germany and third worldwide according to the 2018 Mercer survey, being rated the world's most liveable city by the Monocle's Quality of Life Survey 2018. According to the Globalization and World Rankings Research Institute Munich is considered an alpha-world city, as of 2015.
Munich is a major international center of engineering, science and research, exemplified by the presence of two research universities, a multitude of scientific institutions in the city and its surroundings, world class technology and science museums like the Deutsches Museum and BMW Museum.. Munich houses many multinational companies and its economy is based on high tech, the service sector and creative industries, as well as IT, biotechnology and electronics among many others; the name of the city is derived from the Old/Middle High German term Munichen, meaning "by the monks". It derives from the monks of the Benedictine order, who ran a monastery at the place, to become the Old Town of Munich. Munich was first mentioned in 1158. Catholic Munich resisted the Reformation and was a political point of divergence during the resulting Thirty Years' War, but remained physically untouched despite an occupation by the Protestant Swedes. Once Bavaria was established as a sovereign kingdom in 1806, it became a major European centre of arts, architecture and science.
In 1918, during the German Revolution, the ruling house of Wittelsbach, which had governed Bavaria since 1180, was forced to abdicate in Munich and a short-lived socialist republic was declared. In the 1920s, Munich became home to several political factions, among them the NSDAP; the first attempt of the Nazi movement to take over the German government in 1923 with the Beer Hall Putsch was stopped by the Bavarian police in Munich with gunfire. After the Nazis' rise to power, Munich was declared their "Capital of the Movement". During World War II, Munich was bombed and more than 50% of the entire city and up to 90% of the historic centre were destroyed. After the end of postwar American occupation in 1949, there was a great increase in population and economic power during the years of Wirtschaftswunder, or "economic miracle". Unlike many other German cities which were bombed, Munich restored most of its traditional cityscape and hosted the 1972 Summer Olympics; the 1980s brought strong economic growth, high-tech industries and scientific institutions, population growth.
The city is home to major corporations like BMW, Siemens, MAN, Linde and MunichRE. Munich is home to many universities and theatres, its numerous architectural attractions, sports events and its annual Oktoberfest attract considerable tourism. Munich is one of the fastest growing cities in Germany, it is a top-ranked destination for expatriate location. Munich hosts more than 530,000 people of foreign background; the first known settlement in the area was of Benedictine monks on the Salt road. The foundation date is not considered the year 1158, the date the city was first mentioned in a document; the document was signed in Augsburg. By the Guelph Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, had built a toll bridge over the river Isar next to the monk settlement and on the salt route, but as part of the archaeological excavations at Marienhof in advance of the expansion of the S-Bahn from 2012 shards of vessels from the eleventh century were found, which prove again that the settlement Munich must be older than their first documentary mention from 1158.
In 1175 Munich received city fortification. In 1180 with the trial of Henry the Lion, Otto I Wittelsbach became Duke of Bavaria, Munich was handed to the Bishop of Freising. In 1240, Munich was transferred to Otto II Wittelsbach and in 1255, when the Duchy of Bavaria was split in two, Munich became the ducal residence of Upper Bavaria. Duke Louis IV, a native of Munich, was elected German king in 1314 and crowned as Holy Roman Emperor in 1328, he strengthened the city's position by granting it the salt monopoly, thus assuring it of additional income. In the late 15th century, Munich underwent a revival of gothic arts: the Old Town Hall was enlarged, Munich's largest gothic church – the Frauenkirche – now a cathedral, was constructed in only 20 years, starting in 1468; when Bavaria was reunited in 1506, Munich became its capital. The arts and politics became influenced by the court. During the 16th century, Munich was a centre of the German counter reformation, of renaissance arts. Duke Wilhelm V commissioned the Jesuit Michaelskirche, which became a centre for the counter-reform
Egyptian Hall
The Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, was an exhibition hall built in the ancient Egyptian style in 1812, to the designs of Peter Frederick Robinson. The Hall was a considerable success, of Napoleonic era relics; the hall was used for popular entertainments and lectures, developed an association with magic and spiritualism, becoming known as "England's Home of Mystery". In 1905 the building was demolished to make way for offices; the Egyptian Hall was commissioned by William Bullock as a museum to house his collection, which included curiosities brought back from the South Seas by Captain Cook. It was completed in 1812 at a cost of £16,000, it was the first building in England to be influenced by the Egyptian style inspired by the success of the Egyptian Room in Thomas Hope's house in Duchess Street, open to the public and had been well illustrated in Hope's Household Furniture and Interior Decoration. Unlike Bullock's Egyptian temple in Piccadilly, Hope's neoclassical façade betrayed no hint of the Egyptianizing decor it contained.
Detailed renderings of various temples on the Nile, the Pyramids and the Sphinx had been accumulating for connoisseurs and designers in works such as Bernard de Montfaucon's, ten-volume L'Antiquité expliquée et representée en figures, which reproduces, methodically grouped, all the ancient monuments, Benoît de Maillet's Description de l'Égypte, Richard Pococke's A Description of the East and Some Other Countries, Frederic Louis Norden's Voyage d'Egypte et de Nubie. The plans for the hall were drawn up by architect Peter Frederick Robinson. Bullock, who had displayed his collection in Sheffield and Liverpool before opening in London, used the hall to put on various spectaculars, from which he made money from ticket sales; the museum was variously referred to as the London Museum, the Egyptian Hall or Museum, or Bullock's Museum. The Hall was a considerable success, with an exhibition of Napoleonic era relics in 1816 including Napoleon's carriage taken at Waterloo being seen by about 220,000 visitors.
In 1819, Bullock sold his ethnographical and natural history collection at auction and converted the museum into an exhibition hall. Subsequently, the Hall became a major venue for the exhibiting of works of art. Admission was one shilling. In 1820, The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault was exhibited from 10 June until the end of the year, rather overshadowing Benjamin Robert Haydon's painting, Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, on show in an adjacent room. In 1821, exhibitions included Giovanni Battista Belzoni's show of the tomb of Seti I in 1821, James Ward's gigantic Allegory of Waterloo. In 1822, a family of Laplanders with their reindeer were imported to be displayed in front of a painted backdrop, give short sleigh-rides to visitors; the bookseller George Lackington became owner of the Hall in 1825 and went on to use the facilities to show panoramas, art exhibits, entertainment productions. The Hall became associated with watercolours; the old Water-Colour Society exhibited there in 1821–22, it was hired by Charles Heath to display the watercolours commissioned by from Joseph Mallord William Turner forming Picturesque Views in England and Wales.
Turner exhibited at the Hall for a number of years and it was used as a venue for exhibitions by the Society of Painters in Water Colours. In the "Dudley Gallery" at the Egyptian Hall, the valuable collection of pictures belonging to the Earl of Dudley was deposited during the erection of his own gallery at Dudley House in Park Lane; the room gave its name to the Dudley Gallery Art Society when they were founded in 1861 and used it for their exhibitions. It was the venue chosen for their first exhibitions by the influential New English Art Club; the hall lectures. Here Albert Smith related his ascent of Mont Blanc, illustrated by some cleverly dioramic views of the Alpine peaks. By the end of the 19th century, the Hall was associated with magic and spiritualism, as a number of performers and lecturers had hired it for shows. In 1873 William Morton took on the management of the Hall and modified it for his protegees and Cooke, whose run there lasted a remarkable 31 years; the Hall became known as England's Home of Mystery.
Many illusions were staged including the exposition of fraudulent spiritualistic manifestations being practised by charlatans. The final performance was on 5 January 1905. In 1905 the building was demolished to make room for blocks of flats and offices at 170–173 Piccadilly. Muirhead Bone captured its demise in his work The Dissolution of Egyptian Hall; the Maskelynes relocated to the St. George's Hall in Langham Place, which became known as Maskelyne's Theatre. Egyptian Revival architecture in the British Isles Egyptian revival decorative arts List of demolished buildings and structures in London History and internal and external images History of the Egyptian Hall
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
Peninsular War
The Peninsular War was a military conflict between Napoleon's empire and Bourbon Spain, for control of the Iberian Peninsula during the Napoleonic Wars. The war began when the French and Spanish armies invaded and occupied Portugal in 1807, escalated in 1808 when France turned on Spain its ally; the war on the peninsula lasted until the Sixth Coalition defeated Napoleon in 1814, is regarded as one of the first wars of national liberation, significant for the emergence of large-scale guerrilla warfare. The Peninsular War overlaps with what the Spanish-speaking world calls the Guerra de la Independencia Española, which began with the Dos de Mayo Uprising on 2 May 1808 and ended on 17 April 1814; the French occupation destroyed the Spanish administration, which fragmented into quarrelling provincial juntas. The episode remains as the bloodiest event in Spain's modern history, doubling in relative terms the Spanish Civil War. A reconstituted national government, the Cortes of Cádiz—in effect a government-in-exile—fortified itself in Cádiz in 1810, but could not raise effective armies because it was besieged by 70,000 French troops.
British and Portuguese forces secured Portugal, using it as a safe position from which to launch campaigns against the French army and provide whatever supplies they could get to the Spanish, while the Spanish armies and guerrillas tied down vast numbers of Napoleon's troops. These combined regular and irregular allied forces, by restricting French control of territory, prevented Napoleon's marshals from subduing the rebellious Spanish provinces, the war continued through years of stalemate; the British Army, under Lt. Gen. Sir Arthur Wellesley the 1st Duke of Wellington, guarded Portugal and campaigned against the French in Spain alongside the reformed Portuguese army; the demoralised Portuguese army was reorganised and refitted under the command of Gen. William Beresford, appointed commander-in-chief of the Portuguese forces by the exiled Portuguese royal family, fought as part of the combined Anglo-Portuguese Army under Wellesley. In 1812, when Napoleon set out with a massive army on what proved to be a disastrous French invasion of Russia, a combined allied army under Wellesley pushed into Spain, defeating the French at Salamanca and taking Madrid.
In the following year Wellington scored a decisive victory over King Joseph Bonaparte's army in the Battle of Vitoria. Pursued by the armies of Britain and Portugal, Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult, no longer able to get sufficient support from a depleted France, led the exhausted and demoralized French forces in a fighting withdrawal across the Pyrenees during the winter of 1813–1814; the years of fighting in Spain were a heavy burden on France's Grande Armée. While the French were victorious in battle, their communications and supplies were tested and their units were isolated, harassed or overwhelmed by partisans fighting an intense guerrilla war of raids and ambushes; the Spanish armies were beaten and driven to the peripheries, but they would regroup and relentlessly hound the French. This drain on French resources led Napoleon, who had unwittingly provoked a total war, to call the conflict the "Spanish Ulcer". War and revolution against Napoleon's occupation led to the Spanish Constitution of 1812 a cornerstone of European liberalism.
The burden of war destroyed the social and economic fabric of Portugal and Spain, ushered in an era of social turbulence, political instability and economic stagnation. Devastating civil wars between liberal and absolutist factions, led by officers trained in the Peninsular War, persisted in Iberia until 1850; the cumulative crises and disruptions of invasion and restoration led to the independence of most of Spain's American colonies and the independence of Brazil from Portugal. The Treaties of Tilsit, negotiated during a meeting in July 1807 between Emperors Alexander I of Russia and Napoleon, concluded the War of the Fourth Coalition. With Prussia shattered, the Russian Empire allied with the First French Empire, Napoleon expressed irritation that Portugal was open to trade with the United Kingdom. Pretexts were plentiful. Furthermore, Prince John of Braganza, regent for his insane mother Queen Maria I, had declined to join the emperor's Continental System against British trade. Events moved rapidly.
The Emperor sent orders on 19 July 1807 to his Foreign Minister, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, to order Portugal to declare war on Britain, close its ports to British ships, detain British subjects on a provisional basis and sequester their goods. After a few days, a large force started concentrating at Bayonne. Meanwhile, the Portuguese government's resolve was stiffening, shortly afterward Napoleon was once again told that Portugal would not go beyond its original agreements. Napoleon now had all the pretext that he needed, while his force, the First Corps of Observation of the Gironde with divisional general Jean-Andoche Junot in command, was prepared to march on Lisbon. After he received the Portuguese answer, he ordered Junot's corps to cross the frontier into the Spanish Empire. While all this was going on, the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau had been signed between France and Spain; the document was drawn up by Napoleon's marshal of the palace Géraud Duroc and Eugenio Izquierdo, an agent for Manuel Godoy.
The treaty proposed to carve up Portugal into three
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). . Encyclopædia Britannica. 16 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 405.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the 
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