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511
481-511
CLOVIS, KING OF THE
FRANKS The Franks (Frank means free). lived in the region originally called Gaul. The Franks became powerful. The country was named after them: France. King Chlodwig, or Clovis, became king at age 16 in the year 481. Clovis was intelligent and brave. No one ever knew him to be afraid of anything even when he was but a child.He resolved to drive out the Romans.The dynasty or family of kings to which he belonged is known in history as the Merovingian dynasty. -
Dec 2, 1066
1066 Battle of hastings
The Battle of Hastings occurred on 14 October 1066 during the Norman conquest of England. The Norman-French army of Duke William II of Normandy and the English army under King Harold II. It was a decisive Norman victory.The Battle of Hastings is an example of the theory of combined arms. The Norman bowmen, cavalry and infantry cooperated to deny the English the initiative and gave the homogeneous English army few tactical options except defence. -
Dec 2, 1297
St. Louis (Louis IX)
King of France from 1226 until his death. He was also styled Louis II, Count of Artois from 1226 to 1237. Born at Poissy, near Paris, he was a descendant of Hugh Capet, and thus a member of the House of Capet, and the son of Louis VIII and Blanche of Castile. He worked with the Parliament of Paris in order to improve the professionalism of his legal administration. During his second crusade, Louis died at Tunis, 25 August 1270, He is often considered the model of the ideal Christian monarch. -
Dec 2, 1412
Joan of Arc
national heroine of France and a Roman Catholic saint. A peasant girl born in eastern France who claimed divine guidance, she led the French army to several important victories during the Hundred Years' War, which paved the way for the coronation of Charles VII. She was captured by the Burgundians, sold to the English, tried by an ecclesiastical court, and burned at the stake when she was 19 years old. -
Dec 2, 1415
Battle of Agincourt
The Battle of Agincourt was a major English victory against a numerically superior French army in the Hundred Years' War. Henry V's victory crippled France and started a new period in the war, during which Henry married the French king's daughter and his son, Henry VI, was made heir to the throne of France. Although the victory had been militarily decisive, it did not lead to further English conquests. -
Dec 2, 1572
St. Bartholomew's Massacre
The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre was a targeted group of assassinations, followed by a wave of Roman Catholic mob violence, both directed against the Huguenots (French Calvinist Protestants), during the French Wars of Religion. Believed to have been instigated by Catherine de' Medici, the mother of King Charles IX, the massacre took place six days after the wedding of the king's sister Margaret to the Protestant Henry III of Navarre. (future Henri IV of France). -
Edict of Nantes
The Edict of Nantes issued by King Henry IV of France, granted the Calvinist Protestants of France (also known as Huguenots) substantial rights in a nation still considered essentially Catholic. In the Edict, Henry aimed primarily to promote civil unity.The Edict separated civil from religious unity, treated some Protestants for the first time as more than mere heretics, and opened a path for secularism and tolerance. -
Beginning of the French Revolution
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Louisiana Purchase
Despite issuing orders that the 60 million francs were to be spent on the construction of five new canals in France, Bonaparte actually spent the whole amount on his planned invasion of the United Kingdom. -
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1804-1815 Napoleon Bonapart, Emperor
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1914-1918 WW I, War to end all Wars
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World War 2
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Nicholas Sarkozy, President of France
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800-843
Charlemagne
Barring his wars, Charlemagne’s was the most just and enlightened government that Europe had known since Theodoric the Goth
Charlemagne struggled to protect a free peasantry against spreading serfdom, but the power of the nobles, and the force of circumstance, frustrated him.
Appalled by the illiteracy of his time, when hardly any but ecclesiastics could read, and by the lack of education among the lower clergy, he called in foreign scholars to restore the schools of France. -
987 Hugh Capet
One can see the beginnings of modern France with the coronation of Hugh Capet. As Count of Paris, he made the city his power centre. The monarch began a long process of exerting control of the rest of the country from there.
He founded of the Capetian dynasty. The Capetians, or the House of Capet, ruled France from 987 to 1328; thereafter, the Kingdom was ruled by branches of the dynasty. All French kings through Louis Philippe, and all royal pretenders since then, have belonged to the dynasty.
