A hexagon with a South American border
The French call their mainland l'Hexagone, the Hexagon, and it holds 95.9 percent of the republic's people. Overseas France takes in islands in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans, and about 2.9 million people lived across its territories in January 2026. Five of them are full departments: French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mayotte and Réunion.
French Guiana sits on the South American mainland, so France shares land borders with Brazil and Suriname, 649 and 556 kilometres long. In 1964 the government chose Kourou there, from 14 other sites, as its launch base. Lying just over 500 kilometres north of the equator, it is now Europe's Spaceport. France's maritime space covers about 10.2 million square kilometres, second only to that of the United States, and nearly 96 percent of it lies overseas.
The Hexagon has some 5,500 kilometres of coast. Its south is mountainous, with the Massif Central and the Pyrenees, and Mont Blanc is the highest summit in Western Europe. The Loire, at 1,012 kilometres, is the longest river.
Cave walls, royal rules and a secular republic
On 12 September 1940, four boys climbed into a cave in the hillside above Montignac, in the Dordogne, and found Lascaux. Its walls carry some 600 animals, horses above all, left by people who used the cave between about 21,500 and 21,000 years ago. The originals are now out of reach, so visitors see replicas, the newest of which, Lascaux IV, opened in 2016.
An ordinance signed by Francis I at Villers-Cotterêts in 1539 established French for legal and administrative documents, and parts of it are still used by French courts. Richelieu founded the Académie française in 1635 to give the language firm rules, and its first dictionary took until 1694. The present constitution settles the matter in one line: "The language of the Republic shall be French."
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen dates from 26 August 1789, and the National Convention abolished the monarchy on 21 September 1792. The Constitutional Council recognised the Declaration's constitutional value in 1971. A law of 9 December 1905 ended state funding of religion, although Alsace and Moselle, German territory at the time, remain outside it. Today's constitution calls France an indivisible, secular, democratic and social republic.
The long reckoning with empire and occupation
A French prime minister said at the 2025 national commemoration that about four million people were enslaved in French colonies between 1625 and 1848, and that 3,321 slaving expeditions left French shores. Slavery was abolished on 4 February 1794, brought back by Napoleon in 1802 and ended by a decree of 27 April 1848, which made some 250,000 people citizens. Haiti had won independence in 1804, yet a French ordinance of 1825 required it to pay 150 million francs to compensate former colonists. The sum was later cut, but Haiti's final remittance came only in 1947. In April 2025 France announced a joint commission with Haiti to examine that past.
After the armistice of 22 June 1940, the Vichy regime collaborated closely with Germany and passed antisemitic laws of its own. About 350,000 Jews lived in France, fewer than half of them citizens. On 16 and 17 July 1942, French police arrested 13,000 in Paris. Some 77,000 Jews living on French territory died, most of them at Auschwitz.
Algeria was conquered from 1830 and governed as French departments after 1848. Its war of independence began on 1 November 1954. The army's routine use of torture became common knowledge in France in 1957. Estimates of Algerian deaths range from 400,000 to 1.5 million. The crisis brought down the Fourth Republic, and the constitution of 4 October 1958 created a stronger presidency. Independence came in July 1962, after the Évian Accords, and 900,000 Europeans left for France within months.
Europe offered a different future. In 1950 France's foreign minister proposed integrating Western Europe's coal and steel industries, and the treaty of 1951 made France one of six founders of the European Coal and Steel Community.
Reactors, visitors and a four-course table
INSEE estimated the population at 69.1 million on 1 January 2026. In 2025 there were 645,000 births and 651,000 deaths, the first natural decline since the end of the Second World War. Fertility fell to 1.56 children per woman, the lowest since the end of the First World War, though in 2023 France still ranked second in the European Union. In 2024 France had 7.7 million immigrants, 11.3 percent of residents, and about a third of them had become French.
The government decided in 1974, just after the first oil shock, to expand nuclear power quickly, and France now has 57 reactors at 18 plants. They produced 380 of the country's 570 terawatt-hours in 2024, or 67 percent, and France is the world's largest net exporter of electricity.
It is also the world's most visited country, with 102 million international visitors in 2025. They spent a record €77.5 billion, though Spain earned more, at €105 billion. Eating well carries official weight too: in 2010 UNESCO listed the gastronomic meal of the French, a ritual running from apéritif to liqueurs with at least four courses in between.
