The military history of France encompasses an immense panorama of conflicts and struggles extending for more than 2,000 years across areas including modern France, greater Europe, and European territorial possessions overseas. Because of such lengthy periods of warfare, the peoples of France have often been at the forefront of military development, and as a result, military trends emerging in France have had a decisive impact on European and world history.
Gallo-Roman conflict predominated from 400 BC to 50 BC, with the Romans emerging victorious in the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar. After the decline of the Roman Empire, a Germanic tribe known as the Franks took control of Gaul by defeating competing tribes. The "land of Francia," from which France gets its name, had high points of expansion under kings Clovis I and Charlemagne. In the Middle Ages, rivalries with England and the Holy Roman Empire prompted major conflicts such as the Norman Conquest and the Hundred Years' War. With an increasingly centralized monarchy and the first standing army since Roman times, France came out of the Middle Ages as the most powerful nation in Europe, only to lose that status to Spain following defeat in the Italian Wars. The Wars of Religion crippled France in the late sixteenth century, but a major victory over Spain in the Thirty Years' War, with help from Sweden, made France the most powerful nation on the continent once more. The wars of Louis XIV in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries left France territorially larger, but fiscally bankrupt.
In the eighteenth century, global competition with Great Britain led to the Seven Years' War, where France lost its North American holdings, but consolation came in the form of preeminence in Europe and the American Revolutionary War, where extensive French aid led to America's independence. Internal political upheaval eventually led to 23 years of nearly continuous conflict in the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. France reached the zenith of its power during this period, dominating the European continent in an unprecedented fashion, but by 1815 it had been restored to its pre-Revolutionary borders. The rest of the nineteenth century witnessed the growth of the French colonial empire and wars with Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Following defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, Franco-German rivalry reasserted itself again in World War I, this time France, with British and to a much lesser extent, American aid, emerging as the winner. Tensions over the Versailles Treaty led to the Second World War, where it was defeated in the Battle of France. The Allies, including the Free French Forces, and later France itself as a liberated and restored nation, eventually emerged victorious over the Germans. As a result, France was given an occupation zone in Germany. The two world wars destroyed Franco-German rivalry and paved the way for European integration, economically, politically, and militarily. Today, French military intervention is most often seen in its former colonies and with its NATO allies.
