France (German Heritage)

French Republic République française (French) Timeline: German Heritage
Flag of France Coat of arms
Anthem:  La Marseillaise
Location of France
Capital		Paris
Largest city		Paris
Official languages		French
Regional languages		See Languages.
Religion		Catholic Protestant
Demonym		German
Government		Federal Semi-Presidential Republic
-	President	François Bayrou
-	Prime Minister	Christine Lagarde
Population
-	August 2018 estimate	61.8 million
Currency		Franc (FF)
Time zone		CET
Date formats		dd.mm.yyyy
Drives on the		right
Internet TLD		.fr

The French Republic (French:République française), commonly known as France, is a nation located in Western Europe.

In the 19th century, Napoleon took power and established the First French Empire. His subsequent Napoleonic Wars (1803–15) 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 defeated, which led to the French Civil War and the start of full Communist Rule in 1921. France entered World War II on the Soviet Side in 1942, in which it was invaded by a joint Italian-Free French invasion. After the Second French Civil War, the nationalist French State was founded, and lasted until 1989.

History of France

Aristide Briand, who governed France from France’s capitulation to the Military Coup in 1919.

After the British Republic and Belgium signed the Treaty of Rotterdam, the French were left to fight the Germans alone. The Germans, with the taste of victory in their mouth, quickly broke through broke though French lines in March 1918. Pressure began to amount against Georges Clemenceau to resign or sue for peace as the French Army mutinied on a larger scale than 1917. Clemenceau resigned upon the German Success at the Second Battle of the Marne, on the 21st of March. He was replaced by Aristide Briand, who signed the armistice at Reims, on the 1st of April. Paris, under German Occupation, soon erupted into nationalist and communist protests and strikes, which posed a considerable threat to the German Occupiers. In non-occupied France, general worker strikes also broke out, leading to the brutal persecution of any suspected communists. With both sides eager to finish the conflict, Germany and France signed the harsh Treaty of Cologne in October 1918. As a result, Germany gained French Colonial Possessions, imposed large reparations, annexed land and withdrew from Paris.

Clockwise from Top Right: Petain and other members of the military junta c.April 1919, a nationalist march in Toulouse, the aftermath of communist-nationalist fighting in Paris, members of the 1920 Communist Convention, communist riots in Paris in March 1919.

In March 1919, at the height of the crisis, a military nationalist faction led by Marshal Phillipe Pétain overthrew the government in Toulouse (the government hadn’t moved back to Paris due to the revolutionary atmosphere there) and installed a provisional right-wing military government. Petain used the remaining French Army to purge communists, beginning in key urban areas in the south. These purges finally united the formerly pacifist communists in their fight against the authoritarian government. Organised by Ludovic-Oscar Frossard, the communists armed themselves and took control of a number of communes in Paris. The Revolution quickly took hold of the capital, and by late-April, the Red Army controlled the whole of Paris and the neighbouring provinces. Petain’s situation was not helped from May to July 1919, when about 20,000 soldiers (roughly about a fifth of France’s entire mainland army) mutinied and joined the rapidly growing Red Army. The Radical-Right quickly joined the fight against the PCF and formed paramilitaries, such as the Camelots du Roi, Jeunesses Patriotes and Croix-de-Feu. The Red Army’s tactics of killing high-class citizens led to a great number fleeing southward, towards Petain’s government in Toulouse. By October 1920, the military was pushed out of Toulouse and relocated to Toulon. After the strategic Battle for Arles was lost in January 1921, the French Government finally fled mainland France and went to Corsica and Algeria. The last pockets of anti-communist resistance were held in the richest parts of the French Riviera, where the Organisation française de protection fought the communists to allow the French emigre to escape to Corsica.

In 1936, France and the Soviet Union formed the International Communist Alliance, a political and military union. Stalin and Maurice Thorez led the Stalinist-based alliance, which was opposed to syndicalists and Trotskyists.

Italian Mountain Corps during 1942.

France was promised the lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine, the Calais region and Wallonia in exchange for joining the war against the German Empire and its allies in 1941. France, knowing that in the event of a third war against Germany that it would evidently lose, had created the Maginot Line. Using this as a backup, the Red Army invaded Belgium through Wallonia, hoping to counter the strengthened German Defences on the Franco-German Border. However, the French advance halted due to the Italian attack on the defences at the Alpine Franco-Italian border. Roughly 400,000 Italian soldiers invaded Southern France in the first weeks of the invasion, though it made little progress in penetrating the French line in the first months of the invasion. With Germany unwilling to spend any more effort, men, and supplies invading France (due to the Eastern Front), the Italians not making much progress past the French Alps, and French soldiers overstretched, the front became a stalemate with minimal action.

As agreed by Germany and the Nationalists, the Free French Government already in place in Algeria automatically became the new governing body of mainland France. In 1944, Philippe Pétain - the so-called “Chief Protector of France” - had retired and passed command to his protégé Charles de Gaulle, who also took the title of “Chief Protector”. Now, de Gaulle became the first head of an unified France since 1919. An immediate issue facing France was in which way the government should be formed - the prominent Action Francaise led by Charles Maurras supported a form of constitutional monarchy characterised by extreme conservatism and nationalism, much of the army supported an authoritarian republic, and a notable collection of former Liberal and Socialist politicians supported a return to multi-party parliamentarism.

In 1947, the French Government under Charles de Gaulle allowed the first multi-party elections since 1914. However, these elections were heavily monitored and manipulated by the French Army, and only three parties were allowed to run - the Gaullist MPRN, the Radical-Republican Party and the Action Francaise. The Movement for Progress and National Revival won a plurality of seats and received 79.2% of the vote, an indication of the heavy electoral fraud indicative of the 1947 Election.