French people () are the individuals who are identified with the country of France, or more broadly, a global sociolinguistic group that share a common connection through the French language, culture, and history that originated in Western Europe. The Francophone world is one of the most geographically widespread linguistic communities.
The French people are primarily descended from Gallo-Romans (Romanized Celts) and Germanic peoples such as the Franks, the Visigoths, the Suebi and the Burgundians who settled in Gaul from east of the Rhine after the fall of the Roman Empire, as well as various later waves of lower-level irregular migration that have continued to the present day. The Norsemen also settled in Normandy in the 10th century and contributed significantly to the ancestry of the Normans. Furthermore, regional ethnic minorities also exist within France that have distinct lineages, languages and cultures such as Bretons in Brittany, Occitans in Occitania, Basques in the French Basque Country, Catalans in northern Catalonia, Germans in Alsace, Corsicans in Corsica and Flemings in French Flanders.
France has long been a patchwork of local customs and regional differences, and while most French people still speak the French language as their mother tongue, languages like Picard, Poitevin-Saintongeais, Franco-Provencal, Occitan, Auvergnat, Corsican, Basque, Lorraine Franconian, Alsatian, Norman, Breton, french flemish and Catalan remain spoken in their respective regions. Arabic is also widely spoken, arguably the largest minority language in France as of the 21st century (a spot previously held by Breton and Occitan).
Modern French society is a melting pot.French historian Gérard Noiriel uses the phrase "creuset français" to express the idea, in his pioneering work Le Creuset français (1988). See ; translated from French by Geoffroy de Laforcade. From the middle of the 19th century, it experienced a high rate of inward migration, mainly consisting of Italians, Portuguese, Spaniards, Berbers, Arabs, Jews, Sub-Saharan Africans, Chinese, and other peoples from the Middle East and East Asia, and the government, defining France as an inclusive nation with universal values, advocated assimilation through which immigrants were expected to adhere to French values and cultural norms. Nowadays, while the government has let newcomers retain their distinctive cultures since the mid-1980s and requires from them a mere integration, French citizens still equate their nationality with citizenship as does French law.
the total population in France was estimated about 68.6million. In addition to mainland France, French people and people of French descent can be found internationally, in overseas departments and territories of France such as the French West Indies (French Caribbean), and in foreign countries with significant French-speaking population groups or not, such as the United States (French Americans), Canada (French Canadians), Argentina (French Argentines), Brazil (French Brazilians), Mexico (French Mexicans), Chile (French Chileans) and Uruguay (French Uruguayans).Countries and Their Cultures French Canadians – everyculture.com Retrieved 12 April 2013.
Citizenship and legal residence To be French, according to the first article of the French Constitution, is to be a citizen of France, regardless of one's origin, race, or religion (sans distinction d'origine, de race ou de religion). According to its principles, France has devoted itself to the destiny of a proposition nation, a generic territory where people are bounded only by the French language and the assumed willingness to live together, as defined by Ernest Renan's "plébiscite de tous les jours" ('everyday plebiscite') on the willingness to live together, in Renan's 1882 essay "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?").
The debate concerning the integration of this view with the principles underlying the European Community remains open.One point of friction can be the status of minority languages. However, though almost extinct, such regional languages are preserved in France and one can learn them at school as a second language (enseignement de langue regionale).
France has been historically open to immigration, although this has changed in recent years. Referring to this perceived openness, Gertrude Stein, wrote: "America is my country but Paris is my home". Indeed, the country has long valued its openness, tolerance and the quality of services available.For instance, the World Health Organization found that France provided the "best overall health care" in the world World Health Organization Assesses the World's Health Systems Application for French citizenship is often interpreted as a renunciation of previous state allegiance unless a dual citizenship agreement exists between the two countries (for instance, this is the case with Switzerland: one can be both French and Swiss). The European treaties have formally permitted movement and European citizens enjoy formal rights to employment in the state sector (though not as trainees in reserved branches, e.g., as magistrates).
Seeing itself as an inclusive nation with universal values, France has always valued and strongly advocated assimilation. However, the success of such assimilation has recently been called into question. There is increasing dissatisfaction with, and within, growing ethno-cultural enclaves (communautarisme). The 2005 French riots in some troubled and impoverished suburbs (les quartiers sensibles) were an example of such tensions. However they should not be interpreted as ethnic conflicts (as appeared before in other countries like the US and the UK) but as social conflicts born out of socioeconomic problems endangering proper integration.Hughes LAGRANGES, Emeutes, renovation urbaine et alienation politique, Observatoire sociologique du changement, Paris, 2007
History
Historically, the heritage of the French people is mostly of Celtic or Gallic, Latin (Romans) origin, descending from the ancient and medieval populations of Gauls or Celts from the Atlantic to the Rhone Alps, Germanic tribes that settled France from east of the Rhine and Belgium after the fall of the Roman Empire such as the Franks, Burgundians, Allemanni, Visigoths, and Suebi, Latin and Roman tribes such as Ligurians and Gallo-Romans, Basques, and Norse populations largely settling in Normandy at the beginning of the 10th century as well as "Bretons" (Celtic Britons) settling in Brittany in Western France.
The name "France" etymologically derives from the word Francia, the territory of the Franks. The Franks were a Germanic tribe that overran Roman Gaul at the end of the Roman Empire.
Celtic and Roman Gaul
In the pre-Roman era, Gaul (an area of Western Europe that encompassed all of what is known today as France, Belgium, part of Germany and Switzerland, and Northern Italy) was inhabited by a variety of peoples who were known collectively as the Gaulish tribes. Their ancestors were Celts who came from Central Europe in the 7th century BCE or earlier, and non-Celtic peoples including the Ligures, Aquitanians and Basques in Aquitaine. The Belgae, who lived in the northern and eastern areas, may have had Germanic admixture; many of these peoples had already spoken Gaulish by the time of the Roman conquest.
Gaul was militarily conquered in 58–51 BCE by the Roman legions under the command of General Julius Caesar, except for the south-east which had already been conquered about one century earlier. Over the next six centuries, the two cultures intermingled, creating a hybridized Gallo-Roman culture. In the late Roman era, in addition to colonists from elsewhere in the Empire and Gaulish natives, Gallia also became home to some immigrant populations of Germanic and Scythian origin, such as the Alans.
The Gaulish language is thought to have survived into the 6th century in France, despite considerable Romanization of the local material culture. Coexisting with Latin, Gaulish helped shape the Vulgar Latin dialects that developed into French, with effects including loanwords and calques (including oui, the word for "yes"), sound changes,Henri Guiter, "Sur le substrat gaulois dans la Romania", in Munus amicitae. Studia linguistica in honorem Witoldi Manczak septuagenarii, eds., Anna Bochnakowa & Stanislan Widlak, Krakow, 1995.Eugeen Roegiest, Vers les sources des langues romanes: Un itinéraire linguistique à travers la Romania (Leuven, Belgium: Acco, 2006), 83. and influences in conjugation and word order. Today, the last redoubt of Celtic language in France can be found in the northwestern region of Brittany, although this is not the result of a survival of Gaulish language but of a 5th-century AD migration of Brythonic speaking Celts from Britain.
The Vulgar Latin in the region of Gallia took on a distinctly local character, some of which is attested in graffiti, which evolved into the Gallo-Romance dialects which include French and its closest relatives.
Frankish Kingdom
With the decline of the Roman Empire in Western Europe, a federation of Germanic peoples entered the picture: the Franks, from which the word "French" derives. The Franks were Germanic pagans who began to settle in northern Gaul as laeti during the Roman era. They continued to filter across the Rhine River from present-day Netherlands and Germany between the 3rd and 7th centuries. Initially, they served in the Roman army and obtained important commands. Their language is still spoken as a kind of Dutch (French Flemish) in northern France (French Flanders). The Alamans, another Germanic people immigrated to Alsace, hence the Alemannic German now spoken there. The Alamans were competitors of the Franks, and their name is the origin of the French word for "German": Allemand.
By the early 6th century, the Franks, led by the Merovingian king Clovis I and his sons, had consolidated their hold on much of modern-day France. The other major Germanic people to arrive in France, after the Burgundians and the Visigoths, were the Norsemen or Northmen. Known by the shortened name "Norman" in France, these were Viking raiders from modern Denmark and Norway. They settled with Anglo-Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxons from the Danelaw in the region known today as Normandy in the 9th and 10th centuries. This later became a fiefdom of the Kingdom of France under King Charles III. The Vikings eventually intermarried with the local people, converting to Christianity in the process. The Normans, two centuries later, went on to conquer England and Southern Italy.
Eventually, though, the largely autonomous Duchy of Normandy was incorporated back into the royal domain (i. e. the territory under direct control of the French king) in the Middle Ages. In the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, founded in 1099, at most 120,000 Franks, who were predominantly French-speaking Western Christians, ruled over 350,000 Muslims, Jews, and native Eastern Christians.Benjamin Z. Kedar, "The Subjected Muslims of the Frankish Levant", in The Crusades: The Essential Readings, ed. Thomas F. Madden, Blackwell, 2002, pg. 244. Originally published in Muslims Under Latin Rule, 1100–1300, ed. James M. Powell, Princeton University Press, 1990. Kedar quotes his numbers from Joshua Prawer, Histoire du royaume latin de Jérusalem, tr. G. Nahon, Paris, 1969, vol. 1, pp. 498, 568–72.
Kingdom of France
Unlike elsewhere in Europe, France experienced relatively low levels of emigration to the Americas, with the exception of the Huguenots, due to a lower birthrate than in the rest of Europe. However, significant emigration of mainly Roman Catholic French populations led to the settlement of the Province of Acadia, Canada (New France) and Louisiana, all (at the time) French possessions, as well as colonies in the West Indies, Mascarene islands and Africa.