M-F 9-6, Sat 9-11 EST 800 230 0426
The Battle of Normandy in 1944, codenamed Operation Overlord, was the invasion of Nazi occupied Western Europe by the western allies. With almost three million troops crossing the English Channel from England to Normandy in France, it still ranks as the world’s largest seaborne invasion.
The national flag of France, more commonly known as the Tricolore (Tricolour), features three equal vertical bands coloured blue (hoist side), white and red. It first appeared during the French Revolution and was a combination of the colours of the coat of arms of Paris (red and blue) and the royal colour (white), with the combination often being credited to the Marquis de Lafayette.
Causes
Many factors led to the revolution; to some extent the old order succumbed to its own rigidity in the face of a changing world; to some extent, it fell to the ambitions of a rising bourgeoisie, allied with aggrieved peasants and wage-earners and with individuals of all classes who were influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment. As the revolution proceeded and as power devolved from the monarchy to legislative bodies, the conflicting interests of these initially allied groups would become the source of conflict and bloodshed.
Certainly, all of the following must be counted among the causes of the revolution:
France in 1789 was one of the richest and most powerful nations in Europe. Only in Great Britain and the Netherlands did the common people have more freedom and less chance of arbitrary punishment. Nonetheless, a popular rebellion would first to bring the regime of King Louis XVI of France under control of a constitution, then to depose, imprison, try, and execute the king and, later, his wife Marie Antoinette.
Treaty of Versailles
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The Treaty of Versailles of 1919 was the peace treaty that was created as a result of the six-month-long Paris Peace Conference of 1919 which put an official end to World War I. The treaty was ratified on January 10, 1920 and required that Germany accept responsibility for the war and was thus obliged to pay large amounts of compensation (known as war reparations). Like many other treaties, it is named for the place of its signing: the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles. On January 18, 1919 a peace conference opened in Versailles, France to work on the treaty.
The Dreyfus Affair was a political cover-up which divided France for many years in the late 19th century.
History
La Marseillaise is a song written and composed by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle on April 24, 1792. Its original name is Chant de marche de l’Armée du Rhin (Marching song of the Rhine Army). It became the rallying call of the French Revolution and was so-called because it was first sung on the streets by troops from Marseille upon their arrival in Paris.
La Marseillaise was rearranged by Hector Berlioz around 1830.
In 1917, after the collapse of the tsarist regim La Marseillaise became the national anthem of Russia, the Russian lyrics being very different from the French lyrics. It was soon replaced with The International by the Bolsheviks.
Gaul
Settled mainly by the Gauls and related Celtic peoples (apart from a shrinking area of Basque population in the south-west), the area of modern France comprised the bulk of the region of Gaul (Latin Gallia) under Roman rule from the 1st century BC to the 5th century AD.
Franks
In 486, Clovis I, leader of the Salian Franks to the east, conquered the Roman territory between the Loire and the Somme, subsequently uniting most of northern and central France under his rule and adopting (496) the Roman Catholic form of Christianity in preference to the Arianism preferred by rival Germanic rulers.
The first humans found in France, known as Homo Erectus, are believed to have lived around 950,000 B.C. 
Categories: French History 101
Prehistory
They evolved slowly, through four glaciations, discovered fire in the process (around 400,000 B.C.) to become Homo Sapiens. One of them, Cro-Magnon man, found in Dordogne (South West of France) in 1868 used to live circa 25,000. His physionomy differed only slightly from ours.