France

Roman Gaul left Nîmes, Arles, Lyon and the Pont du Gard; the baptism of Clovis around 496 anchored the Franks to Rome. From Cluny to Chartres, France invented Romanesque then Gothic art; the Sorbonne transmitted Aristotle, and the 1804 Civil Code rewrote Roman law for the whole of Europe.

Conquered by Caesar between 58 and 51 BC, Gaul became one of the most Romanised provinces of the Empire: grid-planned cities, aqueducts, Latin law. Christianity took root there from the second century through Lyon and the Rhône corridor.

From the baptism of Clovis to Saint Louis, the Capetian monarchy patiently built a territorial state backed by the Church. In the thirteenth century Paris became the intellectual capital of Christendom: at the Sorbonne the West rediscovered Aristotle through Arabic and Jewish translations.

1789 overturned the old order and proclaimed the rights of man; the Napoleonic Empire spread by arms a codified law that remains, two centuries later, the legal basis of much of continental Europe. After 1945 France chose reconciliation: the Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950, the Treaties of Rome, then the Franco-German engine of European construction.