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Japheth son of the Biblical Patriarch Noah

 

Also Diphath. Literal meanings are opened, enlarged, fair or light (father of the Caucasoid/Indo-Europoid, Indo-European, Indo-Germanic, or Indo-Aryan races - Japhethites). Japheth is the progenitor of seven sons:

 

Gomer "complete" (sons were Ashkenaz, Riphath and Togarmah) - also Gamir, Gommer, Gomeri, Gomeria, Gomery, Goth, Guth, Gutar, Götar, Gadelas, Galic, Gallic, Galicia, Galica, Galatia, Gael, Getae, Galatae, Galatoi, Gaul, Galls, Goar, Celt, Celtae, Celticae, Kelt, Keltoi, Gimmer, Gimmerai, Gimirra, Gimirrai, Gimirraya, Kimmer, Kimmeroi, Kimirraa, Kumri, Umbri, Cimmer, Cimmeria, Cimbri, Cimbris, Crimea, Chomari, Cymric, Cymry, Cymru, Cymbry, Cumber (Caledonians, Picts, Milesians, Umbrians, Helvetians, Celts1, Galatians, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Goths, Vandals, Scandinavians, Jutes, Teutons, Franks, Burgundians, Alemanni, Armenians, Germans2, Belgians, Dutch, Luxembourgers, Liechensteiners, Austrians, Swiss, Angles, Saxons, Britons, English, Cornish, Irish, Welsh, French, and other related groups); 

 

So the Greeks, Romans, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italians all came from Javan. axons, Britons, English, Cornish, Irish, Welsh, French, and other related groups

 

Prehistoric people

 

French people are the descendants of pre-indo European people that lived in western France which corresponds today to Pays de la Loire and Poitou-Charente as well as Gaulsand Belgae, western European Celtic peoples, as well as Bretons, Aquitanians, Iranic Alans and to a lesser extent, Ligurians, mixed with the Germanic people arriving at the beginning of the Frankish Empire such as the Franks, the Visigoths, the Suebi, the Saxons, the Allemanni and the Burgundians, and later Germanic tribes such as the Vikings(known as Normans), who settled in Normandy in the 9th century.

 

The Neolithic period, alias the New Stone Age, produced France’s incredible collection of menhirs and dolmens: the Morbihan Coast in Brittany is an ode to megalithic monuments. During this era, warmer weather caused great changes in flora and fauna, and ushered in farming and stock rearing. Cereals, peas, beans and lentils were grown, and villages were settled. Decorated pottery, woven fabrics and polished stone tools became commonplace household items.

 

At the beginning of the last ice-age, people lived in Europe from Gibraltar to Belgium and from western France to the Crimea. They traversed the woods in the Mediterranean area and the moss-tundra between Brittany and the Ural. They also lived along the North Sea coast and Baltic coast.

 

The France of today has evolved through 2500 years of history. During that time Europe was occupied by various invaders, and the alliances of different empires changed borders. In later years territories were acquired by royal marriage, and even bought and sold. Some areas changed nationality several times, particularly those adjacent to the ever changing frontiers. 

France itself, was an invader at various times and the borders of France expanded to accomodate conquered territories. Savoie finally became part of France in 1860, Alsace was returned to France in 1919. 

After 0AD todays France was controlled by the Romans, but by 300AD the weakened Roman empire began to have civil wars. The empire was partitioned into two in 285AD and into 3 by 330AD. Ongoing power struggles further weakened the empire. The empire was reunited in 390AD, but was unable to stand the onslaught of the invaders. 

British Celts invaded Brittany around 400AD. 

The Vandals controlled West France by 420AD, and by negotiation handed control to their allies, the Visigoths. In 450AD an attack by the Huns was repelled. 

By 460AD, the Western Roman empire was only a shrunken shadow of its former self with a few isolated remnants. 

The Franks expelled the Visigoths and controlled virtually all of present day France by 470AD, with the exception of isolated cities and part of North France. By 500AD France was virtually free of Rome. 

The Franks established the Carolingian dynasty and, under Charlemagne, went on to occupy North Italy by 774AD. 

They were weakened by continued defensive wars against invading Vikings, Saracens (who now occupied Spain), Basques and Saxons. 

By the end of the millenium, France was divided into areas controlled by dukes and counts representing Gauls, Bretons, Danes, Aquitanians, Goths, Spanish and Gascons. 

The regions elected Hugh Capet 'king of the Franks" in 987AD. In fact he only directly controlled a small part of todays France. 

The independent regions strengthened their influence. The Normans, Plantagenets, Lusignans, Hautevilles, Ramnulfids, and the House of Toulouse emerged as powerful territories in their own right. Many expanded their territory overseas (including the Norman conquest of England) and the power of the king was severely threatened. 

William (the conqueror), Duke of Normandy was crowned king of England 1066. 
In Eastern Europe, the muslims had occupied Jerusalem since the seventh century, By 1000AD, they had expanded their ambitions by threatening the Byzantine empire (orthodox christian controlled successor to the East Roman Empire). 

This lead Pope Urban to appeal for military aid from christian countries to repel the muslims and reinstate the Byzantine empire. The various French regions had converted to catholic christianity and crusades would dominate military activity for the 200 years after 1096AD. 

The church acquired significant property and became a dominant local power. 

In 1152 Henry 11 (England) married Eleanor of Aquitaine. Thus the English crown laid claim to a significant part of France. 

The king of France gained control of Languedoc in 1250 as a result of his contribution to the Albigensian crusade against the Cathars. 

In 1337, the French king, Charles 1V, died and the throne was claimed by Edward 111 (England) which marked the start of the hundred years war. By 1453, the English had been driven back to Calais. 

The French royal family became more powerful and claimed sovereignty over roughly the France of today excluding the Flemish areas in the North, Provence & Cote d'Azur, Rousillon, Savoie, Alsace, Lorraine, Corsica and Franche Comte. The separatist areas were gradually added to France over the next 350 years. 

From 1562AD to 1598AD, France was embroiled in religious wars between protestants and catholics. Both sides were assisted by other nations and the war developed into a struggle for France. This was eventually resolved by the Edict of Nantes in 1598AD which temporarily ended the conflict. 

From 1600AD onwards, the French monarchy became more powerful and extravagant. This period established the French court, scientific breakthroughs, colonisation and developments in the arts which were sponsored by the royal court. However, engagement in serial wars (including further religious wars) drained the national resources and demanded an ever increasing taxation burden. The seeds of unrest were therefore planted in the feudal population. 
 

 

 

Gauls & Romans

 

The Celtic Gauls moved into the region between 1500 and 500 BC, establishing trading links by about 600 BC with the Greeks, whose colonies included Massilia (Marseille) on the Mediterranean coast. About 300 years later the Celtic Parisii tribe built a few wattle and daub huts on what is now Paris’ Île de la Cité.

 

It was from Wissant in far northern France that Julius Caesar launched his invasion of Britain in 55 BC. Centuries of conflict between the Gauls and Romans ended in 52 BC when Caesar’s legions crushed a revolt led by Gallic chief Vercingétorix in Gergovia, near present-day Clermont-Ferrand. See Vercingétorix on Clermont-Ferrand’s place de la Jaude and Caesar in action on the façade of the Roman triumphal arch in Orange.

 

The subsequent period gave rise to magnificent baths, temples, aqueducts like the Pont du Gard and other splendid public buildings: stand like a plebeian or sit like a Roman patrician in awe-inspiring theatres and amphitheatres at Autun, Lyon, Vienne, Arles and Orange. Lyon also has an excellent Gallo-Roman civilisation museum. In the Dordogne, Périgueux’s 1st-century Roman amphitheatre was dismantled in the 3rd century and its stones used to build the city walls. The town’s stunningly contemporary Vesunna Musée Gallo-Romain is a feast tobehold.

 

France remained under Roman rule until the 5th century, when the Franks (hence the name ‘France’) and the Alemanii overran the country from the east. These peoples adopted important elements of Gallo-Roman civilisation (including Christianity) and their eventual assimilation resulted in a fusion of Germanic culture with that of the Celts and the Romans.

 

 

Dynasty

 

The Frankish Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties ruled from the 5th to the 10th centuries, with the Carolingians wielding power from Laon in northern France. The Frankish tradition, by which the king was succeeded by all of his sons, led to power struggles and the eventual disintegration of the kingdom into a collection of small feudal states. In Poitiers in 732 Charles Martel defeated the Moors, thus preventing France from falling under Muslim rule as Spain had done.

 

Martel’s grandson, Charlemagne (742–814), extended the boundaries of the kingdom and was crowned Holy Roman Emperor (Emperor of the West) in 800. But during the 9th century, Scandinavian Vikings (also called Norsemen, thus Normans) raided France’s western coast, settling in the lower Seine Valley and forming the duchy of Normandy a century later.

 

With the crowning of Hugh Capet as king in 987, the Capetian dynasty was born. The king’s then-modest domain – a parcel of land around Paris and Orléans – was hardly indicative of a dynasty that would rule one of Europe’s most powerful countries for the next 800 years.

 

The tale of how William the Conqueror and his Norman forces occupied England in 1066 (making Normandy and, later, Plantagenet-ruled England formidable rivals of the kingdom of France) is told on the Bayeux Tapestry, showcased inside Bayeux’s Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux. In 1152 Eleanor of Aquitaine wed Henry of Anjou, bringing a further third of France under the control of the English crown. The subsequent rivalry between France and England for control of Aquitaine and the vast English territories in France lasted three centuries.

 

In Clermont-Ferrand in 1095 Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade, prompting France to play a leading role in the Crusades and giving rise to some splendid cathedrals – Reims, Strasbourg, Metz and Chartres among them – between the 12th and 14th centuries. In 1309 French-born Pope Clement V moved the papal headquarters from Rome to Avignon, with Avignon’s third pope Benoît XII (1334–42) starting work on the resplendent Palais des Papes. The Holy See remained in the Provençal city until 1377.

 

 

The Hundred Years’ War

 

Incessant struggles between the Capetians and England’s King Edward III (a Plantagenet) over the powerful French throne degenerated into the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453). The French suffered particularly nasty defeats at Crécy and Agincourt (home to a great multimedia battle museum). Abbey-studded Mont St-Michel was the only place in northern and western France not to fall into English hands.

 

Five years later, the dukes of Burgundy (allied with the English) occupied Paris and in 1422 John Plantagenet, duke of Bedford, was made regent of France for England’s King Henry VI, then an infant. Less than a decade later he was crowned king of France at Paris’ Notre Dame.

 

Luckily for the French, a 17-year-old virginal warrior called Jeanne d’Arc (Joan of Arc) came along; her tale is told at Orléans’ Maison de Jeanne d’Arc. At Château de Chinon in 1429, she persuaded French legitimist Charles VII that she had a divine mission from God to expel the English from France and bring about Charles’ coronation in Reims. Convicted of witchcraft and heresy by a tribunal of French ecclesiastics following her capture by the Burgundians and subsequent sale to the English in 1430, Joan was burned at the stake in Rouen in 1431: one tower of the castle where the teenager was imprisoned and the square where she was burned as a witch remain.

 

Charles VII returned to Paris in 1437, but it wasn’t until 1453 that the English were driven from French territory (with the exception of Calais). At Château de Langeais in 1491, Charles VIII wed Anne de Bretagne, marking the unification of independent Brittany with France.

 

 

Renaissance to Reformation

 

With the arrival of Italian Renaissance culture during the reign of François I (r 1515–47), the focus shifted to the Loire Valley. Italian artists decorated royal castles in Amboise, Blois, Chambord and Chaumont, with Leonardo da Vinci making Le Clos Lucé in Amboise his home from 1516 until his death. Artist and architect disciples of Michelangelo and Raphael were influential, as were writers such as Rabelais, Marot and Ronsard. Renaissance ideas of scientific and geographic scholarship and discovery assumed a new importance, as did the value of secular over religious life.

 

The Reformation swept through Europe in the 1530s, the ideas of Jean (John) Calvin (1509–64) – a Frenchman born in Noyon (Picardie) but exiled to Geneva – strengthening it in France. Following the Edict of Jan (1562), which afforded the Protestants certain rights, the Wars of Religion (1562–98) broke out between the Huguenots (French Protestants who received help from the English), the Catholic League (led by the House of Guise) and the Catholic monarchy. In 1588 the Catholic League forced Henri III (r 1574–89) to flee the royal court at the Louvre and the next year the monarch was assassinated.

 

Henri IV (r 1589–1610) kicked off the Bourbon dynasty, issuing the controversial Edict of Nantes (1598) to guarantee the Huguenots many civil and political rights, notably freedom of conscience. Ultra-Catholic Paris refused to allow the new Protestant king entry to the city, and a siege of the capital continued for almost five years. Only when Henri IV embraced Catholicism at the cathedral in St-Denis did the capital submit to him.

 

Throughout most of his undistinguished reign, Fontainebleau-born Louis XIII (r 1610–43) remained firmly under the thumb of his ruthless chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, best known for his untiring efforts to establish an all-powerful monarchy in France and French supremacy in Europe.

 

 

The Sun King

 

At the tender age of five, le Roi Soleil (the Sun King) ascended the throne as Louis XIV (r 1643–1715). Bolstered by claims of divine right, he involved France in a rash of wars that gained it territory but terrified its neighbours and nearly bankrupted the treasury. At home, he quashed the ambitious, feuding aristocracy and created the first centralised French state. In Versailles, 23km southwest of Paris, Louis XIV built an extravagant palace and made his courtiers compete with each other for royal favour, reducing them to ineffectual sycophants. In 1685 he revoked the Edict of Nantes.

 

Grandson Louis XV (r 1715–74) was an oafish buffoon whose regent, the duke of Orléans, shifted the royal court back to Paris. As the 18th century progressed, the ancien régime (old order) became increasingly at odds with the needs of the country. Enlightened anti-establishment and anticlerical ideas expressed by Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu further threatened the royal regime.

 

The Seven Years’ War (1756–63), fought by France and Austria against Britain and Prussia, was one of a series of ruinous wars pursued by Louis XV, leading to the loss of France’s flourishing colonies in Canada, the West Indies and India to the British. The war cost a fortune and, even more ruinous for the monarchy, it helped to disseminate in France the radical democratic ideas that had been thrust onto the world stage by the American Revolution.