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France also became involved in joint European projects such as Airbus, the Galileo positioning system and the Eurocorps. [ citation needed ] The French stood among the strongest supporters of NATO and EU policy in the Balkans, to prevent genocide in former Yugoslavia ; French troops joined the 1999 NATO bombing of the country .
To a large extent, modern France lies within clear limits of physical geography.Roughly half of its margin lies on sea coasts: one continuous coastline along "La Manche" ("the sleeve" or English Channel) and the Atlantic Ocean forming the country's north-western and western edge, and a shorter, separate coastline along the Mediterranean Sea forming its south-eastern edge.
France, [IX] officially the French Republic, [X] is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the North Atlantic, the French West Indies, and many islands in Oceania and the Indian Ocean, giving it one of the largest discontiguous exclusive economic zones in the world.
France through its French colonial empire, became a superpower from 1643 until 1815; [2] [3] from the reign of King Louis XIV until the defeat of Napoleon in the Napoleonic Wars. [4] The Spanish Empire lost its superpower status to France after the signing of the Treaty of the Pyrenees (but maintained the status of Great Power until the ...
Treaty of The Hague: France and its allies signed a treaty with Spain, thus ending the War of the Quadruple Alliance. 1723: 15 February: Louis XV Became the new King of France. 1738: 18 November: Treaty of Vienna: The signing of the treaty ended the War of the Polish Succession. France gained the Duchy of Lorraine and Bar. 1744: 5–10 October
Religiously France became divided between the Catholic majority and a Protestant minority, the Huguenots, which led to a series of civil wars, the Wars of Religion (1562–1598). The Wars of Religion crippled France, but triumph over Spain and the Habsburg monarchy in the Thirty Years' War made France the most powerful nation on the continent ...
During the Agadir Crisis in 1911, Britain supported France against Germany, and Morocco became a French protectorate. The French made their last major colonial gains after World War I , when they gained mandates over the former territories of the Ottoman Empire that make up what is now Syria and Lebanon , as well as most of the former German ...
France on the eve of the modern era (1477). The red line denotes the boundary of the French kingdom, while the light blue the royal domain. In the mid 15th century, France was significantly smaller than it is today, [a] and numerous border provinces (such as Roussillon, Cerdagne, Calais, Béarn, Navarre, County of Foix, Flanders, Artois, Lorraine, Alsace, Trois-Évêchés, Franche-Comté ...