The French Army is the armed forces of the Fifth Republic of France and its predecessors such as the First French Empire and the Kingdom of France. Known for its hegemony over European battlefields from the 700s-1400s and from 1790-1914, the French army was a fighting force that at times consisted of the National Guard and militia and at times was made up of professional field army forces.
History[]
Charles VII of France established the French Army, paid with regular wages rather than feudal wages, in the 1420s during the Hundred Years War with the Kingdom of England. The army was one of the first to deploy cannon on a battlefield, winning the Battle of Castillon in 1453 and driving the English out of their country, re-establishing the Kingdom of France as a strong military, political, social, and economic power.
The French armed forces were bolstered by Swiss Pikemen in the later 1400s, from the 1470s to the early 1500s. They employed the Swiss mercenaries during their wars in Italy in the Italian Wars of 1494-1559, during which they lost and regained control of many possessions in Italy. In the end, they gained no lands in Italy, but had finished their reconquest of their homeland by taking Calais from England when England fought against France with the Papal States in the last war of the 1550s.
France had no official army during the French Wars of Religion in the later 1500s, during which time the country was divided between the Catholics and Protestant Huguenots. France signed the Edict of Nantes in 1598, ending the wars and giving the Protestants rights. They had barely recovered from the wars when the Thirty Years War began in 1618, pitting not only Catholics versus Protestants in warfare across Central Europe, but also the House of Habsburg (Holy Roman Empire and the Spanish Empire) against the rest of Europe's smaller German states as well as Denmark and Sweden. The French joined the war in 1635, fighting for the Protestants to prevent a Habsbrug takeover of Europe. While the Thirty Years War ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, they resumed their fighting with Spain until 1658, after they defeated a Spanish invasion at the Battle of the Dunes (although they lost Catalonia to the Spanish).
France's army was reformed by King Louis XIV of France in the 1660s up to the early 1700s, as King Louis wanted to wage wars to re-establish France as a strong power. He fought against Spain and the United Provinces in the Spanish Netherlands in 1665, 1670, and 1683, before bringing most of Europe into conflict during the War of the Grand Alliance in 1688-1697. France defeated an alliance of the Holy Roman Empire, England, the United Provinces, Spain, Sweden, Westphalia, and many of the Habsburg-controlled small German states. Louis XIV had won a military victory but gained no lands, and lost money and men during the conflict. In the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), when he tried to place his great-grandson Philippe de Bourbon as the King of Spain to unite France and Spain, the same allies fought him and defeated him. However, France was given no penalty; Philippe was allowed to become "Felipe V of Spain", but nullified of his privileges in France.
The army was further tested in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) and the Seven Years War (1756-1763), with their general Maurice de Saxe drilling France's troops and issuing lambskin wigs to all soldiers during the Austrian war; during the Seven Years War, France lost all of their North American lands and lost against Prussia. King Louis XV of France was to blame for the defeats, and his son, King Louis XVI of France, was overthrown by a popular uprising in 1789 and executed in 1793 when the new First Republic of France was formed.
The French revolutionary army, lasting from 1789 to 1815, was commanded by many inexperienced generals, many of whom started the war as enlisted men and within months were promoted to a General's rank. The French Revolutionary Wars were full of wins and losses for France, who took on almost all of Europe's powers, but during this time General Napoleon Bonaparte distinguished himself as an artillery commander who later took control of Austrian Italy in 1797 and briefly conquered Egypt and Palestine in 1799. In 1800, he forced the Second Coalition to make peace and in 1803 he became the Emperor of France, and fought many wars to expand France from France to the Ukraine, from Denmark down to Italy. His empire included all of Europe except for the Balkans, Russia, Scandinavia, and the British Isles, by 1812.
Napoleon's tactical genius came to an end when he was dealt a crushing defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, ending his dynasty and restoring King Louis XVIII of France to the throne. France was at peace from 1815 to 1830, when they invaded Algeria Eyalet of the Ottoman Empire. They took over all of Algeria by 1847, killing tens of thousands of Algerian rebels. In 1848, their government was overthrown by Louis Napoleon, who became the President of the Second Republic of France, and the French were plunged into revolutionary crisis. Pompous, the French government waged war on the Austrian Empire to conquer northern Italy, aiding Sardinia-Piedmont against Austria and gaining Nice in exchange for their help.
The French army was worsted in 1870-1871 in the Franco-Prussian War, when the German Empire was formed and its army tested against the French. France lost Alsace-Lorraine to Germany, and the French prepared their army for the new modern challenges that it would face. They had Chassepot rifles and Maxim machine-guns, and the French captured most of Africa, gaining French Equatorial Africa, French West Africa, French Morocco, and French Algeria. In 1914, France faced a new European foe in Germany during World War I, with its colorfully-uniformed troops suffering heavy losses against German troops in the trenches in northern France and Flanders (Belgium). France regained Alsace-Lorraine in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, following the war's end, in victory for France and the Entente Powers.
France's army was modernized to have camouflaged uniforms and steel helmets, and was tested once more in World War II. France was quickly occupied in 1940 by Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, who used the same invasion tactics that the Germans had in World War I to conquer France. It was liberated in June-August 1944 by the United States, United Kingdom, Poland, Canada, and the French Resistance, who fought hard in the hedgerows of Normandy and in the villages of northern France.
In the aftermath of the war, France became a strong military power. They fought against Algerian nationals in the Algerian War of Independence from 1954-1962, giving them independence after a coup overthrew the war-dedicated government. President Charles de Gaulle gave Algeria independence from France, and France's colonial empire dissolved as its African possessions declared independence.
The French army fought in some civil wars in Africa for the rest of the 1900s and early 2000s, as well as the Gulf War and Afghanistan War.
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