Royaume de France (Kingdom of France) - (1589 - 1792/1814/1815 - 1848)

From The Romanian Monarchist

The Kingdom of France is the historiographical name or umbrella term given to various political entities of France in the medieval and early modern period. It was one of the most powerful states in Europe from the High Middle Ages to 1848 during its dissolution. It was also an early colonial power, with colonies in Asia and Africa, and the largest being New France in North America geographically centred around the Great Lakes.

France in the early modern era was increasingly centralised; the French language began to displace other languages from official use, and the monarch expanded his absolute power in an administrative system, known as the Ancien Régime, complicated by historic and regional irregularities in taxation, legal, judicial, and ecclesiastic divisions, and local prerogatives. 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). Subsequently, France developed its first colonial empire in Asia, Africa, and in the Americas. In the 16th to the 17th centuries, the First French colonial empire stretched from a total area at its peak in 1680 to over 10 million square kilometres (3.9 million square miles), the second-largest empire in the world at the time behind the Spanish Empire. Colonial conflicts with Great Britain led to the loss of much of its North American holdings by 1763. French intervention in the American Revolutionary War helped the United States secure independence from King George III and the Kingdom of Great Britain, but was costly and achieved little for France. Through its colonial empire, large population, and centralized government, France became a superpower, lasting from the reign of King Louis XIV in the 17th century until Napoleon's defeat in 1815. Much of this power came at the expense of the Spanish Empire, which is often seen as losing its superpower status to France after the signing of the Treaty of the Pyrenees (although remaining a great power until the Napoleonic Wars and the Independence of Spanish America). Following the French Revolution, which began in 1789, the Kingdom of France adopted a written constitution in 1791, but the Kingdom was abolished a year later and replaced with the First French Republic. The monarchy was restored by the other great powers in 1814 and, with the exception of the Hundred Days in 1815, lasted until the French Revolution of 1848.