An overview of French history from the cave paintings to the present, with the central aim of defining ‘Frenchness’ as a historical construct determined by its centrally representative position on the European continent, its fraught relationship with the Vatican as the ‘eldest daughter  of the Church’, its imperial rivalry with Britain, the conflict since the Revolution between the Catholic conservative  tradition and the secular republican tradition,  its vulnerability in relation to Germany and its determined attempt since World War Two to preserve its specific language and culture.