The military history of France encompasses an immense panorama of conflicts and struggles extending for more than 2,000 years across areas including modern France, greater Europe, and European territorial possessions overseas. Because of such lengthy periods of warfare, the peoples of France have often been at the forefront of military development, and as a result, military trends emerging in France have had a decisive impact on European and world history.
Gallo-Roman conflict predominated from 400 BC to 50 BC, with the Romans emerging victorious in the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar. After the decline of the Roman Empire, a Germanic tribe known as the Franks took control of Gaul by defeating the Gallo-Romans and other competing tribes. The "land of Francia", from which France gets its name, had high points of expansion under the Frankish kings Clovis I, Charles Martel, and Charlemagne. In the Middle Ages, dynastic rivalries with England prompted major conflicts such as the Norman Conquest of England (1066) and the Hundred Years' War (1337 - 1453). With an increasingly centralized monarchy and the first standing army since Roman times, France came out of the Middle Ages as the most powerful nation in Europe, only to lose that status to Spain following defeat in the Italian Wars in the early to mid-sixteenth century. The Wars of Religion crippled France in the late sixteenth century, but a major victory over Spain in the Thirty Years' War of the early seventeenth century, with help from Sweden, made France the most powerful nation on the continent once more. The wars and military successes of Louis XIV in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries left France territorially larger, but fiscally bankrupt.
In the early to mid-eighteenth century, global competition with Great Britain led to several wars, including the Seven Years' War where France lost its North American holdings, but consolation came later in the form of preeminence in Europe and the American Revolutionary War, where extensive French aid led to America's independence. Internal political upheaval eventually led to 23 years of nearly continuous conflict in the French Revolutionary Wars (1792 - 1802) and the Napoleonic Wars (1803 - 1815). France reached the zenith of its power during this period, dominating the European continent in an unprecedented fashion by repeatedly defeating the numerous coalitions arranged against it, but after the defeat at the Battle of Waterloo of 1815 and the subsequent abdication of Napoléon, it had been restored to its pre-Revolutionary borders. The rest of the nineteenth century witnessed the growth of the French colonial empire and significant wars with Russia in the Crimea (a victor in the Crimean War of 1856), with Austria in Italy (a victor in the Second Italian War of Independence of 1859), and with Prussia within France itself (defeated in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870).
Franco-German rivalry reasserted itself again in World War I (1914 - 1918), this time France, along with British and to a much lesser extent, American aid, emerged as the victor. Tensions over the Versailles Treaty led to the Second World War, where it was defeated, along with the British Expeditionary Force, in the Battle of France (1940). The Allies, including the Free French Forces, the French Resistance, and later France itself as a liberated and restored nation, eventually achieved victory over the Germans (1945). As a result, France was given an occupation zone in Germany and a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. The two world wars destroyed Franco-German rivalry and paved the way for European integration, economically, politically, and militarily.
During the post-war period, France participated in the Korean War of 1950 to 1953 as a member of the United Nations contingent. France joined Britain and Israel in attacking Egypt during the Suez Crisis of 1956. While successfully crushing the Malagasy Uprising (1947 - 1948), France was stalemated militarily in its lengthy colonial wars in Vietnam (1946 - 1954) and Algeria (1954 - 1962). France lost those two colonies because of a lack of political will to continue the brutal fighting indefinitely.
Today, French military intervention is most often seen in its former African colonies and with its NATO, European and American allies in places such as Kuwait (1991 Gulf War), the Balkans (mid to late 1990s) and in Afganistan (since 2002 as part of ISAF). In 2006, the French Armed Forces constituted the largest military in the European Union and the 12th largest in the world by number of service personnel. The French Armed Forces however have the 3rd highest expenditure of any military in the world, as well as the 3rd largest nuclear force in the world, only behind those of the United States and Russia.
