French Nail Designs Biography
(Source google.com)
The French (French: Français) are a nation and ethnic group native to Francethat share a common French culture and speak the French language as amother tongue. Historically, the French population descended from peoples ofRomance origin, later mixing with Celtic and/or Germanic origin, depending on the region. It is also an ethno-linguistic group based on ancestral ties, but within France, the French are defined by citizenship, regardless of ancestry or country of residence. However, the word can also refer to people of French descent who are found in other countries, with significant French-speaking population groups or not, such as Canada (French Canadians), United States (French Americans), Argentina(French Argentines), United Kingdom (French British), Brazil (French Brazilians) and French West Indies (French Caribbean), and some of them have a French cultural identity.
To be French, according to the first article of the French Constitution, is to be a citizen of France, regardless of one's origin, race, or religion (sans distinction d'origine, de race ou de religion). According to its principles, France has devoted itself to the destiny of aproposition nation, a generic territory where people are bounded only by the French language and the assumed willingness to live together, as defined by Ernest Renan's "plébiscite de tous les jours" ("daily referendum" on the willingness to live together, in Renan's 1882 essay "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?"). The debate concerning the integration of this view with the principles underlying the European Community remains open. A large number of foreigners have traditionally been permitted to live in France and succeeded in doing so. Indeed, the country has long valued its openness, tolerance and the quality of services available. Application for French citizenship is often interpreted as a renunciation of previous state allegiance unless a dual citizenship agreement exists between the two countries (for instance, this is the case with Switzerland: one can be both French and Swiss). The European treaties have formally permitted movement and European citizens enjoy formal rights to employment in the state sector (though not as trainees in reserved branches, e.g., as magistrates).
Seeing itself as an inclusive nation with universal values, France has always valued and strongly advocated assimilation. However, the success of such assimilation has recently been called into question. There is increasing dissatisfaction with, and within, growing ethno-cultural enclaves (communautarisme). The 2005 French riots in some troubled and impoverished suburbs (les quartiers sensibles) were an example of such tensions. However they should not be interpreted as ethnic conflicts (as appeared before in other countries like the USA and the UK) but as social conflicts born out of socioeconomic problems endangering proper integration. French people are the descendants of Gauls and Belgae, western European Celtic peoples, as well as Italic people, Bretons,Aquitanians, Iberians, Ligurians, and Greeks in southern France, mixed with the Germanic people arriving at the beginning of theFrankish Empire such as the Franks, the Visigoths, the Suebi, the Saxons, the Allemanni and the Burgundians, and later Germanic tribes such as the Vikings (known as Normans), who settled mostly in Normandy in the 9th century.
The name "France" etymologically derives from the word Francia, the territory of the Franks. The Franks were a Germanic tribe that overran Roman Gaul at the end of the Roman Empire. In the pre-Roman era, all of Gaul (an area of Western Europe that encompassed all of what is known today as France, Belgium, part of Germany and Switzerland, and Northern Italy) was inhabited by a variety of peoples who were known collectively as the Gaulish tribes. Their ancestors were Celts who came from Central Europe in the 7th century BCE(and even before, according to new research, and dominated native peoples which can't be clearly identified except the Ligures (Alps and Provence), the Iberians at the eastern bottom of the Pyrenees (south of Agde according to Avenius) and Aquitanicpeople (among them, the Basques) in Aquitaine. Some, particularly in the northern and eastern areas, had Germanic admixture (the Belgae); many of these peoples had already spoken Celtic by the time of the Roman conquest, but others seem to have spoken a Celto-Germanic creole. Gaul was militarily conquered in 58-51 BCE by the Roman legions under the command of General Julius Caesar (except the south-east which had already been conquered about one century earlier and which became the only place with Roman settlements). The area then became part of the Roman Empire. Over the next five centuries the two cultures intermingled, creating a hybridized Gallo-Roman culture. After an intense latinisation theGaulish language came to be called Vulgar Latin, which would later split into dialects that would develop into the French language. Today, the last redoubt of Celtic culture and language in France can be found in the northwestern region of Brittany, although this is not the result of a survival of Gaulish language but of a 5th-century A.D. migration ofBrythonic speaking Celts from Britain.Main articles: Franks and Frankish Kingdom
With the decline of the Roman Empire in Western Europe, a federation of Germanic peoples entered the picture: the Franks, from which the word "French" derives. The Franks were Germanic pagans who began to settle in northern Gaul as laeti, already during the Roman era. They continued to filter across the Rhine River from present-day Netherlands and Germany between the third to the 7th century. At the beginning, they served in the Roman army and reached high commands. Their language is still spoken as a kind of Dutch (Flemish -Low Frankish) in northern France and Frankish (Central Franconian) in German speaking Lorraine. Another Germanic people immigrated massively to Alsace the Alamans, which explains the Alemannic German spoken there. They were competitors of the Franks; that's why it became the word for German in French: Allemand.
