France is the largest country in the European Union by area and has around 68 million people. It is also, strangely, a country with territory in the Caribbean, South America, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific — which means France has a border with Brazil and is the only EU country in South America. It has been the most visited country in the world for decades, with around 100 million visitors a year, which is more than its own population.
The Hexagon
The French call mainland France l'Hexagone, because its shape is roughly a six-sided figure. Three sides are coast — the Channel, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean — and three are land borders with neighbours.
Mainland France is about 552,000 square kilometres. It borders eight countries: Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Monaco, Spain and Andorra.
Add the overseas territories and France borders two more: Brazil and Suriname, both from French Guiana in South America. That makes France's longest land border the one with Brazil, at around 730 kilometres — longer than its border with Spain.
France Is Everywhere
France has thirteen overseas regions and territories left over from its empire, spread across every ocean.
Guadeloupe, Martinique and Saint Martin are in the Caribbean. Réunion and Mayotte are in the Indian Ocean. French Polynesia and New Caledonia are in the Pacific. French Guiana is in South America.
Several are full parts of France with the same laws and the euro as currency, which is why a piece of the European Union sits on the equator in South America. Europe's rocket launch site is there, at Kourou, because being close to the equator gives rockets a free boost from the Earth's spin. Because of the territories, France has the second-largest maritime area of any country in the world.
Mountains and Coasts
Mont Blanc, on the border with Italy, is the highest mountain in the Alps at 4,808 metres. Its exact height is remeasured every two years and keeps changing slightly as the ice cap on top grows and melts.
The Pyrenees form the border with Spain and contain the tiny country of Andorra. The Massif Central in the middle of the country is a plateau of extinct volcanoes; the Puy de Dôme is the best known.
France has around 3,400 kilometres of coastline. Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy is an island at high tide and reachable across sand at low tide, and the difference between the two can be over 14 metres — one of the biggest tidal ranges in Europe.
The Eiffel Tower
Gustave Eiffel's company built it for the 1889 World's Fair, marking a hundred years since the French Revolution. It was meant to be dismantled after twenty years.
It survived because it turned out to be a useful radio antenna, and later a television transmitter. At 330 metres including its aerials it was the tallest structure in the world until the Chrysler Building in 1930.
It grows in summer. The iron expands in heat, and the tower can be up to 15 centimetres taller on a hot day than on a cold one. It is repainted roughly every seven years using around 60 tonnes of paint, and the colour has changed several times — it started reddish-brown and is now a shade called Eiffel Tower Brown.
Bread and Cheese Rules
France takes food seriously enough to legislate about it. A 1993 law, the décret pain, says that a traditional baguette may contain only flour, water, salt and yeast, must be made on the premises where it is sold, and cannot be frozen at any stage.
Baguettes are eaten at a rate of around 320 a second across France. In 2022 UNESCO added the craft of making them to its intangible cultural heritage list.
Charles de Gaulle once asked how anyone could govern a country with 246 varieties of cheese. The real number is well over a thousand depending on how you count, and 46 of them have protected status meaning they can only be made in a specific place by a specific method — Roquefort must be ripened in the caves at Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, and nowhere else.
Try Some French Words You Already Know
Around 30% of English words come from French, mostly arriving after the Norman conquest of 1066, when French-speaking rulers governed England for 300 years.
Here is a pattern that shows it. The animals in the field kept their English names — cow, pig, sheep, calf — because English-speaking peasants looked after them. The meat on the table took French names — beef from boeuf, pork from porc, mutton from mouton, veal from veau — because French-speaking nobles ate it.
Try spotting others: government, justice, army, royal, parliament, city, art, music, chair, dinner. Almost every word to do with law, government or fine dining came from French. Then look up faux amis, false friends — French words that look English and mean something else, like librairie, which is a bookshop, not a library.
Revolution
The French Revolution began in 1789 when a Paris crowd stormed the Bastille prison on 14 July. That date is still France's national day, though the French usually just call it le quatorze juillet.
The revolution abolished the monarchy, executed King Louis XVI and produced the slogan liberté, égalité, fraternité, which is on French coins and public buildings to this day.
It also produced the metric system. Revolutionaries wanted measurements based on nature rather than on kings' body parts, so the metre was defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole. They tried a ten-day week and a ten-hour clock too, and those did not survive.
Castles and Cathedrals
France has around 45,000 churches and 87 cathedrals, plus thousands of chateaux. The Loire Valley alone has over 300 castles, built when French kings and nobles kept court there in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Chambord is the largest, with 440 rooms, 282 fireplaces and a double-helix staircase — two spirals wound around each other so that people going up and coming down never meet. Leonardo da Vinci spent his last years nearby and may have had a hand in the design.
Notre-Dame de Paris was begun in 1163 and took nearly 200 years. A fire in April 2019 destroyed the roof and spire, and it reopened in December 2024 after a restoration involving hundreds of craftspeople, including carpenters who cut and shaped the new oak roof beams by hand with medieval-style axes.
Art and Museums
The Louvre in Paris is the most visited museum in the world, with around 9 million visitors a year. It was a royal palace before it was a museum and covers about 73,000 square metres of gallery space — you would walk several kilometres to see all of it.
The Mona Lisa hangs there, and it is smaller than most people expect at 77 by 53 centimetres. It became world-famous partly because it was stolen in 1911 by an Italian museum worker who hid it in his flat for two years, and the newspaper coverage made it a celebrity.
France also gave the world impressionism — Monet, Renoir, Degas — and the Lumière brothers, who held the first public film screening with a paying audience in Paris in December 1895. That is why film festival awards are still in French and why the cinema is sometimes called the seventh art.
The Tour de France
The Tour de France is the biggest annual sporting event in the world by roadside audience, with millions of people watching from the verges for free.
It covers around 3,500 kilometres over three weeks each July, including brutal mountain stages in the Alps and Pyrenees. It was invented in 1903 by a newspaper trying to boost its circulation, and it worked.
The leader wears a yellow jersey, chosen because the newspaper that founded the race was printed on yellow paper. The route changes every year but almost always finishes on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.
School in France
French schoolchildren get some of the longest holidays in Europe — around sixteen weeks a year — and one of the shortest school weeks. Many primary schools have no lessons on Wednesday afternoons, a tradition dating back to when that time was reserved for religious instruction.
Lunch is taken seriously. School canteens usually serve a four-course meal with a starter, a main, cheese and dessert, sitting down, over an hour or more. Menus are published in advance and are often designed by a nutritionist.
Marks are out of 20 rather than out of 100 or by letter, and 20 out of 20 is famously almost never given. The big exam at eighteen is the baccalauréat, and the results are published publicly.
Odds and Ends
France has more roundabouts than any other country — around 30,000 to 50,000, roughly half of all the roundabouts in the world.
The oldest bridge in Paris is called the Pont Neuf, which means new bridge. It was finished in 1607.
And French is spoken far beyond France. It is an official language in 29 countries and is spoken by around 300 million people, most of them in Africa, where the number is growing fast. To keep exploring, read about religion in France and see the full list of countries in Europe.
