French Republic
Western Europe
Romantic · Refined · Iconic
France (officially French Republic) is a country located in Western Europe. Its capital city is Paris, with other major cities including Lyon and Marseille. With a population of approximately 67.8M, the main language spoken is French. The country covers an area of 543,908 km². The official currency is the euro (€). Traffic drives on the right side.
France is the world's most visited country, attracting around 90 million international tourists annually.
Paris serves as the political, cultural and economic heart of France, positioned in Western Europe. As the seat of government and often the most populous city, it concentrates the country's main institutions, universities and cultural landmarks. Beyond the capital, major cities include Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse — each a hub of regional culture, economy and history. Paris concentrated seven centuries of royal ambition into a city centre of extraordinary architectural coherence, where Haussmann's 19th-century renovation created the wide boulevards and uniform building heights that give the capital its distinctive low skyline — a decision so consequential that Paris remains recognisable from photographs taken 150 years apart.
With a population of approximately 67.8M, France is a vibrant society with a rich mix of traditions and communities. The official language is French, which reflects the country's cultural heritage and connects it with a wide international community. Internationally, France is reached via the dialling code +33. French identity is built on Republican universalism — the idea that citizenship transcends ethnicity, religion, and origin — a philosophy that simultaneously produced the Enlightenment's most important political documents and generated ongoing controversies about secularism, immigration, and the integration of 5 million Muslims into a tradition of strict church-state separation.
France spans 543,908 km², in the Western Europe subregion of Europe. Geographically centred around 46.0°N, 2.0°E, the country offers a diverse range of landscapes shaped by its location, climate and geology. Road traffic follows the right-hand rule, in line with surrounding Europe convention.
The official currency is the euro (€), used for everyday transactions and commerce throughout the country. France's economy is shaped by its geography, natural resources and trade relationships. Business and daily life operate under UTC-10:00, aligning the country with its regional neighbours.
The emblematic dish of France is Bœuf Bourguignon. French cuisine's claim to global culinary leadership rests not on individual dishes but on the development of systematic cooking techniques — the brigade kitchen system, sauce classifications, pastry architecture — that trained the world's professional cooks for two centuries and whose vocabulary (sauté, braise, flambé, mise en place) remains universal.
Football holds a special place in the heart of France's national identity. France's 1998 World Cup victory on home soil — achieved with a multiracial team under Aimé Jacquet whose Zinedine Zidane scored twice with headers in the final — remains the defining moment in a fractious national conversation about immigration, identity, and what it means to be French, a game that briefly unified a country that rarely agrees on anything.
The highest point in France is Mont Blanc, rising to 4,808 metres above sea level. Mont Blanc at 4,808 metres is Western Europe's highest peak, straddling the French-Italian border above Chamonix where the Alpine Club was founded in 1857 to organise the new sport of mountaineering — a summit whose first ascent in 1786 by Balmat and Paccard marked the beginning of the modern relationship between humans and extreme altitude.