The Evolution of an Empire: A Brief Historical Sketch of France

The work offers a compact chronological narrative of French history from ancient Celtic origins through Roman conquest and Christianization to the emergence of the Frankish kingdoms and Carolingian rule. It surveys the growth of feudalism, Norse settlement and Normandy, communal and bourgeois developments, the Crusades, the Hundred Years' War and Joan of Arc, and the religious wars of the Renaissance including Huguenot conflicts and the St. Bartholomew massacre. Subsequent chapters treat absolutist monarchy under Louis XIV, Enlightenment thought, the Revolution and Napoleonic era, and the nineteenth-century restorations, republics, and conflicts, ending with a brief appraisal of contemporary conditions.