I am going to France shortly so I read a history of that country, France by John Norwich, a book that ended the history shortly after WWII, so not completely up to date. Pretty much a mirror image of the history of England. Regional powers gradually arose from tribal times, the Romans pretty much created infrastructure for a country and commerce, the Roman Catholic church was very dominant in France in particular and took much of the land and wealth for itself, and it was a lot of wars, wars, wars, often with England, the people inhabiting what is now Italy, or Germany or Spain. I am planning to read a succession of European histories, and I suspect the broad themes will be the same.
One is that despite the immense waste of human and other resources, there was steady “technological” progress–humans were learning to master the world in a variety of ways. A second is that certain individuals having obtained power, are reluctant to give it up for themselves or their families and are interested in fighting to gain more power over more land. So there are constant wars with neighboring regions. Various pretexts are advanced for the wars, but they are in essence about power and wealth. And because they were fought over land, until relatively recently, the boundaries of a “country” changed constantly as it won or lost those wars. Russia is still engaged in this process today, largely because Putin delusionally thinks he is a czar.
A third theme is that as long as you have autocrats, whether monarchs or emperors or whatever they call themselves, you are dependent on the wisdom of that autocrat. France had a few good kings and a lot of bad ones. The good ones created better institutions of government, education, science, and the arts. The bad ones frittered those away.
Another broad theme is that power over time did devolve from the absolute realm of the monarch to larger groups–first to other “nobles”, then to landowners, business people, professionals, eventually to male workers and finally to women and all adults in a society. The movement toward democratic governance in most Western nations looks quite inevitable in retrospect and along with that movement came greater overall economic performance and greater distribution of wealth throughout a society. It is a fascinating fact to me that while European nations and cities are far older than those in the United States, the United States has the longest-lived extensive democracy. We, and to some extent England, were the role model for democracy in most European countries.
France is another European country, like England, that has been in economic and social decline for decades, again in large part due to allowing massive immigration of persons who do not often share the values of hard work, equality and separation of church and state. It is not clear to me how these countries recover, even if the parties who wish to reverse some of what has occurred come into power.
