Booking Trains In France Sources of booking trains in france resources from the Web

After the war of 1689-1697 gained France only Haiti (lost to a slave revolt a century later), the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713) ended with the undoing of Louis's dreams of a Franco-Spanish Bourbon empire: the two conflicts strained French resources already weakened by disastrous harvests in the 1690s and in 1709, as well as by the revocation (1685) of the Edict of Nantes and the consequent loss of Huguenot support and manpower.

The gouvernement, or cabinet, is headed by the Prime Minister of France. It has at its disposal the civil service the government agencies and the armed forces. (The term "cabinet" itself is rarely used in this sense, even in translation, as it is used in French to mean a minister's private office. In French, the word gouvernement can refer to government, but generally refers to the cabinet.)

Traditionally a predominantly Roman Catholic country, with anticlerical leanings, France is since the 1970s a very secular country. Freedom of religion is a constitutional right, as reflected by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The dominant concept of the relationships between the public sphere and religions is that of laïcité, which implies that the government does not intervene in religious dogma, and that religions should refrain from intervening in policy-making. Tensions occasionally erupt about the alleged or real behaviour of some part of the Muslim minority, or about alleged or real discrimination against that community; see Islam in France.

The May 1958 seizure of power in Algiers by French army units and French settlers opposed to concessions in the face of Arab nationalist insurrection led to the fall of the French government and a presidential invitation to de Gaulle to form an emergency government to forestall the threat of civil war. Swiftly replacing the existing constitution with one strengthening the powers of the presidency, he became the elected president in December of that year, inaugurating France's Fifth Republic.

France has 26 régions: 21 of these are in the continental part of metropolitan France, one is Corse on the island of Corsica (although strictly speaking Corse is in fact a "territorial collectivity", not a région, but is referred to as a région in common speech), 4 are overseas. The région are further subdivided into 100 départements.