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France is a founding member of the European Union, and its largest member state with respect to land area. France is also a founding member of NATO and the UN, and a permanent member of the UN Security Council. It is one of only seven acknowledged nuclear powers in existence.

France's founding membership in the European Union largely defines France's current foreign policy. The French Republic is furthermore a member of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC) and of the Indian Ocean Commission (COI), and an associate member of the Association of Caribbean States (ACS). France is also a leading member or the International Organisation of Francophonie (OIF) which gathers 51 fully or partly French-speaking countries.

The constitution does not contain a bill of rights in itself, but its preamble mentions that France should follow the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, as well as those of the preamble to the constitution of the Fourth Republic. This has been judged to imply that the principles laid in those texts had constitutional value, and that legislation infringing on those principles should be found unconstitutional.

Following the seizure of the (then separate) English, Irish and Scottish thrones by the Dutch prince William of Orange in 1688, the anti-French "Grand Alliance" of 1689 inaugurated more than a century of intermittent European conflict in which Britain would play an ever more important role, seeking in particular to keep France out of the Netherlands (the Dutch provinces and the future Belgium, then under Spanish rule).

The national government of France is divided into an executive branch, a legislative branch and a judiciary branch. The President of France has some direct executive power but most of the formal power resides in his appointee the Prime Minister of France, the choice of which in practice has to be approved by the French National Assembly, the lower house of Parliament (see below for a discussion of the division of power between the President and Prime Minister). Parliament passes statutes and votes the budget; it also controls the action of the executive through questioning and enquiry commissions. The constitutionality of the statutes is checked by the Constitutional Council. Finally, the independent judiciary is divided into the judicial branch (dealing with civil and criminal law) and the administrative branch (dealing with recourses against executive decisions), each with their own independent supreme court. In addition, the French government comprises various bodies checking against possible abuses of power and independant agencies.

Senators are chosen by an electoral college of about 145,000 local elected officials for 6-year terms, and one half of the Senate is renewed every 3 years. Before the law of 30 July 2004, senators were elected for 9 years, renewed by thirds every 3 years. There are currently 321 senators, but there will be 346 in 2010; 304 represent the metropolitan and overseas départements, five the other dependencies and 12 the French established abroad.

Following the Second World War, and especially the Fifth Republic, France embarked on an ambitious and mostly very successful program of modernization, under state impulse and coordination. This program of dirigisme, mostly implemented by right-wing governments, involved the state control of a minority of the industry, such as transportation, energy and telecommunication infrastructures, as well as various incentives for private corporations to merge or engage in certain projects.

During the latter years of the elderly Charlemagne's rule, the Vikings made advances along the northern and western perimeters of his kingdom. After Charlemagne's death in 814 his heirs were incapable of maintaining any kind of political unity and the once great Empire began to crumble. Viking advances were allowed to escalate, their dreaded longboats sailing up the Loire and Seine Rivers and other inland waterways, wreaking havoc and spreading terror. In 843 the Viking invaders murdered the Bishop of Nantes and a few years after that, they burned the Church of Saint-Martin at Tours. Emboldened by their successes, in 845 the Vikings ransacked Paris. Charles the Simple (898-922), whose territory comprised much of the France of today, was forced during his reign to concede to the Vikings a large area on either side of the Seine River, downstream from Paris, that was to become Normandy.

France surrendered to Nazi Germany early in World War II (June 24, 1940). Nazi Germany occupied three fifths of France's territory leaving the rest to the new Vichy collaboration government established on July 10, 1940 under Henri Philippe Pétain. Its senior leaders acquiesced in the plunder of French resources, as well as the sending of French forced labor to Nazi Germany; in doing so, they claimed they hoped to preserve at least some small amount of French sovereignty. The Nazi German occupation proved costly, however, as Nazi Germany appropriated a full one-half of France's public sector revenue.

Napoleon Bonaparte seized control of the republic in 1799, making himself First Consul. His armies engaged in several wars across Europe, conquered many countries and established new kingdoms with Napoleon's family members at the helm. Following his defeat in 1815, the French monarchy was re-established, which was then legislatively abolished and followed by a Second Republic in 1848. The Second Republic ended when the late Emperor's nephew, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was elected President and proclaimed a Second Empire in 1852. Less ambitious than his uncle, the second Napoleon was also ultimately unseated, and republican rule returned for a third time in the Third Republic (1870).

Dirigisme came to be highly contested in the 1980s, with complaints of bureaucracy and lack of reactivity to new challenges. As a result the government largely retreated from economic intervention; Dirigisme has now essentially receded. Despite significant reform and privatization over the past 15 years, the government continues to control a large share of economic activity: Government spending, at 53% of GDP in 2000, is the highest in the G-7. Labour conditions and wages are highly regulated. The government continues to own shares in corporations in a range of sectors, including banking, energy production and distribution, automobiles, transportation, and telecommunications.

Today, France is at the forefront of European states seeking to exploit the momentum of monetary union to advance the creation of a more unified and capable European political, defence and security apparatus.