Читать книгу Cycle Touring in France. Eight tours in Brittany, Picardy, Alsace, Auvergne/Languedoc, Provence, Dordogne/Lot, the Alps and the Pyrenees онлайн

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A Short History

Major evidence of human settlement in France dates from around 25000BC, most noticeably traces of the Cro-Magnon people (as they became known) who lived from the Upper Palaeolithic to the Neolithic Age. Their cave paintings were discovered in Périgord, those in the Grotte de Lascaux being perhaps the most famous. The first Megalithic sites appeared in Brittany – a region peppered with dolmens and menhirs – around 5700BC. From about 1200BC several peoples – including the Celts from Britain and Ireland – came and settled in what is now known as France.

Gaul (as the Romans called it) became part of Julius Caesar's Roman Empire in the 1st century BC and remained so for 500 years until the Franks, a Germanic tribe led by Clovis I, conquered the fertile land between the Loire and the Somme in AD486. Clovis chose Paris (just another little town on the map at that time) as his capital at the turn of the 6th century. Roman Catholicism became the main religion, with Clovis declaring himself a Christian. Frankish society was subsequently converted, with the Franks (from whom ‘France’ derives) pushing southwards through Aquitaine as far as the Pyrénées.