Introduction

Transnational history must also recognize and analyze the importance of national citizenship in ideas of human progress. The product of the French Revolution, which remains to this day possibly the most studied single event in world history, universalism argues that the core revolutionary values of liberty, citizenship, and Enlightenment principles of reason are at the same time central components of French national identity and the province of humanity as a whole. A major theme in French history since the Middle Ages has been the attempt to expand to the nation's ‘natural' or geographical, boundaries. The recorded history of the nation really begins in the millennium before the Christian era. Celtic peoples gradually populated what is now France, founding settlements that gradually grew into cities like Paris, Bordeaux, and Toulouse. In 1643 Louis XIV became king of France at the age of five; he would not begin actually ruling his kingdom until 1661.