The Kingdom of France was a state that existed in western Europe for nearly a thousand years and which was a major international power from the 16th century until the advent of the French Republic. The "Emperor of the French" was a Bonapartist institution with no direct relation to the House of France, and since the 3rd Republic (1870) the institution has been completely abolished.
It originated from the Western portion of the Frankish empire, and consolidated significant power and influence over the next thousand years. Louis XIV, also known as the Sun King, developed a powerful state and legal theory of absolute monarchy. Eventually, the influences of the French Enlightenment, the growing costs of the American War of Independence that France partially supported, the rise of political awareness and the bourgeois need of political empowerment caused the French Revolution, as the Kingdom gave way to the similarly named constitutional Kingdom of France and then the French First Republic.
Read more about Kingdom Of France: Administrative Structures
Famous quotes containing the words kingdom of, kingdom and/or france:
“O thou undaunted daughter of desires!
By all thy dower of lights and fires;
By all the eagle in thee, all the dove;
By all thy lives and deaths of love;
By thy large draughts of intellectual day,
And by thy thirsts of love more large then they;
By all thy brim-fill’d Bowls of fierce desire,
By thy last Morning’s draught of liquid fire;
By the full kingdom of that final kiss
That seiz’d thy parting Soul, and seal’d thee his;”
—Richard Crashaw (1613?–1649)
“The private life of one man shall be a more illustrious monarchy,—more formidable to its enemy, more sweet and serene in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in history. For a man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth the particular natures of all men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in nineteenth-century France and England, or twentieth-century Russia and America.”
—Lillian Hellman (1907–1984)