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:
“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
—Bible: New Testament, Matthew 18:3.
“A lifetime [or, eternity] is a child playing, playing checkers; the kingdom belongs to a child.”
—Heraclitus (c. 535–475 B.C.)
“But as some silly young men returning from France affect a broken English, to be thought perfect in the French language; so his Lordship, I think, to seem a perfect understander of the unintelligible language of the Schoolmen, pretends an ignorance of his mother-tongue. He talks here of command and counsel as if he were no Englishman, nor knew any difference between their significations.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)