The growth of France is traced through a succession of royal dynasties and republics. On this tapestry is woven the story of the French people, how they thought, worked, voted, and prayed, and of their allegiance to an ideal - the great republic of humanity at large.

The origins -- The foundations of French nationality: land, race, language -- The dawn: prehistory and protohistory -- Celtic Gaul -- Roman Gaul -- The dark ages: the chutch and the Franks -- Medieval France -- The church and medieval France: 987-1270 -- Lay society in the middle ages: nobles, peasants, bourgeois -- The rise of the capetians: 987-1270 -- The lost centuries: 1270-1380 -- The lost centuries: 1380-1483 -- Classical France -- The renaissance and the Italian wars -- The reformation and the religious wars -- The foundation of classical order: Henry IV, Richelieu, Mazarin -- The grand monarch: personal reign of Louis XIV, 1661-1715 -- Louis XV: the absentee king and the enlightenment -- The bourgeois-liberal revolution: 1750-1848 -- The revolution: 1788-1792 -- Marital interlude:1792-1815: The revolution: legislative assembly, convention, directory -- Marital interlude: 1792-1815: Napoleon Bonaparte, general, consul, emperor -- The constitutional monarchy: 1814-1848 -- Modern France -- The second republic and the second empire: 1848-1870 -- The "terrible year" and its aftermath: 1870-1880 -- The third republic: opportunism, 1880-1900 -- The third republic: radicalism and world war I, 1900-1918 -- The anxious truce: 1918-1939: recovery, 1918-1929 -- The anxious truce: 1918-1939: the darkening sky, 1929-1939 -- World war II and its aftermath -- The fourth republic in the perspective of a thousand years -- Home politics -- France overseas -- France, Europe, mankind -- 1959 and the dawn of the fifth republic.