Move the slider to any year: every polity recorded for that year is drawn. France is gold: the Frankish kingdoms, the royal domain, and the republics and empires since 1792. From about 1000 to the Revolution, the faint gold area with a dashed edge is the feudal kingdom as a whole, and the dimmer gold shapes inside it are the great fiefs (Normandy, Aquitaine, Toulouse, Burgundy, Brittany…) held by the king’s vassals, which the crown absorbed one by one. The colonies are copper; the other powers named in the current chapter (Rome, England, Spain, the Habsburgs, Napoleon’s satellite states, Germany) are green, and everything else is grey. Borders change only where the dataset records a change, and they fade rather than morph between dated polygons; the slider is stretched so that the dense modern centuries get more room than the long ancient ones. Hover a territory for its name and dates; click it to open its Wikipedia article.

Boundaries are approximate reconstructions. Before the Roman conquest there were no states to draw: the Celts, Belgae, Aquitani and Ligures are schematic culture areas after Caesar’s division of Gaul, drawn with a dashed outline. Medieval borders follow the dataset’s sampling, often every 5–20 years, so some treaties show a few years early or late, and fiefs missing from the dataset show as part of the realm. New France and Louisiana are drawn as the settled and garrisoned areas, not the vast territory France claimed. The First French Empire of 1808–1813 includes Spain under Joseph Bonaparte, occupied rather than annexed; in 1940–1944 the occupied zone and annexed Alsace-Lorraine are part of Nazi Germany. A few shapes were gap-filled or corrected from neighbouring records (the tooltip says so). The dashed line is France’s border today, for orientation only; the last map is dated 2024.