- published: 14 Aug 2013
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France (English i/ˈfræns/ FRANSS or /ˈfrɑːns/ FRAHNSS; French: [fʁɑ̃s] (
listen)), officially the French Republic (French: République française [ʁepyblik fʁɑ̃sɛz]), is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean. It is often referred to as l’Hexagone ("The Hexagon") because of the geometric shape of its territory. It is the largest western European country and it possesses the second-largest exclusive economic zone in the world, covering 11,035,000 km2 (4,260,000 sq mi), just behind that of the United States (11,351,000 km2 / 4,383,000 sq mi).
Over the past 500 years, France has been a major power with strong cultural, economic, military and political influence in Europe and around the world. During the 17th and 18th centuries, France colonised great parts of North America and Southeast Asia; during the 19th and early 20th centuries, France built the second largest colonial empire of the time, including large portions of North, West and Central Africa, Southeast Asia, and many Caribbean and Pacific Islands.
Lothair (French: Lothaire; Latin: Lothārius) (941–986), sometimes called Lothair IV, was the Carolingian king of West Francia (10 September 954 – 1 March 986), son of Louis IV and Gerberga of Saxony.
He succeeded his father in 954 at the age of thirteen and crowned at Rheims on 12 November 954. He was at first under the guardianship of Hugh the Great, Duke of the Franks and Count of Paris, who had been an adversary to his father but nonetheless was appointed guardian of the king's estates, though not as regent for the young king who assumed his royal dignities at thirteen. This gave the young Lothair the opportunity to come to know his guardian's heir, the sixteen year old Hugh Capet, before his father's death in 956; Capet later became king and founder of the Capetian Dynasty.
The beginning of his reign was occupied with wars against the vassals, particularly against the duke of Normandy, and it should be made clear that the monarch of Western Francia was more a ceremonial title, more of a first among equals status, than that state which would represent the later centralised authority meant by monarchies of later historical epochs.
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