French Third Republic

State · 1871–1939 CE · at its largest around 1919 CE

The parliamentary republic established after the fall of Napoleon III, France's longest-lasting regime since 1789, which ended with the German invasion of 1940.

Its battles, in Battle View

First day on the Somme (1916 CE)

On its lands while it lasted

Ashanti Empire (1701–1901 CE): Akan state founded by Osei Tutu with its capital at Kumasi, which grew wealthy on gold and trade and resisted British expansion in a series of wars.
Victor Hugo (1802 CE – 1885 CE): French poet, novelist and dramatist of the Romantic movement, author of Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) and Les Misérables (1862), who spent nearly twenty years in exile as an opponent of Napoleon III.
Gregor Mendel (1822 CE – 1884 CE): Augustinian friar and later abbot in Brno, Moravia, whose experiments on pea plants revealed the basic rules of heredity. His 1866 paper was largely ignored until its rediscovery in 1900.
Louis Pasteur (1822 CE – 1895 CE): French chemist and microbiologist in Paris who developed pasteurisation, supported germ theory and created vaccines against anthrax and rabies.
Claude Monet (1840 CE – 1926 CE): French painter whose Impression, Sunrise gave Impressionism its name. From 1883 he lived at Giverny, where he painted his water garden again and again for the rest of his life.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 CE – 1900 CE): German philosopher and classical philologist whose works, including Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, attacked traditional morality and religion and introduced ideas such as the will to power.
Marie Curie (1867 CE – 1934 CE): Polish-born physicist and chemist in Paris who discovered polonium and radium with Pierre Curie. She was the first person to win Nobel Prizes in two sciences.
Paris Commune (1871 CE): A revolutionary government that seized power in Paris in March 1871 after France’s defeat by Prussia. It was crushed by the French army in the “Bloody Week” of late May, in which thousands were killed.
Proclamation of the German Empire (1871 CE): King Wilhelm I of Prussia was proclaimed German Emperor in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 18 January 1871, completing German unification under Bismarck.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881 CE – 1938 CE): Founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey, who led the War of Independence and carried out sweeping secularizing and westernizing reforms.
Pablo Picasso (1881 CE – 1973 CE): Spanish painter and sculptor who spent most of his life in France. Co-founder of Cubism, he was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.
Benz Patent-Motorwagen (1886 CE): Karl Benz of Mannheim patented his three-wheeled vehicle powered by a petrol engine in 1886. It is widely regarded as the first practical automobile.
Eiffel Tower (1889 CE): Gustave Eiffel's company built this 300-metre wrought-iron tower for the 1889 World's Fair in Paris. It was the tallest structure in the world until 1930.
Einstein's special relativity (1905 CE): In 1905, while working at the patent office in Bern, Albert Einstein published his theory of special relativity and, in a follow-up paper, E = mc². It transformed ideas of space and time.
World War I (1914–1918 CE): A global war from 1914 to 1918 between the Allies and the Central Powers, fought largely in trenches on Europe's Western and Eastern Fronts. Around 9 million soldiers died, and four empires collapsed.