PARIS (AP) — They’re often thought to have practically cornered the market on romance, with Edith Piaf seemingly speaking for a nation of amorous souls when she sang: “It’s crazy how much I love you.” Yet they also can bicker and squabble as though they were Olympic sports. They practically wrote the book on fraternity, liberty and equality — words inscribed on their schools and town halls — but also recognize that to citizens of color.
Les Français — the French, as the people of France call themselves — simply don’t fit neatly into any one box. Now that they’re hosting , here’s a look at some of the particularities that make the French, well, French: The basics France has thanks to centuries of conquest and, in the last 200 years, immigration from Italy, Spain, eastern Europe, and France’s former colonies overseas. Although comic-strip hero Asterix the Gaul is something of a national icon, loved by generations of French readers for his feisty ingenuity and pluck, the ancient Gauls who populated much of what is now France more than two millennia ago — and who some in France still call “our ancestors” — were followed by waves of others.
Romans, Franks (from whom France got its name), Normans (who lent their name to ) and more fought for the rich lands boxed in by the Mediterranean’s waters and mountains of in the south, the mighty Rhine river in the east, and seas to the west and north. Those natural barriers still largely delineate the bo.