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[color=blue][h3]Le Royaume de France[/h3][/color]
[i]"Montjoie! Saint Denis!"[/i]

[quote=Queen Victoria][...] France [...][/quote]
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[b]Geography[/b]

Stretching from the Atlantic in the west to the Rhine in the East, from the Channel in the north to the Mediterranean south, France is a pleasant and fertile land, with rolling hills and verdant fields. 
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[b]Demography[/b]

There are around 25 million people graced with the honor of residing in France.
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[b]Monarch[/b]

By the grace of god, His Majesty, King Louis VIII, rules the realm of France. Exiled after his older brother was murdered by the insidious jacobin revolutionaries, he returned a decade ago to bring back peace and stability to France. A conservative figure, he upholds the rightful authority of the church and the nobility, and fights against the liberals of the Chamber of Deputies. 
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[b]Government[/b]

France is ruled by a constitutional monarchy. The King oversees the nation, guided and advised in this task by the chamber of deputies. The current Chief Minister of France is Jean-Baptiste de Villèle, the newly-elected ultra nationalist who is possessed by an anti-liberal fervor.
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[b]Politics[/b]

Though France is theoretically a constitutional monarchy, in reality it is ruled by the rich. Only those who pay over 3000 francs in tax to the crown may vote, and recently, the ultra-royalists have pushed a law doubling the vote of the richest fraction of that electorate. Thus, even though opinion in the nation is evenly divided between the conservatives and the liberals, the royalists have a solid domination over the chamber of deputies. 

Beneath this veneer of stability, however, France boils. Try as they might, the aristocracy cannot seem to squash the defiant spirit of the revolution which looms over French society, and in secret many, both intellectuals and commoners, keep the tricolor flag of the Republic.
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[b]Economy & Developement[/b]

France is a mostly rural nation, producing everything from wine to wheat. Its great cities are also important industrial nexuses. Though lacking the entrepreneurial zeal of the English, the french are nevertheless moving forward into the new age.

[quote=Wikipedia]Re-establishing the economy on a peacetime basis, after a quarter-century of nearly continuous turmoil and warfare, proved difficult. Some industry and industrial technique developed for the wars was carried over, converted to peacetime purposes. France in 1815 largely still was a land of peasantry, however. Urbanization of the largest cities was well under way, and Paris was a leading world capital already. Smaller French towns and the country's many small villages, however, were impoverished and industrially backward.

The 19th century development of road and rail systems, and other social infrastructure, was greatly aided by the grandes écoles, inherited from the prior era: graduates of these high-standards schools became the engineers and policy-makers of French industrialization.

Industrial development in France was rapid during the 19th century. Around the great cities, and in the north and in other areas which had natural resources readily available, large industries formed. Capital was available through banking services largely located, since the Revolution, in Paris. The large French population of the time supplied an available workforce.

Education was made a high priority of successive French governments. Various educational reforms, implemented from the central government at Paris and applied nationally, were designed to raise the general level of the children of French rural and small-town families to a high national level. At the same time, education spread new and often radical ideas, fueling repeated resistance to and even revolt against the deplorable living conditions of many workers in the new industries and factory towns.[/quote]
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[b]Military[/b]

The Royal Army has a little under 100 000 soldiers in its command, though the experience of the Napoleonic Wars has shown that that number can be multiplied tenfold in times of serious war through mass conscription. Though the Royal Navy has yet to truly recover from Trafalgar, it has been slowly rebuilding. 
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[b]Culture[/b]

The french are a divided people. The urban dwellers of the great cities, particularly Paris, are secular and tend towards intellectualism and philosophy, while the rural communities that dot the country are very catholic and conservative. The peace is maintained by the still fresh memory of the trauma of the Wars. 

Given its recent history, french culture is now saturated in politics. One is royalist, or Bonapartist, or republican, and woe to those who fall in the wrong category. Even the poor debate politics and argue over the rightful rulership of France.
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[b]History[/b]

France's history stretches back to Charlemagne and before, when the Franks first united the land. The nation has been ruled by a King for over a thousand years since then. This all came to an end with the Revolution of 1792, when the crushing french debt revealed the inefficiency and corruption of the Ancien Regime, and the people overthrew the Crown. 

As the King was brought to the guillotine, Europe burned; the flames of revolution could not be denied, or contained. The Old Powers, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and especially Great Britain moved to snuff the candle of liberty in its cradle. First came the Revolutionary Wars, and then, when an ambitious artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte took power, the Napoleonic Wars. The ensuing epic struggle tore the old world apart, and wiped clean the filth of the old order.

In the end, the Emperor was overwhelmed by the opposition, defeated and banished to an isolated island... Twice. Since then, the Bourbon kings have been returned to power under Louis XIII, though they now must listen to the will of the people, or at least feign to. Yet try as they might, the Old Powers cannot keep the fires of revolution extinguished forever.
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[b]Goals[/b]

God, King and Country- those are the tenants of the Bourbon regime. It seeks to overturn the liberal influences of the past decades, and maintain its grip over the nation. All other policies, from foreign relations to the economy, are derived from this drive for stability. 
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