[37] From the middle of the 19th century, it experienced a high rate of inward migration, mainly consisting of Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, Arab-Berbers, Jews, Sub-Saharan Africans, Chinese, and other peoples from Africa, the Middle East and East Asia, and the government, defining France as an inclusive nation with universal values, advocated assimilation through which immigrants were expected to adhere to French values and cultural norms.

In the pre-Roman era, Gaul (an area of Western Europe that encompassed all of what is known today as France, Belgium, part of Germany and Switzerland, and Northern Italy) was inhabited by a variety of peoples who were known collectively as the Gaulish tribes.

In the late Roman era, in addition to colonists from elsewhere in the Empire and Gaulish natives, Gallia also became home to some immigrant populations of Germanic and Scythian origin, such as the Alans.

The Vulgar Latin in the region of Gallia took on a distinctly local character, some of which is attested in graffiti,[54] which evolved into the Gallo-Romance dialects which include French and its closest relatives.

Eventually, though, the largely autonomous Duchy of Normandy was incorporated back into the royal domain (i. e. the territory under direct control of the French king) in the Middle Ages.

The pace of industrial growth attracted millions of European immigrants over the next century, with especially large numbers arriving from Poland, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, and Spain.

The large impact of North African and Arab immigration is the greatest and has brought racial, socio-cultural and religious questions to a country seen as homogenously European, French and Christian for thousands of years.

Thus the historian John F. Drinkwater states, "The French are, paradoxically, strongly conscious of belonging to a single nation, but they hardly constitute a unified ethnic group by any scientific gauge.

[75] According to Dominique Schnapper, "The classical conception of the nation is that of an entity which, opposed to the ethnic group, affirms itself as an open community, the will to live together expressing itself by the acceptation of the rules of a unified public domain which transcends all particularisms".

[77] Vercingetorix, the Gaulish chieftain who tried to unite the various Gallic tribes of the land against Roman encroachment but was ultimately vanquished by Julius Caesar, is often revered as a "first national hero".

During the early nineteenth century, intellectuals began using the identification with Gaul instead as a unifying force to bridge divisions within French society with a common national origin myth.

The usage of ethnic and racial categorization is avoided to prevent any case of discrimination; the same regulations apply to religious membership data that cannot be compiled under the French Census.

The study concluded that the population genetic clusters correlate with linguistic and historical divisions in France and with the presence of geographic barriers such as mountains and major rivers.

This has led various authors (Philippe Van Parijs, Jean-Marc Ferry, Alain Caillé, André Gorz) to theorize a guaranteed minimum income which would impede exclusion from citizenship.

Villalba thus shows that any democratic nation characterize itself by its project of transcending all forms of particular memberships (whether biological, ethnic, historic, economic, social, religious or cultural).

Renan's non-essentialist definition, which forms the basis of the French Republic, is diametrically opposed to the German ethnic conception of a nation, first formulated by Fichte.

This plébiscite de tous les jours ('everyday plebiscite') might be compared to a social contract or even to the classic definition of consciousness as an act which repeats itself endlessly.

Thus, in Algeria, the Crémieux decrees at the end of the 19th century gave French citizenship to north African Jews, while Muslims were regulated by the 1881 Indigenous Code.

[92] This paradoxical tension between the universalist conception of the French nation and the racist attitudes intermingled into colonization is most obvious in Ernest Renan himself, who went as far as advocating a kind of eugenics.

No doubt if the noble elements mixed in the blood of a people happened to disappear completely, then there would be a demeaning equality, like that of some Eastern states and in some respects China.

But it is in fact a very small amount of noble blood put into the circulation of a people that is enough to ennoble them, at least as to historical effects; this is how France, a nation so completely fallen into commonness, in practice plays on the world stage the role of a gentleman.

Paternity, against Napoléon Bonaparte's wish, became the principal criterion of nationality, and therefore broke for the first time with the ancient tradition of jus soli, by breaking any residency condition toward children born abroad from French parents.

Charles Pasqua, who said on 11 May 1987: "Some have reproached me of having used a plane, but, if necessary, I will use trains", declared to Le Monde on 2 June 1993: "France has been a country of immigration, it doesn't want to be one anymore.

In any cases, rights of foreigners in France have improved over the last half-century: The INSEE does not collect data about language, religion, or ethnicity – on the principle of the secular and unitary nature of the French Republic.

that France adheres to the ideal of a single, homogeneous national culture, supported by the absence of hyphenated identities and by avoidance of the very term "ethnicity" in French discourse.

The United States is home to an estimated 13 to 16 million people of French descent, or 4 to 5 percent of the US population, particularly in Louisiana, New England, Northern New York, and parts of the Midwest.

Some notable Argentines of French descent include writer Julio Cortázar, physiologist and Nobel Prize winner Bernardo Houssay or activist Alicia Moreau de Justo.

The first French immigrants were politicians such as Nicolas Raoul and Isidore Saget, Henri Terralonge and officers Aluard, Courbal, Duplessis, Gibourdel and Goudot.

Later in a Conservative government, annihilated nearly all the relations between France and Guatemala, and most of French immigrants went to Costa Rica, but these relationships were again return to the late of the nineteenth century.

[122] Large numbers of Huguenots are known to have settled in the United Kingdom (from 50,000), Ireland (10,000), in Protestant areas of Germany (especially the city of Berlin) (from 40 000), in the Netherlands (from 50 000), in South Africa and in North America.