This name continued to be used even after the beginning of the reign of the Franks' Kings Clovis I, Charles Martel, Pepin the Short, and Charlemagne.

guerre = war, garder = ward, Guillaume = William), and the diphthong au is the regular outcome of al before a following consonant (cf.

gamba > jambe), and the diphthong au would be incomprehensible; the regular outcome of Latin Gallia would have been * Jaille in French.

Gaul is in the plural in the title, reflecting the three Gallic entities identified by the Romans (Celtica, Belgica, and Aquitania).

The Coq Gaulois (Gallic rooster in English) is also a national symbol of France, as for the French Football Federation.

The history of the Franconian Empire lives on today in place names such as Frankfurt or Franconia (Franken in German).

In a tradition going back to the 7th-century Chronicle of Fredegar, the name of the Franks itself is taken from Francio, one of the Germanic kings of Sicambri, c. 61 BCE, whose dominion extended all along those lands immediately joining the west-bank of the Rhine River, as far as Strasbourg and Belgium.

[8] This nation is also explicitly mentioned by Julius Caesar in his Notebooks on the Gallic War (Commentarii de Bello Gallico).

[9] Centuries later, this decree served as the basis for a group of crusading lawyers at the parlement of Paris, many of whom were members of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, winning unprecedented emancipation rights in a series of cases before the French Revolution, which (temporarily) led to the complete abolition of slavery on French overseas territories and colonies in 1794 [10] until Napoleon, propped up by the plantation lobbies, re-introduced slavery in sugarcane-growing colonies in 1802.

In a third meaning, "France" refers specifically to the province of the Île-de-France (with Paris at its centre) which historically was the heart of the royal demesne.

French provinces were typically made up of multiple pays, which were the direct continuation of the pagi set up by the Roman administration during Antiquity.

The Pays de France is the fertile plain located immediately north of Paris which supported one of the most productive agriculture during the Middle Ages and helped to produce the tremendous wealth of the French royal court before the Hundred Years' War, making possible among other things the emergence of the Gothic art and architecture, which later spread all over western Europe[citation needed].

Its historic main town is Saint-Denis, where the first Gothic cathedral in the world was built in the 12th century, and inside which the kings of France are buried.

This fourth meaning is found in many place names, such as the town of Roissy-en-France, on whose territory is located Charles de Gaulle Airport.