France remains one of the world's most talked-about and written-about destinations. It's packed with diversions and distractions of every sort: cultural, culinary, sensual, you name it. And perhaps that's why France has been called le deuxième pays de tout le monde (everyone's second country).
The French claim credit for developing Gothic-style architecture and the cathedrals that stand as legacies of soaring stone. Ever since the Middle Ages, creators of everything from palaces to subway stations have drawn at least some inspiration from designs born in France. The monuments tell the stories of a land that has shaped, and been shaped by, the rise and fall of rulers and empires since ancient times, a country that has been the scene of and the subject of bloody battles. France entered the new millennium as part of an ever-more-unified Europe, but it remains, and always will remain, indescribably, unalterably French.
