When the Romans considered France part of their empire, its boundaries extended deep into the forests of the Paris basin and up to the edges of the Rhine. Julius Caesar made his reputation in part from his defeat of Vercingetorix at Alésia in 52 B.C., a victory he was quick to publicize in The Gallic Wars. In that year the Roman colony of Lutetia (Paris) was established on an island in the Seine (Ile de la Cité).
As the Roman Empire declined, its armies retreated to colonies that had been established along a strip of the Mediterranean coast. These included, among others, Orange, Montpellier, Nîmes, Narbonne, and Marseille, which retain some of the best Roman monuments in Europe.
As one of their legacies, the Roman armies left behind the practice of Christianity. The Roman Church, for all its abuses, was a guardian of civilization during the anarchy following the Roman decline. The common language, a form of Latin, evolved into archaic French.
The Christianity adopted by many chieftains was viewed as heretical by Rome. When Clovis (king of Gaul's Franks and founder of the Merovingian dynasty) converted to Catholicism, he won the approval of the pope, the support of the archbishop of Reims, and the loyalty of many Gallic tribes who'd grown disenchanted with anarchy. (Clovis's baptism is viewed as the beginning of a collusion between the Catholic church and the French monarchy that flourished until the 1789 Revolution.)
At the Battle of Soissons in 486, Clovis defeated the last vestiges of Roman power in Gaul. Other conquests included expansion west to the Seine, then to the Loire. After a battle in Dijon in 500, he became the overlord of the king of Burgundy. Seven years later, his armies drove the Visigoths into Spain, giving most of Aquitaine, in western France, to his Merovingian dynasty. Trying to make the best of an earlier humiliation, Anastasius, the Byzantium-based emperor of the eastern Roman Empire, finally gave the kingdom of the Franks his legal sanction.
After Clovis's death in 511, his kingdom was split among his heirs. The Merovingian dynasty survived in fragmented form for another 250 years. During this period, the power of the bishops and lords grew, entrenching the hierarchies of what we today know as feudalism. Although apologists for the Merovingians can point out their achievements, many have identified the quasi anarchy of their reign (not altogether unfairly) as the Dark Ages.
