France

France

The French Republic or France (French: République française or France) is a country whose metropolitan territory is located in Western Europe, and which is further made up of a collection of overseas islands and territories located in other continents.[1] Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and North Sea, and from the Rhine River to the Atlantic Ocean. Because of its shape, Metropolitan France is known by Frenchmen as "the Hexagon". It is bordered by the United Kingdom (land border inside the Channel Tunnel), Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Monaco, Andorra, and Spain. The French Republic also shares land borders overseas with Brazil, Suriname, and the Netherlands Antilles. France is a democracy organised as a unitary semi-presidential republic. It is a developed country with the fifth-largest economy in the world in 2004.[2] Its main ideals are expressed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. France is one of the founding members of the European Union, and has the largest land area of all members. France is also a founding member of the United Nations. It is one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council wielding veto power, and it is also one of only eight acknowledged nuclear powers.

The name France comes from the Franks, the Germanic tribe that occupied the region after the fall of the Roman Empire, and, more precisely the region around Paris called Île-de-France which was the centre of the French royal dominion.

Geography

While the main territory of France (metropolitan France; French: la Métropole, or France métropolitaine) is located in Western Europe, France is also constituted from territories in North America, the Caribbean, South America, the western and southern Indian Ocean, the northern and southern Pacific Ocean, and Antarctica (sovereignty claims in Antarctica are not recognised by most countries, see Antarctic Treaty System).

Metropolitan France possesses a large variety of landscapes, ranging from coastal plains in the north and west, where France borders the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, to the Pyrenees mountains in the south-west and the Alps in the south-east, the latter containing the highest point in western Europe, Mont Blanc at 4810 m. In between are found other elevated regions such as the Massif Central, the Jura, the Vosges, or the Ardennes which are quite rocky and forested, as well as extensive river basins such as those of the Loire River, the Rhône River, the Garonne and Seine.

Due to its numerous overseas departments and territories scattered on all oceans of the planet, France possesses the second-largest Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in the world, covering 11,035,000 km² (4,260,000 mi²), just behind the EEZ of the United States (11,351,000 km² / 4,383,000 mi²), but ahead of the EEZ of Australia (8,232,000 km² / 3,178,000 mi²).[3] The EEZ of France covers approximately 8% of the total surface of all the EEZs of the world, whereas the land area of the French Republic is only 0.45% of the total land area of the Earth.

from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France