France, formally the French Republic is a nation whose metropolitan region is situated in Western Europe and that likewise involves different abroad islands and domains situated in other continents. Metropolitan France reaches out from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean. It is frequently alluded to as L'Hexagone ("The Hexagon") in view of the state of its domain. France is a unitary semi-presidential republic with its primary goals communicated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

Metropolitan France is flanked (clockwise from the north) by Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Monaco, Andorra, and Spain. France's abroad divisions and collectivities additionally share land fringes with Brazil and Suriname (circumscribing French Guiana), and the Netherlands Antilles (flanking Saint-Martin). France is connected to the United Kingdom by the Channel Tunnel, which goes underneath the English Channel.

France is the biggest nation in the European Union and the second biggest in Europe. It has been one of the world's preeminent forces for a long time. Amid the seventeenth and eighteenth hundreds of years, France colonized quite a bit of North America; amid the nineteenth and mid-twentieth hundreds of years, France fabricated one of the biggest pilgrim realms of the time, including vast bits of North, West and Central Africa, Southeast Asia, and numerous Pacific islands. France is a created nation and has the fifth-biggest economy on the planet, as indicated by ostensible GDP figures. It is the most visited nation on the planet, getting 82 million remote visitors annually. France is one of the establishing individuals from the European Union and has the biggest land territory all things considered. It is additionally an establishing individual from the United Nations, and an individual from the Francophonie, the G8, NATO, and the Latin Union. It is one of the five lasting individuals from the United Nations Security Council and claims the biggest number of atomic weapons with dynamic warheads and atomic power plants in the European Union.