History - French History: A Captivating Guide to the History of France, Charlemagne, and Notre-Dame de Paris

In September of 1940, two months after France fell to Hitler, a group of teenagers was out walking in the woods near the village of Montignac in the Dordogne region of southwestern France. The story goes that the boys were out looking for reported buried treasure at the end of an underground tunnel somewhere in the area. The legend had been going around for years, but this group of boys was sure they were onto something when they (or their dog, in one version) found a large hole in the ground.

The boys gathered around the hole, dropping rocks into it to get an idea of how deep it might be. Thinking it wasnt all that deep, they made their way one by one down a narrow shaft that went down about fifty feet. When they got to the bottom, they found themselves in a dimly lit cave covered with an amazing assortment of paintings. The boys werent sure exactly what they were looking at, but they were pretty sure it was unique. After going promising each other to keep their findings a secret, they went back the next day and then decided they could make money off of what they had found. They decided to charge admission to some of their local friends and acquaintances.

Word spread, and hundreds of locals came to see the paintings, each with a theory about what they were and how they got there. Word finally got to a member of a local prehistory society whose members collected fossils and examined caves in the area. When he went down the hole, he felt sure he was looking at prehistoric paintings and instructed the boys to not let anyone else in until he could notify a local expert. This is the story behind the discovery of the amazing cave paintings of Lascaux.

Illustration 1: One small sample of the Lascaux cave paintings.

The Lascaux paintings are estimated to be between 15,000 to 17,000 years old. Today, only recognized experts can go into the original cave to study the paintings. The climate is very carefully controlled because in the years after their discovery, thousands of people went to see the paintings, some even touching them. Others faded due to the amount of condensation and carbon dioxide caused by the visitors breathing. The caves were closed to the public in 1963. In 2016, an amazing reconstruction of the paintings was created in a site nearby.

Were the inhabitants of the Lascaux caves French? Of course not. But the paintings at Lascaux and elsewhere in France prove that the land we call France has had a long history of human habitation going back thousands of years. It also appears those residents have had the same taste for art and culture that the people of France have always been noted for. Captivating Historys History of France will introduce you to one of the most fascinating and influential nations in the world. French history is so involved and so intricate that it would (and has) taken forests to provide the paper to write it all on. For this book, were going to introduce you to some of the greatest Frenchmen and women in history, and while youre getting to know them, we hope you get a feeling for the time and events that they lived in or perhaps even created themselves.