The destruction of natural timber in France within the past two centuries has been enormous. About a sixth part of the surface is wooded, the most extensive remaining forests being those of Orleans and Fontainebleau, between the northern curve of the Loire and Paris; of the hills of Var in the extreme southeast; and of the Jura and the Vosges. Much of the department of Vaucluse, in the lower valley of the Rhone, is covered with Truffle oaks, from about the roots of which enormous quantities of this fungus are obtained. The western promontory of Brittany is now barest of all, but here, as in the mountains of Auvergne, the Cevennes, the Pyrenees, and the Alps, replanting has begun.

The vine is grown in all parts of France excepting the northwestern departments; more than one thousand four hundred varieties of grapes are recognized; the finest growths being those of Champagne and Burgundy in the east, and of the basin of the Gironde (Bordeaux) in the southwest. Wheat, flax and beet-root for sugar, are the staple products of the north; olives of the extreme southeast. Apples and pears are widely grown in Normandy for cider and perry; oranges, citrons, and pomegranates come from the Mediterranean departments.

In pastoral wealth, in cattle and sheep rearing, France is far behind England and Germany in proportion to its extent.

Industries and Trade.—Agricultural and pastoral pursuits occupy the larger share of the people of France. The trade of the Champagne [478] wine district centers at Reims and Chalons-sur-Marne, east of Paris; that of the Burgundy wines at Dijon, in the Saone valley, on the east; that of the Gironde wines, or claret, at Bordeaux, on the southwest. The subsidiary products of vinegar and brandy are made most largely, the one at Orleans, on the Loire, the other at Cognac, a small town on the Charente, north of Bordeaux.

The French People.—To the aboriginal Iberian and Celtic peoples of France came the Romans chiefly in the south and east; the descendants of this intermixture being the small dark and lively Frenchman of the south; in the north, in some degree, the Germanic element became interwoven; hence the Frenchman of the northern parts of the land partakes more of the character of his neighbors, is taller, blonde, blue-eyed, and less volatile than the southerner. Hence also the old division of the Romanized French language into the Langue d’oc (or Provençal) of the south; and the Langue d’oil (or Roman Walloon) of the north, from which the many dialects now spoken have descended.

The Celtic element remains almost pure in Brittany, and the Iberian in the Basques of the western Pyrenees. Italians appear in the southeast and in Corsica, Flemings on the Belgian frontier, and Germans toward Lorraine and Alsace, though, in this direction, the boundary drawn long the Vosges and round Lorraine since the war of 1871 follows as nearly as possible the meeting points of the German and French inhabitants of the northeast.

Religion and Education.—France is a Roman Catholic country. Protestants form but a small proportion, and the most numerous in the southwest between the Loire and the Pyrenees. Public education is entirely under the supervision of the Government, and no longer in the hands of the clergy. The percentage of illiterates is least in the districts which lie nearest to Germany, and greatest in the Atlantic coast-lands of the west and southwest.

There are state universities at Aix, Algiers, Angers, Bordeaux, Caen, Clermont, Dijon, Grenoble, Lille, Lyon, Marseilles, Montauban, Montpelier, Nancy, Nantes, Paris, Poitiers, Rennes, and Toulouse.

Cities and Towns.—More than 8,000,000 people live in the seventy-one chief cities. Fifteen cities have populations of more than 100,000:

Paris2,888,110
Marseilles550,619
Lyon523,796
Bordeaux261,678
Lille217,807
Nantes170,535
Toulouse149,576
St. Etienne148,656
Nice142,940
Le Havre136,159
Rouen124,987
Roubaix122,723
Nancy119,949
Rheims115,178
Toulon104,582