Indigenous tribes of France

There are two indigenous groups in France, the Gauls and Franks.

The Gauls


In the pre-Roman era, all of Gaul was inhabited by a variety of peoples who were known collectively as the Gaulish tribes. Their ancestors were Celtic immigrants who came from Central Europe in the 7th century BC, and dominated native peoples in Aquitaine. Some, particularly in the northern and eastern areas, had Germanic admixture. Many of these peoples had already spoken Celtic by the time of the Roman conquest, but others seem to have spoken a Celto-Germanic creole.
The Gaulish language came to be supplanted by Vulgar Latin, which would later split into dialects that would develop into the French language. Today, the last redoubt of Celtic culture and language in France can be found in the northwestern region of Brittany. All Gaul is divided into three parts, one of which the Belgae inhabit, the Aquitani, and Gauls. All these differ from each other in language, customs and laws.


The Franks

The name "Frank" is closely related to the word that means, "free" as opposed to slavery, in the Frankish language. The most direct descendants of the Franks are the Dutch and the Flemish-speakers of Belgium.

The Franks had been living for some time in northern Germany when the weakness of the Roman Empire tempted them to move into it in the 400's AD. At first they stayed in northern France and Belgium, but around 490 AD, under a new, young, and ambitious king named Clovis, the Franks converted to Catholicism and began to fight their way south. They came to inhabit the former wealthy Roman provinces of Gaul and became the most powerful of the Germanic tribes. It was the Franks who created the strongest and most stable barbarian kingdom in the days after the Western Roman Empire had collapsed.