French

The French are, paradoxically, strongly conscious of belonging to a single nation, but they hardly constitute a unified ethnic group by any scientific gauge. Before the official discovery of the Americas at the end of the 15th century, France, located on the western extremity of the…

…lands, meant something like “Frenchmen,” while the persistence of old boundaries between populations of Romance and Germanic speech perpetuated the idea of a greater West Frankland.