Because your question is so wide-reaching, it would be futile to attempt to provide a comprehensive history of such a significant a geographical area over a span of two or more millennia. However, given your interest in the formation of France I think I could provide you with some detail on what I would deem to be the most important periods in looking at the origins of the formation of France.

The focus of my answer will therefore concern the period from around the fifth century to the ninth century, whilst also taking into account Germanic tribal structure and the influence of the Roman Empire, because I believe this is truly key to understanding the nature of the Franks (which, from the name, I’m sure you can understand their significance).

So as I mentioned, I start this answer with a discussion of Germanic tribal structures. Generally, the historical consensus is that the early Germanic tribes were perceived as being relatively communalist in social organisation. Perry Anderson (Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism) writes that,

“When the Roman legions had first encountered the Germanic tribes in the time of Caesar… a primitive communal mode of production prevailed among them. Private ownership of land was unknown”.

Malcolm Todd (The Early Germans) further agrees with this assessment that the tribes were not organised in complicated and hierarchical social arrangements;

“When first revealed in our sources, the early Germans were a primitive tribal society”.

Now it’s vital to draw attention to the impact of contiguity with the Roman frontier, so I quote at length from Anderson,

“This rudimentary social structure was soon modified by the arrival of the Romans at the Rhine, and their temporary occupation of Germany up to the Elbe in the first century A.D. Trade in luxury commodities across the frontier rapidly produced a growing internal stratification within the Germanic tribes: to buy Roman goods, leading tribal warriors sold cattle, or raided other tribes to capture slaves for export to Roman markets… Dynastic quasi-royal lineages were emerging, which provided elective chiefs above the council. Above all, the leading men in each tribe had gathered about them ‘retinues’ of warriors for raiding parties, which cut across clan units of kinship… They formed the nucleus for permanent class division and institutionalised coercive authority within these primitive social formations.”

Therefore, hierarchies and extractive structures started to emerge in some Germanic tribes. As seems logical, Anderson remarks,

“the peoples most closely in contact with the Empire of all, inevitably revealed the most ‘advanced’ social and economic structures, and the greatest departures from the traditional way of life of the tribes.”

This inevitably leads to a distinction between what might even be considered different ‘categories’ of Germanic tribes. It is useful here to look at elements from Tacitus’s Germania, written around A.D. 100. Tacitus repeatedly acknowledged the sophisticated and hierarchical structures and relationships in the tribes with which Roman common knowledge was most familiar, though he certainly did not do so knowingly. Tacitus had little to say about the remoter tribal societies. However, he did know that they were not dominated by kings.

I understand that this has been extremely drawn out without obvious reference to your initial question, but it is a vital point to make. This is because I wanted to draw attention to this feature of the Franks, or the gens Francorum. This particular group of Germanic peoples were typically associated with tribes based around the Lower Rhine and, eventually, the full area between the Loire and the Rhine. The Franks were therefore one of these quasi-assimilated frontier tribes, and had already developed relatively complicated socio-economic structures before the ‘fall of Rome’ [problematic though this term is]. Simon Esmonde-Cleary even writes that,

“the Franks seem originally to have had a similarly flat social structure, but when they came in contact with the Gallo-Roman hierarchies they soon developed a more differentiated hierarchy”,

fitting with the model I have discussed above. This is further evidenced in that the Franks are known to have had kings in the fourth century as per Ammianus Marcellinus’s writings, whereas there is no evidence of kings for those tribes further from the frontier until much later.

This, in my view, explains the way in which sophisticated socio-economic structures remained in places in post-Roman Gaul. If we look at post-Roman Britain, in contrast, the archaeological record reveals a relative material simplicity. Certainly, production was decomplexified and there appears to be a relative absence of obvious hierarchical structures and institutionalised surplus extraction. My argument for explaining this would be twofold, but only one is relevant here, which is that the migrations which occurred in respect of Britain mainly involved Germanic peoples who lived further from the frontier and therefore had not developed these Romanised economic structures which I mentioned above. However, when we look at Frankish Gaul, many of the economic and cultural structures of the Roman empire survived. For example, there was a continuation of things like written administration, ‘the state’, old elite families, Latin language, monetary economy, towns, industrial production, and Christianity.

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