14 interesting facts about France

Oui, partout elle est bonne et partout elle est belle,
Notre terre de France aux mille aspects divers !
Belle sur les sommets où trônent les hivers,
Et dans la lande fauve à l’araire rebelle,
Belle au bord des flots bleus, belle au fond des bois verts !

                                 François Fabié, Fleurs de genêts

      Today we will speak about france  so Here are some interesting French facts :

1.France is the world's most popular tourist destination :

some 83.7 million visitors arrived in France, according to the World Tourism Organisation report published in 2014, making it the world's most-visited country.

2.France is the largest country in the EU, and known as 'the hexagon' :

with an area of 551,000 sq km it's almost a fifth of the EU’s total area, and due to its six-sided shape France is sometimes referred to as l’hexagone. About a quarter is covered by forest; only Sweden and Finland have more.

3.The French Army was the first to use camouflage in 1915 (World War I) :

the word camouflage came from the French verb ‘to make up for the stage’. Guns and vehicles were painted by artists called camofleurs. 

4.In France you can marry a dead person :

 under French law, in exceptional cases you can marry posthumously, as long as  you can also prove that the deceased had the intention of marrying while alive and you receive permission from the French president.

5.The French have produced a number of world-renown inventions :

'father of canning' confectioner Nicolas Appert came up with the idea to use sealed glass jars placed in boiling water to preserve food in 1809, and the later use of tin cans was the idea of another Frenchman, Pierre Durand; the reading and writing system for the blind, braille, was developed by Louis Braille who was blinded as a child; physician René Laennec invented the stethoscope at a hospital in Paris in 1816, first discovered by rolling up paper into a tube; andAlexandre-Ferdinand Godefroy patented a contraption was the world's first hair dryer in 1888. The Montgolfier brothers Joseph and Etienne became pioneers of hot air flight after the world's first public display of an untethered hot air balloon in 1783. A less known fact is that the popular game Etch-a-Sketch was invented in the 1950s after French electrical technician André Cassagnes peeled a translucent transfer from a light switch plate and discovered his pencil marks remained on its underside, a result of the electrostatically charged metallic powder.

6.The first public screening of a movie was by French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière on 28 December 1895 :

they used their invention thecinématographe (hence ‘cinema’) to show 10 films of about 50 seconds each at the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris. They made many more films but predicted that ‘cinema is an invention without any future'. 

7.A French woman is the world’s oldest ever human :

she lived to an incredible 122 years and 164 days, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. Jeanne Louise Calment was born on 21 February 1875 and died on 4 August 1997. She lived through the opening of the Eiffel Tower in 1889, two World Wars and the development of television, the modern motor car and aeroplanes. Her compatriots generally live long longer than most other nationalities: France is rated sixth in the OECD for life expectancy at birth at 82 years: 85 years for women and 79 for men. 

8.France legalised same-sex marriage in 2013 :

when President Françoise Holland signed the bill into law on 18 May 2013, France became the ninth country in Europe and 14th in the world to legalise same-sex marriage. Although polls at the time showed that around 50 of French people supported gay marriage, not everyone was happy about it: thousands of people defending the so-called ‘family values’ took to the streets in protest.

9.Paris Gare du Nord is Europe's busiest railway station :

and by far, with some 190 million passengers passing through each year. Inaugurated in 1846, it it also one of the world's oldest stations.

10.French wines can reach astronomical prices :

in 2014, Sotheby’s sold a 114-bottle lot of DCR Romanee-Conti wines in Hong Kong for more than EUR 1.45m to an anonymous Asia-based buyer, a world record for a single wine lot. That works out to about EUR 1,619 per standard glass. 

11.The world’s greatest cycle race, the Tour de France, has been around for more than 100 years :

 with the first event held on 1 July 1903. Every July, cyclists race some 3,200km (2,000 miles) primarily around France in a series of stages over 23 days, with the fastest cyclist at each stage wearing the famous yellow jersey.

12.France has produced some of the world’s most influential writers and thinkers :

Descartes and Pascal in the 17th century, Voltaire in the 18th, Baudelaire and Flaubert in the 19th and Sartre and Camus in the 20th. To date, France has won more Noble Prizes for Literature (15) than any other country.

13.France produces nearly a billion tons of cheese a year in around 1,200 different varieties :

in France it's an ancient art: goats cheese dates back to at least 500AD, the blue-veined Roquefort was mentioned in records of an ancient monastery in Conques as early as 1070, and hard farm cheeses like Emmental started to appear in the 13th century. A French proverb claims 'un fromage par jour de l’année' – there is a different cheese for every day of the year. 

14.The French eat around 30,000 tonnes of snails a year :

but only about 1,000 tonnes of the classic French delicacy (served with garlic, parsley and butter) come from France; only some 100 registered snail farms existed in France in 2015. If you've eaten snails in France, chances are they were plucked from the fields and roadsides of Eastern Europe.