France

From Gothpoodle

• Population: 55 million
• Aspects: Stable, Powerful, Fifth Wave

France is a major power within the European Union, which could be said to revolve around a Franco-German axis. For a variety of reasons, the country has been slow to adopt new technologies in the course of the 21st century. Even so, France is a Fifth Wave nation and an integral part of the modern global economy.

French politics have been chaotic since about 2070, with no single political party able to maintain a dominant coalition for long. French society is controlled by the local Preservationist movement, which emphasizes French national identity as well as rejection of transhumanism. Meanwhile, a growing moderniste faction wishes to break France out of its economic and technological conservatism. In recent years the struggle over language and other social issues has broken out into frequent protests, some of them violent.

France has a substantial ethnic minority (the Occitans) in the south, which share linguistic and cultural ties with the Catalans. Since the independence of Catalonia from Spain, the Occitans have tended to build closer ties with Barcelona than with Paris. Meanwhile, unrest on the island of Corsica has been an occasional issue for over a century; protests and calls for independence have been very frequent in recent years. So far the central government has refused to consider granting greater autonomy to any of the outlying regions, much less outright independence.