For me France either started in 987 with the Capet or 600 wit the settlement of the Franks from which France derives its name.
The Franks settled in the Netherlands/Rhine valley during the Ist century AC, the first sources saying it was a kingdom (different from the other germanic tribes as its members were
freemen, where the word Frank come from, as members of the tribe had not the right to enslave each other, unlike in the others) come from the IIIrd century, and its penetration in the Roman Empire was in the IVth century.
496 is considered as the fundation of France, even if Clovis was crowned before, because this is when he got baptisted, uniting forever the kingdom to the christianism. That's also under his reign that the frankish kingdom took its modern shape, by increasing its size by 3 or 4, by conquering the last roman kingdom in Gaul & the Burgund & Wizigoth ones:
To the share of the kingdom at the death of Clovis:
The history of a nation can not be considered by its political system. Mao tried to make beleive that nothing happened before 1949 with his cultural revolution in the 70's. The culture, interpretation of the world comes from the history of the country, whatever its political system was.
The oldest european nations (in the modern sense) are UK & France, that were the firsts to have a centralized state, and who forged their national identity (abandonning the regionnal/feudal one) in the XIII-XIVth centuries.
The US may have the longest uninterrupted democracy, right, but the US are basically a Switzerland surrounded by 5000 km wide oceans, and nothing really happens, just a civil war, once, and it was founded on a new basis, it didn't have ten centuries of monarchy in its back, with all its cultural, philosophical & political heritage. Europe is small, overcrowded, and was at war 70% of the time. The european regimes were highly influenced by the foreign affairs.
