structural:scholar_edition
Ethnic groups

Historically, French people were mainly of Celtic - Gallic origin, with a significant admixture of Italic (Romans) and Germanic (Franks) groups reflecting centuries of respective migration and settlement. Through the course of the Middle Ages, France incorporated various neighbouring ethnic and linguistic groups, as evidenced by Breton elements in the west, Aquitanian in the southwest, Scandinavian in the northwest, Alemannic in the northeast, and Ligurian in the southeast.

Large-scale immigration over the last century and a half have led to a more multicultural society; beginning with the French Revolution, and further codified in the French Constitution of 1958, the government is prohibited from collecting data on ethnicity and ancestry; most demographic information is drawn from private sector organisations or academic institutions. In 2004, the Institut Montaign e estimated that within Metropolitan France, 51 million people were White (85% of the population), 6 million were Northwest African (10%), 2 million were Black (3.3%), and 1 million were Asian (1.7%).

A 2008 poll conducted jointly by the Institut national d'études démographiques and the French National Institute of Statistics estimated that the largest minority ancestry groups were Italian (5 million), followed by Northwest African (3–6 million), Sub-Saharan African (2.5 million), Armenian (500,000), and Turkish (200,000). There are also sizeable minorities of other European ethnic groups, namely Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, and Greek. France has a significant Gitan (Romani) population, numbering between 20,000 and 400,000; many foreign Roma are expelled back to Bulgaria and Romania frequently.