I think most laptops are actually perfectly capable of playing PDX games, my old laptop sure was, but holy shit when i got this laptop i was surprised at what speed 5 is like! 1 month passes in 1.5 seconds, it's insane!
I always scratch my head a bit when i see people complaining about ck2/eu4's performance (other than a slight memory leak issue in late game). i honestly think they may be blaming the game for something more likely to be caused by outdated drivers, hardware with compatibility problems, faulty hardware, other programs hogging up system resources running in the background, et cetera.
EDIT: also a lot of people forget that GPU doesn't matter as much for most PDX games, what is really important is having a powerful CPU
so.... you're problem is that France is France?
I don't have a huge problem with it, it's just weird when you're playing the big boy with the butter and every other day someone asks if it's alright to duel their rival. Of course the women are plotting to kill each other and bastard children. It's just one big bloody mess.