Paris

• 1. Introduction

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  Paris holds 2.04 million people in just 105.4 square kilometres of land. Around that core, a metropolitan population of 13.2 million spreads across the Seine valley. Julius Caesar first wrote of this place in the mid-1st century BC, calling it Lutetia Parisiorum, the settlement of a Gallic tribe called the Parisii. From that marshy bend in the river grew the capital of France, a city later called the City of Light. How did an island trading post become a centre of finance, diplomacy, fashion, and gastronomy by the 17th century? Why do twenty numbered districts spiral clockwise across its map? And what string of beheadings, sieges, fires, and grand building projects shaped the streets that survive today? The answers run through Roman amphitheatres, revolutionary guillotines, and a cathedral that burned in 2019.

• 2. From Parisii To Capital

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  The Parisii people settled the area around the middle of the 3rd century BC. One major north-south trade route crossed the Seine on the Île de la Cité, which grew into an important trading centre. These people traded with river towns as far away as the Iberian Peninsula and minted their own coins. In 52 BC, Julius Caesar conquered the Paris Basin for the Roman Republic and built a settlement on the Left Bank. The Roman town, Lutetia, grew prosperous with a forum, baths, temples, theatres, and an amphitheatre. By the end of the Western Roman Empire it was called Parisius, the name that became Paris in French. Christianity arrived in the middle of the 3rd century AD through Saint Denis, the first Bishop of Paris. Legend says he refused to renounce his faith and was beheaded on a hill that became known as Montmartre. From there, the story goes, he walked headless to the north of the city. Where he fell and was buried became the Basilica of Saint-Denis, where many French kings now lie. Clovis the Frank, first king of the Merovingian dynasty, made the city his capital from 508. Fortifying the Île de la Cité did not stop Vikings from sacking it in 845. Yet a successful defence in the Siege of Paris, fought from 885 to 886, proved the city's strategic worth. For that defence, the Count of Paris, Odo of France, was elected king of West Francia. The Capetian dynasty began with the 987 election of Hugh Capet as king of a unified West Francia.

• 3. Cathedrals, Kings, And Plague Of Filth

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  Maurice de Sully, bishop of Paris, began building the Notre Dame Cathedral in 1163, and it took 182 years to complete. By the end of the 12th century, the city had become the political, economic, religious, and cultural capital of France. In 1137 a new marketplace, today's Les Halles, replaced two smaller ones. Philip Augustus extended the Louvre fortress, gave the city its first walls between 1190 and 1215, and paved its main streets. In 1190 he turned the cathedral school into a corporation that became the University of Paris, drawing students from across Europe. With 200,000 inhabitants in 1328, Paris was the most populous city in Europe. London in 1300 held only 80,000 people. Around 1340 the population reached between 250,000 and 300,000. By the early fourteenth century, so much filth had collected in urban Europe that French and Italian cities named streets after human waste. In medieval Paris, several street names came from merde, the French word for excrement. During the Hundred Years' War, England-friendly Burgundian forces occupied the city from 1418. Henry V of England entered the capital in 1420, and despite Joan of Arc's effort in 1429 to free it, the city stayed under English occupation until 1436. In the late 16th century Wars of Religion, the city became a stronghold of the Catholic League. Those forces organised the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre on the 24th of August 1572, when thousands of French Protestants were killed. The conflicts ended when Henry IV, after converting to Catholicism, entered the city in 1594 to claim the crown. He built the Pont Neuf, extended the Louvre toward the Tuileries Palace, and created the Place Royale, now the Place des Vosges. The narrowness of the streets contributed to his assassination near Les Halles in 1610.

• 4. Richelieu, Versailles, And Enlightenment

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  Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister of Louis XIII, set out to make the city the most beautiful in Europe during the 17th century. He built five new bridges, a chapel for the College of Sorbonne, and a palace for himself called the Palais-Cardinal. After Richelieu died in 1642, it was renamed the Palais-Royal. Louis XIV moved his court to a new palace at Versailles in 1682, prompted by the Parisian uprisings of the Fronde civil war. Though no longer the capital, the city saw its arts and sciences flourish with the Comédie-Française and the French Academy of Sciences. To show the city was safe from attack, the king demolished the walls and replaced them with tree-lined boulevards, the future Grands Boulevards. His reign also produced the Place Vendôme, the Place des Victoires, and Les Invalides. The population grew from about 400,000 in 1640 to 650,000 in 1780. A new boulevard, the Champs-Élysées, stretched the city west to Étoile. The working-class Faubourg Saint-Antoine on the eastern side filled with poor migrant workers from across France. The city's role in education and sciences earned it the name City of Light during the age of Enlightenment in the 18th century.

• 5. Revolution And Empire

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  In the summer of 1789, the city became the centre stage of the French Revolution. On the 14th of July, a mob seized the arsenal at the Invalides and stormed the Bastille, a symbol of royal authority. The first independent Paris Commune met in the Hôtel de Ville and elected the astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly as Mayor on the 15th of July. Louis XVI and the royal family were brought to the city and held in the Tuileries Palace. In 1793, the king, queen, and mayor were beheaded by guillotine in the Reign of Terror, along with more than 16,000 others across France. The property of the aristocracy and the church was nationalised, and churches were closed, sold, or demolished. Revolutionary factions ruled until the 9th of November 1799, when Napoleon Bonaparte seized power as First Consul. The population had dropped by 100,000 during the Revolution, then surged with 160,000 new residents to reach 660,000 by 1815. Napoleon replaced the elected government with a prefect who reported directly to him. He raised monuments to military glory, including the Arc de Triomphe, and built new fountains, the Canal de l'Ourcq, Père Lachaise Cemetery, and the Pont des Arts. The Arc de Triomphe was finished in 1836. The first railway line to the city opened in 1837, starting massive migration from the provinces. In 1848 Louis-Philippe was overthrown by an uprising in the streets.

• 6. Haussmann And The Modern City

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  Napoleon III and his prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann launched a vast public works project after 1848. Between 1853 and 1870 they rebuilt the city centre, cut wide boulevards, and imposed standard facades in cream-grey Paris stone. They built the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes, along with new aqueducts, sewers, and an opera house. In 1860, Napoleon III annexed the surrounding towns and created eight new arrondissements, fixing the city's modern limits. That annexation produced the twenty clockwise-spiralling arrondissements. During the Franco-Prussian War, the Prussian Army besieged the city, which surrendered on the 28th of January 1871. After seizing power on the 28th of March, a revolutionary government known as the Paris Commune held power for two months before the French army crushed it during the Bloody Week at the end of May 1871. The city hosted two major international expositions late in the century. The 1889 Universal Exposition featured the new Eiffel Tower and marked the centennial of the Revolution. The 1900 Universal Exposition gave the city the Pont Alexandre III, the Grand Palais, the Petit Palais, and the first Métro line. The city became the laboratory of Naturalism through Émile Zola and of Impressionism through Courbet, Manet, Monet, and Renoir.

• 7. War, Occupation, And Liberation

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  By 1901, the population had grown to about 2,715,000. Artists from around the world, including Pablo Picasso, Modigliani, and Henri Matisse, made the city their home. It was the birthplace of Fauvism, Cubism, and abstract art, while Marcel Proust explored new approaches to literature. During the First World War, between 600 and 1,000 taxis carried 6,000 soldiers to the front at the First Battle of the Marne. The city was bombed by Zeppelins and shelled by German long-range guns. In the years afterward, known as Les Années Folles, it drew writers and musicians like Ernest Hemingway, Igor Stravinsky, James Joyce, and Josephine Baker. Future national leaders such as Ho Chi Minh, Zhou Enlai, and Léopold Sédar Senghor studied and organised there. On the 14th of June 1940, the German army marched in after the city was declared an open city. On the 16th and the 17th of July 1942, French police and gendarmes arrested 12,884 Jews, including 4,115 children, and held them at the Vel d'Hiv before deportation to Auschwitz. None of the children came back. On the 25th of August 1944, the French 2nd Armoured Division and the United States 4th Infantry Division liberated the city. General Charles de Gaulle led a huge crowd down the Champs-Élysées and spoke from the Hôtel de Ville.

• 8. Protest, Terror, And A Burning Spire

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  In August 1961, the pro-independence FLN killed 11 city policemen, leading to a curfew on Algerians, who were then French citizens. On the 17th of October 1961, a peaceful protest against the curfew turned violent, and at least 40 people were killed. In May 1968, students occupied the Sorbonne and built barricades in the Latin Quarter. Thousands of blue-collar workers joined them, and the movement grew into a two-week general strike. The events split the University of Paris into 13 independent campuses. On the 25th of March 1977, Jacques Chirac became the first elected mayor of the city since 1793. The Tour Maine-Montparnasse, at 57 storeys and 210 metres, was built between 1969 and 1973 and remains the only building in the centre over 32 storeys high. The bank of the Seine including the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower was classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991. The Métropole du Grand Paris, with a population of 6.7 million, was created on the 1st of January 2016. In January 2015, the shooting at the offices of Charlie Hebdo and related attacks killed 17 people, and 1.5 million people marched in solidarity. Attacks in November that year killed 130 people and injured more than 350. The Paris Agreement was signed by 196 nations on the 22nd of April 2016. The Notre Dame Cathedral caught fire on the 15th of April 2019, its spire and most of its roof lost, though firefighters saved the bell towers and rose windows. It reopened on the 7th of December 2024.