Who ruled Paris?

Paris grew up on the Seine where islands in the river made it easy to cross, in the middle of the rich farmland of the Paris Basin. River trade, an easily defended island and the surrounding grain lands made it a natural centre, and from the Middle Ages onwards French kings made it the heart of their state. Two things above all define its history: the steady concentration of power, learning and wealth in one capital, and a long tradition of revolution, in which the people of Paris repeatedly changed the course of French history.

A Celtic people, the Parisii, lived along this stretch of the Seine by the third century BCE. After the Romans defeated them in 52 BCE during Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul, a Roman town called Lutetia grew up on the Île de la Cité and the slopes of the left bank, where its forum, baths and amphitheatre stood. Late in the Roman period the town took the name of its people, Paris. As the Western Roman Empire dissolved, the Frankish king Clovis I made Paris his main residence around 508, but under later Frankish rulers the city lost importance. Viking fleets attacked it several times in the ninth century, and the defence of Paris during the long siege of 885 to 886 raised the prestige of its counts, whose family later produced Hugh Capet, king of the Franks from 987.

Under the Capetian kings Paris became the capital of the Kingdom of France. Philip II Augustus built a new city wall and the first Louvre fortress around 1200, work on the cathedral of Notre-Dame began in 1163, and the university, recognised around 1200, drew scholars from across Europe. By 1300 Paris was the largest city in western Europe, with perhaps 200,000 people. The Black Death of 1348 and the Hundred Years' War brought disaster: English and Burgundian forces held the city from 1420 to 1436. The Wars of Religion divided Paris again in the sixteenth century, with thousands of Protestants killed in the St Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572. When Louis XIV moved the court to Versailles in 1682, Paris lost its royal residence but kept its role as the centre of finance, publishing and ideas.

The storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 opened the French Revolution, and Parisian crowds and clubs drove its course, from the overthrow of the monarchy in 1792 to the Terror. Napoleon crowned himself emperor in Notre-Dame in 1804 and filled the city with monuments, among them the Arc de Triomphe. Further revolutions in 1830 and 1848 toppled two more monarchies. Under Napoleon III, the prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann rebuilt much of the city from 1853 to 1870, cutting broad boulevards through the medieval streets and adding parks, sewers and uniform stone apartment blocks. The Prussian siege of 1870 to 1871 was followed by the Paris Commune, a revolutionary government crushed by French troops in May 1871 with many thousands killed.

The decades around 1900 made Paris a world capital of art and entertainment, symbolised by the Eiffel Tower, built for the exhibition of 1889. German troops occupied the city from June 1940 until its liberation in August 1944, during World War II, when Allied and Free French forces entered and Charles de Gaulle walked down the Champs-Élysées. Since then Paris has seen the student and worker revolt of May 1968, the terrorist attacks of November 2015, the fire that destroyed Notre-Dame's roof and spire in April 2019 and its restoration and reopening in December 2024. The city proper has about two million inhabitants, within a metropolitan area of more than twelve million that dominates the political, economic and cultural life of France.