Paris through the ages

The Parisii settled on the banks of the Seine between 250 and 225 BC, where a major north–south trade route crossed the river on the way between Britain and the Roman colony of Provence. Tolls for the bridge and the river traffic made the place prosperous enough to mint its own gold coins. The Parisii joined Vercingetorix's rising in 52 BC, lost their commander at the Battle of Lutetia and sent eight thousand men to the last stand at Alesia.

The Romans laid out a new town, Lutetia, on the higher Left Bank as a base for troops watching a rebellious province. It held only six to eight thousand people and remained smaller than Lyon or Sens. Christianity arrived in the middle of the third century; by tradition Saint Denis was beheaded on the hill that became Montmartre, and the church over his grave became the Basilica of Saint-Denis. Germanic invasions from 275 drove the population onto the Île de la Cité, whose first wall was built from the stones of abandoned Left Bank monuments. Clovis I entered the city in 486, made it his capital in 508 and chose to be buried there; the Carolingians moved the capital to Aachen in 751 and largely ignored Paris. Vikings burned the city in December 856 and besieged it for a year in 885–886 without taking it, and in 987 the Capetians came to the throne under Hugh Capet, Count of Paris.

The early Capetians held little more than Paris and its region, and built it up as the capital of France. Notre-Dame was begun in 1163 under Bishop Maurice de Sully, and Abbot Suger's rebuilding of Saint-Denis produced the style later called Gothic, which spread from Paris to England and Germany. Philip II built the Louvre fortress between 1190 and 1202, walled both banks, paved the streets and began Les Halles. On the Left Bank the University of Paris, organised in the mid-twelfth century, drew some twenty thousand students to what became the Latin Quarter, and into the fifteenth century the university was the most important school of Roman Catholic theology in western Europe. The Right Bank was the side of commerce, and its merchants' league, the Hanse parisienne, became a power in the city's affairs.

By 1328 Paris held about 200,000 people, the most populous city in Europe. The first epidemic of bubonic plague, in 1348–1349, killed forty to fifty thousand Parisians, a quarter of the population. War did more damage still: an Anglo-Burgundian force took the city in May 1418, Henry V of England captured it in 1420 and the infant Henry VI was crowned King of France there in 1431. When the English left in 1436 much of Paris was in ruins and 100,000 Parisians — half the population — had gone. The kings preferred the Loire valley, and the royal residence did not return until Francis I brought it back in 1528.

Paris had recovered to 250,000 people by 1500 and to seventy-five printing houses, second in number only to Venice; later in the century it brought out more books than any other city in Europe. The same presses carried Protestant and humanist doctrine, which the Sorbonne's theology faculty attacked; on its orders the scholar Étienne Dolet was burned at the stake in 1546.

Repression and massacre of Protestants alternated with periods of tolerance from 1562, through the French Wars of Religion, with Paris a stronghold of the Catholic League. On the night of 23–24 August 1572, with prominent Protestants from across France in the city for the marriage of Henry of Navarre to Margaret of Valois, the royal council decided to assassinate their leaders. The killings became a general slaughter of Protestants by Catholic mobs — the St Bartholomew's Day massacre — running through August and September and spreading from Paris to the rest of the country: about three thousand Protestants were killed in Paris and five to ten thousand elsewhere in France. Paris held out against Henry IV until he converted to Catholicism and entered the city on 14 March 1594. A third of the population had fled during the wars, and Henry IV took away the independence of the city government, ruling Paris through royal officers.

Mazarin's attempt to tax the Parlement of Paris, and his arrest of its leaders when they refused, began the Fronde, an uprising of the Parisian nobility from 1648 to 1653 that twice forced the young Louis XIV to flee the city. The king never trusted Paris again: he moved the royal residence out to Versailles and came in as seldom as possible. The population reached between 400,000 and 500,000; the historian Daniel Roche estimated that in 1700 between 150,000 and 200,000 Parisians — about a third — were indigent and receiving assistance.

In the eighteenth century Paris was the financial capital of France and continental Europe and the primary European centre of book publishing, fashion and the manufacture of fine furniture and luxury goods. Diderot and d'Alembert published the Encyclopédie in 1751–52, and the city's four hundred or so cafés served as exchanges for news. The population grew from 400,000 in 1640 to 600,000 in 1789, largely by migration from the Paris basin and from the north and east of France. To raise revenue on goods entering the city, Louis XVI's government ringed it between 1784 and 1791 with the Wall of the Farmers-General and its fifty-six tax gates; the wall and its duties were bitterly unpopular and, with shortages of bread, fed the discontent that broke out in the Revolution.

Paris held between 600,000 and 640,000 people in 1789, among them about a hundred thousand very poor and unemployed, many recently arrived to escape hunger in the countryside; these sans-culottes made up as much as a third of the eastern neighbourhoods. On 14 July a crowd seized thousands of guns at the Invalides and stormed the Bastille, losing 87 dead; the governor and the provost of the merchants were killed. The first independent Paris Commune met at the Hôtel de Ville on 15 July and chose Jean Sylvain Bailly as the city's first mayor; a charter of 1790 divided Paris into twelve municipalities, later the arrondissements. Between 2 and 6 September 1792 bands of sans-culottes broke into the prisons and murdered refractory priests, aristocrats and criminals. Louis XVI was guillotined on 21 January 1793, Marie Antoinette in October and Bailly in November; 16,594 people were tried by the revolutionary tribunal and executed. By 1797 the population had fallen to 570,000.

Napoleon abolished the elected mayoralty in 1800 and replaced it with a prefect who answered to him. Paris grew from 785,000 people in 1831 to 1,053,000 in 1848 while the poorest central quarters grew denser still, and cholera killed twenty thousand in 1832. The first railway line, opened in 1837, began a long migration from the provinces into the city, and in February 1848 barricades in the eastern working-class districts drove Louis-Philippe into exile in England.

Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte made himself Emperor Napoleon III in 1852 and in 1853 launched a vast public works programme under his prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, meant to put unemployed Parisians to work and bring clean water, light and open space into the centre. He annexed the surrounding towns, adding eight arrondissements in 1860 and bringing Paris to its present size. Old quarters on the Île de la Cité were demolished, wide boulevards cut through to connect the railway stations, sewers and water mains laid, and four large parks built at the compass points. He was dismissed in January 1870.

Napoleon III was defeated and captured at Sedan on 1–2 September 1870 and the Third Republic was proclaimed in Paris two days later. The Prussian army reached the city on 19 September and besieged it into January; Parisians ate cats, rats and horses before heavy siege guns opened on the city and it surrendered on 28 January 1871. On 18 March soldiers of the Paris National Guard killed two French generals, the government withdrew to Versailles, and a new city council, the Paris Commune, took power on 26 March for two months. Between 21 and 28 May the army reconquered the city in the fighting known as the Bloody Week; the Communards set fire to the Tuileries Palace, the Hôtel de Ville and the Palais de Justice and executed hostages including Georges Darboy, the archbishop of Paris. Nearly 7,000 Communards were killed in combat or shot by army firing squads afterwards; about 10,000 escaped into exile in Belgium, England, Switzerland and the United States; of the 45,000 prisoners taken, about 10,000 were sentenced to prison or to deportation to New Caledonia and other prison colonies. All were amnestied in 1879 and 1880.

Parliament did not return from Versailles until 1879. In 1873 the National Assembly voted to build the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur by public subscription on the site where the Commune's rising had begun, to atone for the sufferings of the war and the Commune. Five international expositions between 1855 and 1900 drew millions of visitors: the Eiffel Tower was raised as the gateway to the 1889 exposition marking the centenary of the Revolution, and the 1900 exposition drew fifty million visitors and opened with the first Métro line.

In the First World War German aircraft and the long-range Paris Gun shelled the city; one shell killed 88 people in the church of Saint-Gervais on 29 March 1918. Women and 183,000 colonial workers from Africa and Indo-China, closely watched by the government, replaced the drafted men in the arms factories of the outer arrondissements. After the war the old fortifications came down and were replaced by tens of thousands of low-cost flats filled by workers who voted socialist or communist, leaving a bourgeois centre inside a radical ring; in the 1960s those blocks would be filled in turn by refugees from Algeria. Immigration from Russia, Poland, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain offset a low birth rate in the 1930s.

Paris was declared an open city and German troops entered it on 14 June 1940. The government moved to Vichy, the clocks were reset to Berlin time, a curfew ran from nine at night, and food, coal and clothing were rationed from September 1940; a million Parisians left for the provinces. Jews were made to wear the yellow star and barred from professions and public places. On 16–17 July 1942, on German orders, French police and gendarmes arrested 12,884 Jews, including more than four thousand children, and held them for five days at the Vélodrome d'Hiver before they were sent by train to the extermination camp at Auschwitz. None of the children came back. The city was liberated on 25 August 1944 by the French 2nd Armoured Division and the United States 4th Infantry Division, and Charles de Gaulle spoke from the Hôtel de Ville.

The Algerian war reached the capital: after the FLN killed eleven Paris policemen in August 1961 a curfew was imposed on Algerian Muslims, who were French citizens at the time, and an unauthorised but peaceful protest against it on 17 October 1961 ended in violence between police and demonstrators in which at least forty people were killed. Students occupied the Sorbonne in May 1968 and workers joined them in a two-week general strike. The city had no elected mayor between 1793 and 1977, when Jacques Chirac took the office. Its population fell from 2,850,000 in 1954 to 2,152,000 in 1990 as middle-class families moved to the suburbs, and in 2005 the housing estates of the banlieues, lived in largely by immigrants from France's former colonies in the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa, saw violent unrest. Seventeen people were killed in attacks in January 2015, including the shooting at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, and 130 more that November. The Metropolis of Grand Paris was created on 1 January 2016 with 6.7 million inhabitants; the city itself held about 2.04 million people in January 2026, below its 1921 peak of 2.9 million, in a metropolitan area of 13.2 million.