General Information

Since its origins, the history of Paris has been a series of ups and downs: sieges, sacks, epidemics, plots, revolts, expansions... We will mention the most symbolic events that contributed to create the character and looks of the present city.

Lutetia Parisiorum was just a little Gallic port on the Seine River when Caesar conquered the region (Asterix and Obelix did not live here), a small village which was on one of the many transit routes across the River.

Paris had to wait until the Merovingians in the 6th century to become the capital of a kingdom, but no traces from that era has remained (there are, however, some Roman ruins), since Charlemagne moved the capital to Aquis Grana (now Aachen, in Germany) and the raids of the Norman tribes did the rest.

It was with the Capetian dynasty (987 - 1328) that Paris acquired a real political, commercial and cultural importance: the testimonies of this epoch are the Notre-Dame cathedral, the Sainte Chapelle, the first Louvre castle, the founding of the Sorbonne university...

The splendour of the city was later tarnished by the Hundred Years’ War (which actually lasted from 1337 to 1453) against England, which has however been a fundamental moment in the building of France’s national pride, by the religious civil wars, which with Saint Bartholomew’s Day culminated into one of the most tragic cases of religious fanaticisms in history, and by the plague, and the decadence of the city lasted for a couple of centuries.

Paris returned to be one of the foremost political and cultural centres of Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries, and particularly during the reign of Louis XIV, "the Sun King", whose magnificent palace in Versailles (where he had transferred all of his court in order to better control the nobles’ political manoeuvres) is the most famous symbol of the luxury and pomp of the European "Ancien Régime". Since Louis XIV, the capital of France became the centre of all economic and administrative activities of the country, and will be the place where most of the history of France will take place.

The revolutionary explosion which took France and the whole of Europe by surprise in 1789, with the Republic and Napoleon’s Empire, took place almost entirely in Paris: the National Assembly, the taking of the Bastille, the proclamation of the First Republic, the guillotined heads, Napoleon’s coup d’etat, everything took place in Paris or had Paris as its focal point.

The single period that had the most influence on how Paris looks nowadays is actually the Restoration period after the Revolution, and particularly after 1848, when the Emperor of France is Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon’s grandson): the Emperor ordered the prefect Haussmann to change the urban plan of the city, and this led to the destruction of entire districts and the creation of the monumental boulevards which now characterize the city.

Since then, after losing progressively its world leadership both in the economic and military sense, France and particularly Paris have always been one of the focal centres of Europe’s cultural activities, and the ideal meeting point for artists, musicians, writers from all over the world, which is still evident from the several arts museums in the city (the Orsay Museum, the Picasso Museum, the Pompidou Collection), the research institutes, universities, the huge number of students, the huge number of cinemas, concert halls, theatres...