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Rental furnished apartments Paris, Nice and Montpellier
The choice of furnished apartment to rent and more ...
Rental furnished apartments Paris, Nice and Montpellier
The choice of furnished apartment to rent and more ...
The city’s motto, ‘Fluctuat nec mergitur’, means ‘it is tossed on rough seas but does not sink’, and its coat of arms features a boat, symbolising the power of the river workers’ guild which ran Paris in the Middle Ages.
Since then, the city authorities may have tweaked the logo a few times, but the city has always been symbolised by a boat.
Paris owes its origins to a settlement of Celtic fishermen. The Parisii tribe took over the Ile de la Cité in the third century BC, fortified it and named it Lutetia. In 52 BC, Lutetia was captured by one of Caesar’s lieutenants, and the Romans called the settlement Civitas Parisorum, the town of the Parisii. The fortifications were expanded and the settlement grew on the left bank of the Seine, where the thermal baths at what would later become Cluny and the arènes de Lutèce were built.
In 486 AD, Clovis made a peaceful march on Paris and made the city the capital for all the Frankish people. Subsequently, however, the Merovingian kings neglected the city, and its status fell even more under the Carolingians after Charlemagne made Aix-la-Chapelle his capital. Little by little, the left bank was abandoned, leaving only a few religious institutions like the powerful abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In the ninth century, the Normans ravaged the region around Paris several times, and the city suffered a long Viking siege in 885.
By 861, Paris was Capetian property, and Hugh Capet was crowned in 987. At the time, the city was the capital of a small kingdom which the Capetians gradually expanded by increasing their power over nearby rivals. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Paris enjoyed a commercial renaissance, and began to grow again on both sides of the river, but especially the right bank.
At the end of the twelfth century, Philippe Auguste installed fountains, paved the city’s most important streets and opened a market at les Halles, still one of the busiest commercial areas of central Paris.
To protect the city, he built a thick defensive wall around it from 1180 to 1213, reinforced by a fortress at the Louvre (1204). Paris would remain a fortified city for more than seven centuries, right up to 1919, which is why it has a circular shape: over time, boulevards have gradually replaced the fortifications in concentric circles. That also explains why the city centre is so dense and why there is relatively little green space compared to other large cities.
-au-moyen-age.jpg "Paris (Marais) au Moyen-Age")
Because the Seine was Paris’ lifeline, the river workers’ guild was incredibly powerful, and was awarded an exclusive monopoly on all river traffic on the Seine between the towns Mantes and Corbeil in 1170. From the fourteenth century onwards, the guild’s council, led by the Provost of Merchants, met in a building known as the Maison aux Piliers, which would later become the Hôtel de Ville. The king’s own Provost controlled the city from the nearby Châtlet fortress, and there were frequent tensions between the two centres of power.
During this period, Paris was gradually divided into three main areas, a distinction that is visible to this day. On the right bank, commercial activity dominated the neighbourhood around the Halles, while the Cité island was the centre of political and religious power and still features the Palais de Justice and Hotel-Dieu hospital. The right bank and its universities became the centre of intellectual life.
The Ile de la Cité was later expanded with the arrival of Notre-Dame cathedral (construction began in 1164) and Saint Louis’ Sainte-Chapelle (1246). Phillipe le Bel renovated the Palais Royal from 1285-1314.
The left bank’s intellectual reputation dates back to a conflict in the twelfth century. Some monks, frustrated by the constraints imposed by the religious authorities at Notre-Dame, left, and began teaching on the montagne Saint-Geneviève opposite. From 1250, sixty or so colleges brought together 700 students, offering them accommodation and teaching. The most well-known was founded in 1257 by Robert de Sorbon, and was rebuilt in the nineteenth century as the Sorbonne. At the time, the university of Paris was one of the biggest centres for theological teaching and learning in medieval Christendom. In the thirteenth century, Paris’ population grew to 80 000, making it the largest Christian town in Europe.
Unfortunately, the fourteenth century saw several setbacks, and Parisians had to deal with a famine in 1315-7 and then with a plague in 1348-4, while the Hundred Years’ War between France and England turned the capital into the scene of much conflict. In 1356, Etienne Marcel, the Provost of Merchants, seized control of the town town from the French Dauphin. King Charles V (1364-1380) created a larger, expanded series of fortifications to protect new outlying areas from English attacks, with fortresses at Bastille and improvements to the Louvre.
But Paris’ troubles were set to continue. In 1420, the English occupiers received a not altogether hostile welcome, and despite Joan of Arc’s attempted siege in 1429, the city was only recaptured in 1436. The rest of the country remained dubious, and Paris only regained its status as capital under François I a century later.
Peace and prosperity finally returned in the second half of the fifteenth century, with Paris becoming the capital of a newly united kingdom. The hotel de Sens and the hotel de Cluny were the final examples of gothic architecture.
The start of the sixteenth century saw new growth for Paris when François I decided to live permanently in the capital from 1530 onwards; previously, the court had been itinerant, moving around France according to the seasons. He demolished the old Louvre to have a new Renaissance palace built, and started work on the Saint-Eustache church and a new Hôtel de Ville. Paris warmly welcomed Renaissance thinking, and was once again a centre of culture and learning thanks to the growth of printing and the works of several poets and thinkers, the most brilliant of whom began teaching at the new Collège de France.
Paris was also a resolutely Catholic town, and remained hostile to the Reformation. Religious divisions split the town from 1534: the town’s inhabitants participated in a massacre of the Huguenots on Saint Bartholomew’s Day in 1572, took up sides with the Catholic League and took part in the driving out of Henri III after the murder of its leader, the duc de Guise, in 1588. The king’s successor, Henri IV, could only enter Paris after swearing his Catholic faith.
The Bourbon kings emphasises the centralising role of an absolute monarchy, and worked hard to improve Paris. When he came to the throne at the start of the seventeenth century, Henri IV continued work on the Louvre and the Tuileries started by Catherine de Medici, which propelled further growth in wealthy neighbourhoods west of the city centre. He finished the Hôtel de Ville and the Pont-Neuf, and created a new type of urban architecture with symmetrical squares at the place Royale (now the place des Vosges) and the place Dauphine.
The city’s role as a cultural hub grew further still under Louis XIII, with the opening of the royal printer’s in 1620, as well as the Jardin des Plantes and the Académie française. Louis XIII created new fortifications on the right bank, in the area now known as grands boulevards, giving more room for expansion. New neighbourhoods replaced rural landscapes around the faubourg Saint-Honoré, the Ile Saint-Louis, the Marais and the faubourg Saint-Germain. Richelieu had the Palais-Cardinal, now the Palais-Royal built, and Marie de Medici moved into the palais du Luxembourg.
While Louis XIV was still a child, Paris was shaken by the fronde uprising, but ordinary Parisians soon left noblemen to fight it out.
Louis, known by many as the Sun-King, would never forget the harrowing childhood experience of having to flee the capital. He left Paris for good and moved first to Saint-Germin, and then Versailles in 1680. Now with almost half a million residents, Paris remained the centre of intellectual life and improvements continued. Colbert supervised most of the work, using architects such like François Mansart and Claude Perrault.
The end of the seventeenth century saw the high point of classical architecture with the building of the galleries around the Louvre, before a transition to Italian Baroque. Buildings in this style include the Invalides, the Observatory, the Salpêtrière hospital, the Collège des Quatre-Nation, the Porte Saint-Denis and Porte Saint-Matin, the two royal places, Louis-le-Grand (now Vendôme) and Victoires, the Tuileires gardens and the Gobelins. This opulent new architecture contrasted sharply with a dirty, over-populated city.
Versailles remained the seat of the government until the fall of the ancien régime, and its distance from Paris contributed to mutual distrust between the monarchy and the people.
In the eighteenth century, Paris was home to many enlightenment thinkers, with literary salons and the first coffee houses, including the Procope the scene of discussions on equality, freedom and the limits of national power. New building in the period included the École militaire, the Odéon, what would become the Pantheon and the Saint-Sulpice church.
The Louis XVI bridge, later the pont de la Concorde lead to the place XV, the first open royal square which would later become place de la Concorde. In 1785, the fermiers généraux, Paris’ tax collectors, commissioned the architect Ledoux to built new toll barriers around the edge of the city to collect tax on goods coming into the city; examples remain at Stalingrad and the place de la Nation.
Deeply unpopular with citizens, these new barriers no longer had a military role, but still defined the edges of the city until 1860.
The gardens of the Palais-Royal were landscaped and opened to the public and became a hotbed of discussion and dissent, particularly on July 12 1789.
In a single stroke, the Revolution ensured Paris replaced Versailles as capital of France.
The city was the scene of many key events during the Revolution, and the victory of the Jacobins over the Girondins only sped up centralisation. Importantly, the tricolour flag that now represents modern France is made up of the colours of the city of Paris, red and blue, with a stripe of royal white down the middle.
“But because Paris claimed to be a substitute for the whole country, representing an entire nation, Parisians could no longer expect to enjoy the same freedom as residents of other towns. Their fortune was tied to that of the central power, for better or for worse.”
Napoleon understood this when he gave Paris a special status, with neither a mayor nor a local council, “under the control of the Seine prefect and a prefect of police under the direct control of the national government.” (Michel Mourre)
Centralisation continued during the nineteenth century, and picked up speed during the industrial revolution with a large population shift away from rural areas and the expanding road and railway networks.
Napoleon never managed to finish all of the projects he had envisioned for the capital, but he started work on the Arc de Triomphe, the Stock Exchange, the column on place Vendôme and the Ourcq, Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis canals. He destroyed the squalid housing that had grown up on the bridges and banks of the Seine to restore a view of the river.
Following Napoleon’s military efforts, the city was occupied for the first time in four centuries in 1814 and 1815, which is why the Parisians were only too happy to see the Bourbons return a few years later.
The city subsequently enjoyed a period of rapid growth, reaching 600 000 residents in 1800 and then a million in 1846, entirely composed of newcomers from the French countryside; almost all of the growth in the French population in the nineteenth century was absorbed by the capital.
However, the town’s infrastructure still dated from the Middle Ages, and Paris was quickly becoming dirty and overcrowded. The western end of the city was filled with quiet, residential streets, but the population in the east was under-fed and vulnerable to epidemics like the cholera that broke out in 1832.
The social divisions did not lead to political tensions, and the revolutions in 1830 and February 1848 saw alliances of workers and Parisian bourgeois rising up against the monarchy; it was only the socialist insurrection of 1848 and the repression that followed that divided the city along political lines.
It was under the Second Empire that Paris was truly transformed and took on its current face. Inspired by the modernity he had witnessed in London, and keen to both improve standards of living and reduce the chances of future instability, Napoleon III asked Georges Haussmann to redesign the city from 1853 to 1869.
Haussmann was charged with making Paris into a truly modern capital city, with modern sewers, spacious parks and room for new transportation methods. He destroyed the oldest medieval parts of the heart of the city to create wide north-south and east-west axes. His new tree-lined avenues filled with stone-faced buildings were designed to easily link the most important areas of the city. He also commissioned a circular railway around the outside of the city, which is no longer used.
Two engineers, Alphand and Belgrand, created a new network of pipes to bring fresh drinking water from further up the Seine into Paris, as well as a sewage network and a network of over 2000 hectares of parks and gardens. Their green spaces range from the two huge forests at either side of the capital, the bois de Boulogne and the bois de Vincennes through medium-sized parks like the Buttes Chaumont and Montsouris down to countless small squares and gardens dotted around different neighbourhoods. Haussmann also added new facilities, including new theatres at the place de Chatelet, the opera Garnier, two hospitals and several municipal buildings.
Napeoleon III asked Baltard to redesign the city’s central marketplace, the Halles. Although Napoleon III financed several social housing projects, Haussmann largely ignored housing for the workers.
In 1845, Paris was rubbing up against the fortifications built by Thiers in 1845. By including towns like Auteui, la Villette and Charonne, Haussmann expanded the city to include its current selection of twenty arrondissements, and cleverly managed to divide up sensitive areas like Belleville at the time.
These largely rural towns were rapidly developed and soon became home to workers fleeing rent increases in the city centre.
The Empire finally met a sticky end in 1870 at the end of the Franco-Prussian way, with Napoleon’s arrest and the proclamation of a new Republic, with its capital in Paris, on September 4 1870. Exhausted by the siege, and horrified by the sight of invading troops marching down the Champs-Elysées, a popular uprising led by the workers led to the Commune that existed from March to May 1871.
Furious that the new government had started work in Versailles, members of the Commune set fire to several important Parisian landmarks including the Hôtel de Ville and the chateau des Tuileries.
The last part of the nineteenth century saw a return of calm and the creation of a modern, efficient third Republic.
Starting in 1878, a series of Universal Exhibitions celebrated scientific and technological progress. The event held in 1898 led to the construction of the Eiffel Tower, the high point of iron engineering, while the Exhibition of 1900 left behind the Grand and Petit Palais as well as the first metro line to be decorated by Guimard.
The Sacré-Coeur was finished in 1910, by which time Paris was once again at the heart of a cultural and artistic movement, with impressionist painters flocking to Montmartre. Fascinated by the Far East, several private collectors begin acquiring Asian art that now form the basis of museums like the Guimet, Cernuschi and Ennery. Paris reached its all-time peak population in 1911, with 2.9 residents.
During the First World War, Paris escaped German occupation by the victory at the Battle of the Marne, in which Parisian taxi drivers ferried reinforcements to the front.
After the war, the city finally demolished the fortifications built by Thiers in 1919, although they had fallen into disrepair as early as 1870. The large no man’s land left behind was filled in with what are now know as the boulevards des Maréchaux, a large series of brick-built social housing projects and a narrow green belt of sports fields. The périphérique ring road was only started in the 1960s. The final step in creating the Paris of today was the inclusion of the bois de Boulogne and the bois de Vincennes within the city limits.
During the inter-war period, the city was in the literary and artistic limelight, with artists and writers from all over Europe flocking to Montmartre and Montparnasse.
Architecturally, the period was one of transition: while the government stuck to the large, austere style popular at the time (palais de Chaillot, palais de Tokyo), wealthier inhabitants enjoyed apartments designed as artists’ studios (Bruno Elkouken, Henri Sauvage) while others were attempting modern avant-garde statements (Auguste Perret, Le Corbusier, Mallet Stevents).
The Wehrmacht occupied Paris in June 1940, and despite food shortages, deportations and arbitrary executions, the city’s cultural and literary life carried on. On August 25 1945, von Choltitz signed the German surrender at Montparnasse station.
Since 1945, Paris’ architecture has followed the same pattern as other French cities: the huge, uniform slabs of the 50s and 60s gradually gave way to modern, more sophisticated buildings in the 1970s, like the UNESCO headquarters or the Maison de la Radio.
During the 1980s, Haussmann’s sense of proportion was back in fashion, and a first step to a new way of imagining a street and mixing up shapes was seen in the Hautes Formes complex in the thirteenth arrondissement. The new post-modernism remained faithful to the pure cubic spaces of earlier modern architecture.
At the same time, several older neighbourhoods were ‘renovated’. After a series of demolitions and reconstructions on the banks of the Seine, in the Maine-Montparnasse area and at the Halles, the authorities began to realise the value of older buildings and began work to preserve them. Culture Secretary André Malraux first protected the Marais in 1962.
Today, the city aims to protect not just museum-piece neighbourhoods, but also more prosaic examples of architecture in lively, busy areas of the city like the neighbourhood around Montorgueil or the faubourg Saint-Antoine.
Paris finally gained the same status as other cities in 1977 and Jacques Chirac was the first person elected to be Mayor since the Revolution. In 1982, the city’s legal position changed once again, with each of the twenty arrondissements run by 350 arrondissement councillors who choose a mayor for each district, as well as 613 local councillors who elect the Mayor himself.
Like the absolute monarchs that went before them, the Presidents of the French Fifth Republic have all left their mark on Paris. De Gaulle’s ambitions for the region lead to the creation of the city’s main airport, while Georges Pompidou was beyond the cultural centre that now bears his name, even if he didn’t finally approve of the architecture. The demolition of the Halles market designed by Baltard and the public anger that followed led to a growing interest in the city’s nineteenth century heritage, and President Valéry Giscard d’Éstaing protected the former Orsay station by converting it into the Musée d’Orsay, and had the slaughterhouses at la Villette transformed into a science museum.
The last fifteen years have been marked by the grands projets undertaken by President François Mitterrand, who installed a series of large, imposing buildings, often inspired by clean, geometric shapes. Examples include the Grande Arche de la Défense, the pyramid at the Louvre, the opera Bastille, the new national library and the finance ministry at Bercy.
All of these historic sites make Paris a destination of choice for over 20 million visitors a year—while at the same time, the permanent population is falling steadily and recently fell below the 2 million mark. The city is now a wonderful living museum, a great place for culture and partying and a lively, cosmopolitan centre for business.
