Under the name of Lutetia, it remained a Roman colony for the next three hundred years, prosperous commercially because of its commanding position on the Seine trade route, but insignificant politically. The Romans established their administrative centre on the Île de la Cité, and their town on the Left Bank on the slopes of the Montagne Ste-Geneviève. Though only two monuments from this period remain today - the baths by the Hôtel de Cluny and the amphitheatre in rue Monge - the Roman street plan , still evident in the north-south axis of rue St-Martin and rue St-Jacques, determined the future growth of the city.

Although Roman rule disintegrated under the impact of Germanic invasions around 275 AD, Paris held out until it fell to Clovis the Frank in 486, whose conversion to Christianity hastened the Christianization of the whole country. Under his successors, Paris saw the foundation of several rich and influential monasteries, especially on the Left Bank.

With the election of Hugues Capet , Comte de Paris, as king in 987, the fate of the city was inextricably identified with that of the monarchy . Recurrent political tension between the classes and the crown led to open rebellion , such as in 1356, when Étienne Marcel, a wealthy cloth merchant, demanded greater autonomy for the city. Further rebellions, fuelled by the hopeless poverty of the lower classes, led to the king and court abandoning the capital in 1418, not to return for more than a hundred years.

Growth of the city

As the city's livelihood depended from the first on its river-borne trade, commercial activity naturally centred on the place where the goods were landed. This was the place de Grève on the Right Bank , where the Hôtel de Ville now stands. Marshy ground originally, it was gradually drained to accommodate the business quarter. The Right Bank continues to be associated with commerce and banking today.

The Left Bank 's intellectual associations are similarly ancient, dating from the growth of schools and student accommodation round the two great monasteries of Ste-Geneviève and St-Germain-des-Prés. In 1215, a papal licence allowed the formation of what gradually became the renowned University of Paris , eventually to be known as the Sorbonne , after Robert de Sorbon, founder of a college for poor scholars.

To protect this burgeoning city, Philippe Auguste (king from 1180 to 1223) built the Louvre fortress and a defensive wall, which swung south to enclose the Montagne Ste-Geneviève and north and east to encompass the Marais. The administration of the city remained in the hands of the king until 1260, when St Louis ceded a measure of responsibility to the leaders of the Paris watermen's guild, whose power was based on their monopoly control of all river traffic

Civil wars and foreign occupation

From the mid-thirteenth to mid-fourteenth centuries, Paris shared the same unhappy fate as the rest of France, embroiled in the long and destructive Hundred Years War with the English. The country reached its lowest point when the English king, Henry VI, had himself crowned king of France in Notre-Dame in 1430.

It was only when the English were expelled - from Paris in 1437 and from France in 1453 - that the economy had a chance to recover from decades of devastation. It received a further boost when François I decided to re-establish the royal court in Paris in 1528. He began reconstruction work on the Louvre, and built the Tuileries palace for Cathérine de Médicis.

However, before these projects could be completed, war again intervened, this time civil war between Catholics and Protestants. It was sparked off by the massacre of some three thousand protestants on August 25, 1572, St Bartholomew's Day. The Protestants had gathered in Paris for the wedding of Henri III's daughter, Marguerite, to Henri, the Protestant king of Navarre. They were massacred at the instigation of the Catholic Guise family. When, through his marriage, Henri of Navarre became heir to the French throne in 1584, the Guises drove his father-in-law, Henri III, out of Paris. Forced into alliance, the two Henris laid siege to the city. Five years later, Henri III having been assassinated in the meantime, Henri of Navarre entered the city as king Henri IV . "Paris is worth a Mass", he is reputed to have said to justify renouncing his Protestantism in order to soothe Catholic susceptibilities.

The Paris he inherited was not a very salubrious place. No domestic building had been permitted beyond the limits of Philippe-Auguste's twelfth-century walls, and the population had doubled to around 400,000, causing an acute housing shortage and a terrible strain on the rudimentary water supply and drainage system. It is said that the first workmen who went to clean out the city's cesspools in 1633 fell dead from the fumes

Planning and expansion

The first systematic attempts at planning were introduced by Henri IV at the beginning of the seventeenth century: regulating street lines and uniformity of façade, and laying out the first geometric squares. The place des Vosges dates from this period, as does the Pont Neuf . Grandiose public buildings from this period perfectly symbolise the bureaucratic, centralized power of the newly self-confident state.

Louis XIV is responsible for the construction of the boulevards from the Madeleine to the Bastille, the places Vendôme and Victoire, the Porte St-Martin and St-Denis gateways, the Invalides, Observatoire and the Cour Carrée of the Louvre - not to mention the vast palace at Versailles , which Louis made the home of his court in 1671. The aristocratic hôtels or mansions of the Marais were also erected during this period, to be superseded early in the eighteenth century by the Faubourg St-Germain as the fashionable quarter of the rich and powerful.

The underside of all this bricks-and-mortar self-aggrandizement was the general neglect of the living conditions of the ordinary citizenry of Paris. The centre of the city remained a densely packed and insanitary warren of medieval lanes and tenements. And it was only in the years immediately preceding the 1789 Revolution that any attempt was made to clean it up. A further source of pestilential infection was removed with the emptying of theovercrowded 800-year-old cemeteries into the catacombs.

In 1786, Paris received its penultimate ring of fortifications, the so-called wall of the Fermiers Généraux, with 57 barrières or toll gates (one of which survives in the middle of place Stalingrad), where a tax was levied on all goods entering the city.

The 1789 Revolution

The immediate cause of the Revolution of 1789 was a campaign by the clergy and nobility to protect their status - especially their exemption from taxation - from erosion by the royal government. The revolutionary movement, however, was quickly taken over by the middle classes, essentially the provincial bourgeoisie, relatively well off but politically underprivileged. They comprised the majority of the representatives of the Third Estate , the "order" that encompassed the whole of French society after the clergy, who formed the First Estate, and the nobility who formed the Second. It was the middle classes who took the initiative in setting up the National Assembly on June 17, 1789. The majority would probably have been content with constitutional reforms that checked monarchical power, as on the English model. But their power depended largely on their ability to wield the threat of a Parisian popular uprising.

Although the effects of the Revolution were felt all over France, it was in Paris that the most profound changes took place. Being as it were on the spot, the people of Paris couldn't avoid being caught up in the Revolution. They formed the revolutionary shock troops, the driving force at the crucial stages of the Revolution. Parisians marched on Versailles and forced the king to return to Paris with them. They stormed and destroyed the Bastille prison on July 14, 1789. They occupied the Hôtel de Ville, set up an insurrectionary Commune and captured the Tuileries palace on August 10, 1792. They invaded the Convention in May 1793 and secured the arrest of the more conservative Girondin faction of deputies.

Where the bourgeois deputies of the Convention were concerned principally with political reform, the poorest people, the sans-culottes - literally, the people without breeches - expressed their demands in economic terms: price controls, regulation of the city's food supplies, and so on. In so doing they foreshadowed the rise of the working-class and socialist movements of the nineteenth century.

Napoleon - and the barricades

Napoleon's chief legacy to France was a very centralized, authoritarian and efficient bureaucracy that put Paris in firm control of the rest of the country. For the rest of the nineteenth century after his demise, France was left to fight out, literally in the streets, the contradictions and unfinished business left behind by the Revolution of 1789.

On the one hand, there was a tussle between the class that had risen to wealth and power as a direct result of the destruction of the monarchy and the old order, and the survivors of the old order, who sought to make a comeback in the 1820s under the restored monarchy of Louis XVIII and Charles X . This conflict was finally resolved in favour of the new bourgeoisie. When Charles X refused to accept the result of the 1830 National Assembly elections, Adolphe Thiers - who was to become the veteran conservative politician of the nineteenth century - led the opposition in revolt. Barricades were erected in Paris and there followed three days of bitter street fighting, known as les trois glorieuses , in which 1800 people were killed (they are commemorated by the column on place de la Bastille). The outcome was the election of Louis-Philippe as constitutional monarch, and the introduction of a few liberalizing reforms, most either cosmetic or serving merely to consolidate the power of the wealthiest stratum of the population. Radical republican and working-class interests remained completely unrepresented.

The other, and more important, major political conflict was the extended struggle between this enfranchized and privileged bourgeoisie and the heirs of the 1789 sans-culottes , whose political consciousness had been awakened by the Revolution but whose demands remained unsatisfied. These were the people who died on the barricades of July to hoist the bourgeoisie firmly into the saddle.

As their demands continued to go unheeded, so their radicalism increased, exacerbated by deteriorating living and working conditions in the large towns, especially Paris, as the Industrial Revolution got underway. There were, for example, twenty thousand deaths from cholera in Paris in 1832, and 65 percent of the population in 1848 were too poor to be liable for tax. Eruptions of discontent invariably occurred in the capital, with insurrections in 1832 and 1834. In the absence of organized parties, opposition centred on newspapers and clandestine or informal political clubs in the tradition of 1789.

In the 1840s, the publication of the first socialist works such as Louis Blanc's Organization of Labour and Proudhon's What is Property? gave an additional spur to the impatience of the opposition. When the lid blew off the pot in 1848 and the Second Republic was proclaimed in Paris, it looked for a time as if working-class demands might be at least partly met. The provisional government included Louis Blanc and a Parisian manual worker. But in the face of demands for the control of industry, the setting up of co-operatives and so on, backed by agitation in the streets, the more conservative Republicans lost their nerve. The nation returned a spanking reactionary majority in the April elections.

Revolution began to appear the only possible defence forthe radical left. On June 23, 1848, working-class Paris - Poissonnière, Temple, St-Antoine, the Marais, Quartier Latin, Montmartre - rose in revolt . Men, women and children fought side by side against fifty thousand troops. In three days of fighting, nine hundred soldiers were killed. No-one knows how many of the insurgés - the insurgents - died. Fifteen thousand people were arrested and four thousand sentenced to prison terms.

Despite the shock and devastation of civil war in the streets of the capital, the ruling classes failed to heed the warning in the events of June 1848. Far from redressing the injustices which had provoked them, they proceeded to exacerbate them. The Republic was brought to an end in a coup d'état by Louis Napoleon , who within twelve months had himself crowned Emperor Napoleon III.