Paris: History

History
People have lived continuously on this spot since roughly 250 BC, when a Celtic tribe called the Parisii settled the islands in the Seine that became the Île de la Cité — still the geographic and historic heart of the city today. The Romans expanded it, the Franks made it their capital, and by the medieval period Paris was already one of the largest cities in Europe, home to one of the world’s oldest universities.

The French Revolution of 1789 reshaped not just France but the political imagination of the entire modern world, and its key moments — the storming of the Bastille, the guillotine in the Place de la Révolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man — are still legible in the city’s actual geography. The Bastille is a square named for the prison destroyed there. The Place de la Concorde is the former Place de la Révolution, renamed but never forgotten.

Baron Haussmann’s massive 1850s-60s renovation under Napoleon III tore down much of medieval Paris and rebuilt it with the wide boulevards, uniform building heights and grand public spaces that still define the city’s look today — controversial at the time, hugely influential on urban planning ever since.

Paris made it through both World Wars with its built fabric largely intact, especially the second — the German military governor of Paris famously received Hitler’s order to destroy the city before retreat in 1944 and simply ignored it, leaving the medieval and Haussmann-era city standing for everyone who’s walked it since.