All About The City Of Paris

 Paris

national capital, France

Paris, city and capital of France, situated in the north-central part of the country. People were living on the site of the present-day city, located along the Seine River some 233 miles (375 km) upstream from the river’s mouth on the English Channel (La Manche), by about 7600 BCE. The modern city has spread from the island (the Île de la Cité) and far beyond both banks of the Seine.Paris occupies a central position in the rich agricultural region known as the Paris Basin, and it constitutes one of eight départements of the Île-de-France administrative region. It is by far the country’s most important centre of commerce and culture. Area city, 41 square miles (105 square km); metropolitan area, 890 square miles (2,300 square km). Pop. (2012) city, 2,265,886; (2015 est.) urban agglomeration, 10,858,000.

Character Of The City

For centuries Paris has been one of the world’s most important and attractive cities. It is appreciated for the opportunities it offers for business and commerce, for study, for culture, and for entertainment; its gastronomy, haute couture, painting, literature, and intellectual community especially enjoy an enviable reputation. Its sobriquet “the City of Light” (“la Ville Lumière”), earned during the Enlightenment, remains appropriate, for Paris has retained its importance as a centre for education and intellectual pursuits.Paris’s site at a crossroads of both water and land routes significant not only to France but also to Europe has had a continuing influence on its growth. Under Roman administration, in the 1st century BCE, the original site on the Île de la Cité was designated the capital of the Parisii tribe and territory. The Frankish king Clovis I had taken Paris from the Gauls by 494 CE and later made his capital there. Under Hugh Capet (ruled 987–996) and the Capetian dynasty the preeminence of Paris was firmly established, and Paris became the political and cultural hub as modern France took shape. France has long been a highly centralized country, and Paris has come to be identified with a powerful central state, drawing to itself much of the talent and vitality of the provinces.The three main parts of historical Paris are defined by the Seine. At its centre is the Île de la Cité, which is the seat of religious and temporal authority (the word cité connotes the nucleus of the ancient city). The Seine’s Left Bank (Rive Gauche) has traditionally been the seat of intellectual life, and its Right Bank (Rive Droite) contains the heart of the city’s economic life, but the distinctions have become blurred in recent decades. The fusion of all these functions at the centre of France and, later, at the centre of an empire, resulted in a tremendously vital environment. In this environment, however, the emotional and intellectual climate that was created by contending powers often set the stage for great violence in both the social and political arenas—the years 1358, 1382, 1588, 1648, 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871 being notable for such events.

In its centuries of growth Paris has for the most part retained the circular shape of the early city. Its boundaries have spread outward to engulf the surrounding towns (bourgs), usually built around monasteries or churches and often the site of a market. From the mid-14th to the mid-16th century, the city’s growth was mainly eastward; since then it has been westward. It comprises 20 arrondissements (municipal districts), each of which has its own mayor, town hall, and particular features. The numbering begins in the heart of Paris and continues in the spiraling shape of a snail shell, ending to the far east. Parisians refer to the arrondissements by number as the first (premier), second (deuxième), third (troisième), and so on. Adaptation to the problems of urbanization—such as immigration, housing, social infrastructure, public utilities, suburban development, and zoning—has produced the vast urban agglomeration.

Landscape

City site

Paris is positioned at the centre of the Île-de-France region, which is crossed by the Seine, Oise, and Marne rivers. The city is ringed with great forests of beech and oak; they are called the “lungs of Paris,” for they help to purify the air in the heavily industrialized region. The city proper is small; no corner is farther than about 6 miles (10 km) from the square in front of Notre-Dame Cathedral. It occupies a depression hollowed out by the Seine, and the surrounding heights have been respected as the limits of the city. Elevation varies from 430 feet (130 metres) at the butte of Montmartre, in the north, to 85 feet (26 metres) in the Grenelle area, in the southwest.

The Seine flows for about 8 miles (13 km) through the centre of the city and 10 of the 20 arrondissements. It enters the city at the southeast corner, flows northwestward, and turns gradually southwestward, eventually leaving Paris at the southwest corner. As a result, what starts out as the stream’s east bank becomes its north bank and ends as the west bank, and the Parisians therefore adopted the simple, unchanging designation of Right Bank and Left Bank (when facing downstream). Specific places, however, are usually indicated by arrondissement or by quarter (quartier).

At water level, some 30 feet (9 metres) below street level, the river is bordered—at least on those portions not transformed into expressways—by cobbled quays graced with trees and shrubs. From street level another line of trees leans toward the water. Between the two levels, the retaining walls, usually made of massive stone blocks, are decorated with the great iron rings once used to moor merchant vessels, and some are pierced by openings left by water gates for old palaces or inspection ports for subways, sewers, and underpasses. At intermittent points the walls are shawled in ivy.

The garden effect of the Seine’s open waters and its tree-lined banks foster in part the appearance of Paris as a city well-endowed with green spaces. Tens of thousands of trees (mostly plane trees, with a scattering of chestnuts) line the streets as well, and numerous public parks, gardens, and squares dot the city. Most of the parks and gardens of the modern central city are on land that formerly was reserved for the kings on the old city’s outskirts. Under Napoleon III, who had been impressed by London’s parks while living in Britain, two ancient royal military preserves at the approaches to Paris were made into “English” parks—the Bois de Boulogne to the west and the Bois de Vincennes to the east. Moreover, during his reign a large area of land was laid out in promenades and garden squares. Under Mayor Jacques Chirac in the late 20th century, the municipal government initiated efforts to create new parks, and such projects continued into the 21st century.

The Promenade Plantée is a partially elevated parkway built along an abandoned rail line and viaduct in the 12th arrondissement (municipal district) of Paris, on the right bank of the Seine River. It was the world’s first elevated park (first phase completed in 1994) and the first “green space” constructed on a viaduct; it has since inspired other cities to turn abandoned rail lines into public parkland. The entire feature runs some 4.5 km (about 3 miles) from the Opéra Bastille to the Bois de Vincennes. Located underneath the elevated portion is the Viaduc des Arts, which stretches along the Avenue Daumesnil. Its former archways house specialized commercial establishments.

Climate

In its location on the western side of Europe and in a plain relatively close to the sea, Paris benefits from the balmy influences of the Gulf Stream and has a fairly temperate climate. The weather can be very changeable, however, especially in winter and spring, when the wind can be sharp and cold. The annual average temperature is in the lower 50s F (roughly 12 °C); the July average is in the upper 60s F (about 19 °C), and the January average is in the upper 30s F (about 3 °C). The temperature drops below freezing for about a month each year, and snow falls on approximately half of those days. The city has taken measures to decrease air pollution, and a system of water purification has made tap water safe for drinking.

City layout

Over the centuries, as Paris expanded outward from the Île de la Cité, various walls were built to enclose parts of the city. After the Roman town on the Left Bank was sacked by barbarians in the 3rd century CE, the fire-blackened stones were freighted across to the Île de la Cité, where a defensive wall was constructed. Neglected in times of peace, it was rebuilt several times over the course of the centuries. The earliest of the bridges to the Left Bank, the Petit Pont (Little Bridge), which has been rebuilt several times, was guarded by a fortified gate, the Petit Châtelet (châtelet meaning a small castle or fortress). The bridge to the Right Bank, the Pont au Change (Exchange Bridge), was guarded by the Grand Châtelet, which served as a fort, prison, torture chamber, and morgue until it was demolished in 1801.

From 1180 to 1225 King Philip II built a new wall that protected the settlements on both banks. In 1367–70 the Right Bank enclosure was enlarged by Charles V, with the massive Bastille fortress protecting the eastern approaches as the Louvre fortress protected the west. In 1670 Louis XIV had the Charles V walls replaced by the tree-planted Grands Boulevards, embellished at the Saint-Denis Gate (Porte Saint-Denis) and the Saint-Antoine Gate (Porte Saint-Antoine) with triumphal arches; the Saint-Denis arch still stands. (The word boulevard, related to “bulwark,” originally was a military engineering term for the platform of a defensive wall.) Imitating the arch of the river, the Grands Boulevards still stretch from the present-day Place de la Madeleine north and east to the present-day Place de la République.

In the second half of the 18th century, a new wall was begun. The wall was built with 57 tollhouses to enable the farmers-general, a company of tax “farmers,” or collectors, to collect customs duties on goods entering Paris. The tollhouses are still standing at Place Denfert-Rochereau.

The last wall, built in the mid-19th century by Adolphe Thiers for King Louis-Philippe, was a genuine military installation with outlying forts. By the time it was finished, it enclosed a number of hamlets outside Paris, among them Auteuil, Passy, Montmartre, La Villette, and Belleville.

The rebuilding and economic recovery that occurred after the collapse of Napoleon III’s Second Empire in 1870, along with the expansion of employment provoked by the Industrial Revolution, drew more and more people to Paris—with ever-increasing facility as railways developed. Between 1852 and 1870 the city planner Baron Haussmann razed the walls of the farmers-general and built a number of wide, straight boulevards that cut through the city’s mass of narrow streets. The 19th-century walls were eventually knocked down, and the boulevards were extended in 1925.

Today Paris’s many boulevards, old buildings, monuments, gardens, plazas, and bridges compose one of the world’s grandest cityscapes. Much of central Paris was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1991.

Around the Eiffel Tower

Back within the city limits, south of Place Charles de Gaulle, is the Chaillot Palace (Palais de Chaillot). Standing on a rise on the Right Bank of the Seine, where the river begins its southwestward curve, the palace is an impressive spot from which to view what is arguably the most recognized symbol of Paris, the Eiffel Tower. The palace, which dates from the International Exposition of 1937, replaced the Trocadéro Palace, a structure left over from the 1878 International Exposition. It is made up of two separate pavilions, from each of which extends a curved wing. Several museums, including the Museum of Mankind, the Naval Museum, the Museum of French Monuments, and the Cinema Museum, are located there. Under the terrace that separates the two sections are the National Theatre of Chaillot and a small hall that serves as a motion-picture house of the national film library.

The terrace, which is lined by statues, gives a splendid view across Paris. The slope descending to the river has been made into a terraced park, the centre of which is alive with fountains, cascades, and pools. The Trocadéro Aquarium (Cinéaqua) is a few steps away in the park. From the bottom of the slope the five-arched Jena Bridge (Pont d’Iéna) leads across the river. It was built for Napoleon I in 1813 to commemorate his victory at the Battle of Jena in 1806.

On the Left Bank rises the Eiffel Tower itself, an unclad metal truss tower designed by Gustave Eiffel. The tower was built for the International Exposition of 1889, against the strident opposition of national figures who thought it unsafe or ugly or both. When the exposition concession expired in 1909, the 984-foot (300-metre) tower was to have been demolished, but its value as an antenna for radio transmission saved it. Additions made for television transmission added about 79 feet (24 metres) to the height. From the topmost of the three platforms, the view extends for more than 40 miles (64 km).

From the 2-acre (0.8-hectare) base of the tower, the Champ-de-Mars (Field of Mars), an immense field, stretches to the Military Academy (École Militaire), which was built from 1769 to 1772 and later became the site of the War College (École Supérieure de Guerre). The Champ-de-Mars, which originally served as the school’s parade ground, was the scene of two vast rallies during the French Revolution: the Festival of the Federation (1790) and the Festival of the Supreme Being (1794). From 1798 there were annual national expositions of crafts and manufactures, which were followed by world’s fairs between 1855 and 1900.

Behind the Military Academy stands the headquarters of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). The building, erected in 1958, was designed by an international trio of architects and decorated by artists of member nations.

The ministry quarter

Running along the river from the Eiffel Tower to the Carrousel Bridge is an area of the Left Bank known as the ministry quarter. Most of the national ministries are located there, along with the headquarters of the Île-de-France region and the National Assembly (Assemblée Nationale). The arrondissement is the old Faubourg Saint-Germain, an impeccable address since the early 18th century. As such, it was subject to heavy expropriation during the French Revolution, and ministries are lodged mostly in splendid old mansions and convents. Although imposing, these have been difficult to adapt to the needs of modern administration. When it has proved impractical to spread into adjacent buildings or to construct annexes in the garden, branches have been installed wherever space can be found. Some of the ministries occupy as many as 25 separate buildings.

Probably the best known of all ministries is the low-built, ornate Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ministère des Affaires Étrangères), on the Quai d’Orsay between the Invalides Esplanade and the National Assembly. The address “Quai d’Orsay” has become a synonym for the ministry.

The National Assembly is housed in the Bourbon Palace (1722–28), which was seized during the Revolution. Succeeding regimes added bits and pieces onto the old palace, including the Greek peristyle facing the river as ordered in 1807 by Napoleon I.

The old, disused Orsay railway station near the river was renovated and in 1986 was reopened as the Orsay Museum (Musée d’Orsay) of 19th-century art and civilization. It contains, among other collections, the Impressionist and Postimpressionist paintings—by Paul Cézanne, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Vincent van Gogh, and others—that were formerly in the Jeu de Paume.

The Institute of France

East of the Orsay Museum, at the point where the Arts Bridge (Pont des Arts) meets the Left Bank, stands the Institute of France (Institut de France), which since 1806 has housed the five French academies. The site was originally occupied by the Nesle Tower (Tour de Nesle), a defense work for the Left Bank terminus of the city wall of 1220. Louis Le Vau designed the additional buildings in 1663 to house the College of the Four Nations (Collège des Quatre-Nations), paid for by a legacy from Louis XIV’s minister Cardinal Mazarin, who had brought the four entities in question—Pignerol (Pinerolo, in the Italian Piedmont), Alsace, Artois, and northern Catalonia (the Cerdagne [Cerdaña] and Roussillon regions)—under the French crown. Le Vau based his designs on Italian models. The five contemporary academies are the French Academy, founded by Cardinal de Richelieu in 1635, which edits the official French dictionary, awards literary prizes, and has a membership of “40 Immortals”; the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres, founded in 1663 by Louis XIV’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert; the Academy of Sciences, founded in 1666, also by Colbert; the Academy of Fine Arts, two sections formed at different times by Mazarin and Colbert and joined in 1795; and the Academy of Ethics and Political Science, created by the National Convention (a governing body during the French Revolution) in 1795 to ponder questions of philosophy, economics, politics, law, and history.

Almost next door is the Mint (Hôtel des Monnaies). In this sober late 18th-century building, visitors may tour a museum of coins and medals.

The Arts Bridge leads from the Institute of France across the Seine to the Louvre. One of the most charming of all the Parisian bridges, it was the first (1803) to be made of iron, and it has always been reserved for pedestrians; it provides an intimate view of riverside Paris and of the Seine itself.

Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Latin Quarter

South of the city centre are the quintessential Left Bank neighbourhoods known as Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Latin Quarter (Quartier Latin). The boulevard Saint-Germain itself begins at the National Assembly building, curving eastward to join the river again at the Sully Bridge. A little less than halfway along the boulevard is the pre-Gothic church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The old church, which belonged to a Benedictine abbey founded in the 8th century, was sacked four times by Vikings and was rebuilt between 990 and 1201. Parts of the present church date from that time.

This portion of the Left Bank has long been a gathering place for practitioners of the arts. The dramatist Jean Racine died there in 1699; the painter Eugène Delacroix had his studio in the Place Fürstemberg; publishing houses moved in during the 19th century; and the principal cafés have been meeting places for artists, writers, and publishers ever since. From 1945 to about 1955 it was the hub of the Existentialist movement and an associated revival of bohemianism. It is still a lively centre for literature, food, and conversation.

Straight north from the crossroads at the Saint-Germain-des-Prés church is the National School of Fine Arts (École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts), the state school of painting and sculpture, on the Quai Malaquais. Two streets south of the crossroads is the church of Saint-Sulpice (1646–1780), the work of six successive architects. The street alongside the church is sprinkled with shops specializing in devotional statuary, much of it on the aesthetic level of tourist souvenirs and known in France as “Saint Sulpicerie.” Eastward to the boulevard Saint-Michel, the area toward the river from the boulevard Saint-Germain is a tangle of narrow, animated streets, which typify the tourist’s idea of a vivacious and noisy Paris.

East of the boulevard Saint-Michel is the university precinct, self-governing under the kings, where, in class and out, students and teachers spoke Latin until 1789 (hence the name Quartier Latin). At the junction of the boulevards Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel are the remains of one of the three baths of the Roman city. These are in the grounds of the National Museum of the Middle Ages (Musée National du Moyen Âge), housed in the Hôtel de Cluny, a Gothic mansion (1485–1500) that holds a collection of medieval works of art, including the renowned six-panel tapestry La Dame à la licorne (“The Lady and the Unicorn”).

The wide straight boulevard Saint-Michel is the main street of the student quarter. It is lined with bookshops, cafés, cafeterias, and movie houses. The buildings of the university are found on smaller streets. The university was built up of colleges, each founded and supported by a donor, often a prelate or a religious order. In about 1257 Robert de Sorbon, chaplain to Louis IX, established a college, known as the Sorbonne, that eventually became the centre of theological study in France. The oldest part of the Sorbonne is the chapel (1635–42), the gift of Cardinal de Richelieu, who is buried there. It was designed by Jacques Lemercier and was one of a number of new domed Jesuit-style churches of the period.

The Sorbonne served for centuries as the administrative seat of the University of Paris. Following mass student protests in 1968, the university was divided into a number of entirely separate universities, and the Sorbonne building proper continues to serve as the premises for some of these. Other faculties, schools, and institutes have moved to more-spacious sites in the city and suburbs in an effort to ease the overcrowding of the Paris student milieu.

The independent College of France (Collège de France) was set up a few steps from the university by King Francis I in 1529 to offer a more liberal, modern curriculum than the narrow theology and Latin of the Sorbonne. Bestowing no degrees, it always has had a superb faculty of well-known specialists, especially in philosophy, literature, and the sciences.

At the top of the hill rising from the river, the boulevard Saint-Michel skirts the Luxembourg Gardens, the remains of the park of Marie de Médicis’ Luxembourg Palace (1616–21), which now houses the French Senate. The gardens are planted with chestnuts and are enhanced with a pond for toy sailboats, a marionette theatre, and statuary.

East of the gardens at the end of the rue Soufflot stands the 18th-century Panthéon building, designed by Jacques-Germain Soufflot. It was commissioned by King Louis XV, after his recovery from an illness, as a votive offering to St. Geneviève and was to replace the mouldering 5th-century abbey in her name. Though intended as the principal church in Paris, it was renamed the Panthéon by the Revolutionary authorities, who made it the last resting place for heroes of the French Revolution. The walling up of a number of its windows and the removal of much interior decoration replaced the intended effect of a light interior space with a gloomy dignity. Among those buried under the inscription “Aux grands hommes, la Patrie reconnaissante” (“To great men, [from] their grateful homeland”) are the authors Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Victor Hugo, and Émile Zola, as well as Jean Moulin, chief of the Resistance in World War II.

Northwest of the Panthéon is a steep street named the rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. It was the paved road to Italy in Roman times. The hill leads down to the lively market square of Place Maubert and a tangle of ancient, picturesque riverside streets. The best known of these is the medieval rue de la Huchette, from which the rue du Chat-qui-Pêche (“Street of the Fishing Cat”) leads to the Quai Saint-Michel. Two churches in this area—Saint-Séverin (1489–94), Gothic and humble, and Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre (1165–1220), which belongs to the transitional period between the Romanesque and the Gothic—are notable. The square in front of the latter church offers one of the finest views of Notre-Dame de Paris.

People

In 1850 Paris had approximately 600,000 inhabitants. It then grew rapidly as industrial expansion attracted a constant stream of people from the provinces. By 1870 the population had surpassed 1,000,000, and by 1931 the conurbation contained some 5,000,000 people, more than half of them living in the city of Paris, the administrative city within the old gates. After World War II this growth continued, and in the early 21st century Greater Paris had over 10,000,000 inhabitants. The population of the city of Paris, however, steadily declined, from a peak of about 2,900,000 in 1931 to roughly 2,200,000 in 2012, so that about four out of five Parisians were suburbanites. The shift took place in part because massive rehousing reduced the city’s high density, though it remained well above the northern European average. Many families moved out to newer and more spacious homes in the smaller towns around the capital, leaving the city of Paris with an aging, curiously solitary population, with almost half of the households consisting of just one person. Yet within the first few years of the 21st century, the city’s population slowly began to increase. With birth rates rising and older persons tending to retire outside the capital region, the Parisian population also grew younger.

Paris-born Parisians are outnumbered by those born outside the city, many of whom keep their provincial or international ties. Hence, many shops, restaurants, and neighbourhoods have a French regional or international flavour. While most nonnative Parisians are French, more than one-tenth of the population is foreign-born. About a third of the city’s foreign residents are from European Union member countries, but the largest immigrant groups are peoples of African origin—particularly Muslim Arabs from the North African countries of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. In general, families of North African origin cluster in the poorer northern quarters or, increasingly, in the peripheral banlieues (suburbs) surrounding the capital. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, high unemployment and low social mobility fed racial and religious tensions in the banlieues.

Those tensions boiled over in October 2005 when two teenagers were accidentally electrocuted while hiding from police in an electricity substation in Clichy-sous-Bois, a banlieue northeast of Paris. The rioting by ethnic minorities that followed dispelled the belief held by many French people that their country had been exemplary in terms of the integration of people of different religions and ethnicities. Over three weeks the unrest spread from the satellite towns around Paris to much of the rest of the country. Discrimination and lack of opportunity in France’s heavily immigrant suburbs fueled the protests, which peaked on the night of November 7, affecting 274 communes around the country. The following day Pres. Jacques Chirac declared a state of emergency. It was not until November 17, after nearly 9,000 cars had been burned and nearly 3,000 arrests made, that the French police declared that the level of car burning had returned to “normal.” The state of emergency was not lifted until February 2006.

The city’s sizable black population is made up of immigrants from the French overseas departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe as well as from West and Central African countries such as Senegal, Mali, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Many of these immigrants inhabit the northeastern portions of Paris, as do people of Chinese and Turkish origin. Immigrant groups from Southeast Asia are concentrated in southeastern Paris.

Most of the population is nominally Roman Catholic, though only a small percentage attend Mass regularly. Muslims are an important presence in the city, as evidenced by its dozens of mosques, including the Grande Mosquée de Paris (1922–26) in the 5th arrondissement. The Jewish community is centred on the rue des Rosiers quarter of the Marais neighbourhood, where there are numerous synagogues, kosher stores, and Hebrew bookshops.

Economy

Paris is not only the political and cultural capital of France but also its major financial and commercial centre. Despite some pockets of poverty, it is a very wealthy city, home to many vast private fortunes, both French and foreign. It serves as the base for numerous international business concerns, and even if large French firms have their manufacturing plants in the provinces, they nearly all keep their headquarters in Paris, conveniently close to the major banks and key ministries. Greater Paris does still contain a significant portion of French manufacturing concerns, but as an industrial centre the Île-de-France region is less dominant in France than it was in its heyday in the 1930s. Today more than four-fifths of the region’s workforce is employed in the services sector, notably in business services and public- and private-sector administration and commerce. This proportion is even higher in the city of Paris itself. As a whole, the region is characterized by an above-average concentration of senior management and administrative and research personnel.