🇫🇷 France · Paris and Île-de-France
Few cities stir up so much anticipation as Paris. Before you arrive you already know it through a thousand films, songs and postcards: the Eiffel Tower lighting up as night falls, the cafés with their wicker chairs facing the street, the bridges over the Seine, the second-hand book stalls of the bouquinistes. And yet, when you actually set foot in it, the 'City of Light' always outdoes the fantasy: there is an everyday beauty in its pale stone boulevards, its zinc mansard roofs and its tree-lined squares that you feel on every corner.
Paris is, above all, a capital of culture. Here is the Louvre, the most visited museum in the world, with the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo; the Musée d'Orsay, with the Impressionists; Notre-Dame cathedral rising from the flames; and whole neighbourhoods that breathe art, like Montmartre, where Picasso and Toulouse-Lautrec painted, or the Marais, with its mansions and galleries. But it is also the city of simple pleasure: sitting on a terrace with a coffee or a glass of wine, buying a croissant fresh out of the oven, getting lost wandering its streets with no plan.
This guide covers the essentials of Paris with a practical, warm eye: how to organise your visits to its great museums and monuments, how to get around by metro and on foot, which neighbourhoods to walk, where to catch the best sunsets and how to enjoy its food without overspending. Paris can feel overwhelming for everything it offers, but with a little planning it gives you some of the most memorable days of any trip through Europe.
Paris was born on an island in the Seine, today's Île de la Cité, where in antiquity the Gaulish tribe of the Parisii lived and gave the city its name. Around 52 BC the Romans conquered the place and founded Lutetia, a Roman city of which traces still remain, such as the Arènes de Lutèce and the Cluny baths. With the fall of Rome the region passed into Frankish hands, and in the year 508 Clovis, king of the Franks, made Paris his capital. During the Middle Ages the city grew on both sides of the river, with the building of Notre-Dame (begun in 1163) and of the University of Paris (the Sorbonne), one of the great centres of learning in Europe. Under the Capetian kings and later the Valois and the Bourbons, Paris consolidated itself as the capital of the kingdom of France, although the court moved back and forth between the city and the Loire Valley. The 17th century saw the magnificence of Louis XIV (who nonetheless moved the court to Versailles), and the 18th the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment. In 1789 the storming of the Bastille set off the French Revolution, which changed the history of the world. In the 19th century, Baron Haussmann, commissioned by Napoleon III, radically transformed the medieval city by opening up the great boulevards and giving it the look it has today; in 1889 the Eiffel Tower was inaugurated for the Universal Exhibition. Paris was occupied by the Nazis between 1940 and 1944 and liberated at the end of the Second World War. In the post-war years it went on being a capital of art, fashion and ideas. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The capital region, cradle of the Capetian kingdom and heart of France: from Roman Lutetia to the city of Notre-Dame, the Sorbonne and the Louvre, the stage of every French revolution and of the absolutist pomp of Versailles.
Read the history of Paris and Île-de-France →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The history of Paris begins on an island in the middle of the river Seine, today's Île de la Cité. Around the 3rd century before Christ, a Celtic Gaulish tribe, the Parisii, settled in this strategic spot: the island offered natural protection and controlled an important river crossing on one of the trade routes for tin and other goods. The city's name comes from that tribe, the Parisii. They lived off fishing, river trade and farming, and they even minted their own gold coins.
In the year 52 before Christ, during Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul, the Roman legions faced the Gaulish peoples of the region. After the Gaulish defeat, the Romans took control of the settlement and founded a city they called Lutetia. The Roman city grew above all on the left bank of the Seine (today's Sainte-Geneviève hill, where the Latin Quarter now is) and on the island, following the orderly Roman grid, with a forum, baths, a theatre and an amphitheatre.
Traces of that Roman Lutetia are still visible in the middle of Paris: the Arènes de Lutèce, an amphitheatre where fights and shows were held, and the Cluny baths, now part of the National Museum of the Middle Ages. For several centuries Lutetia was a prosperous but secondary Gallo-Roman city within the Empire. Over time, and already in late antiquity, the city's name shifted from that of the city (Lutetia) to that of the people who lived in it (the Parisii), until it settled simply as 'Paris'.
With the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Paris region passed into the hands of Germanic peoples. In the year 508, Clovis I, king of the Franks and the first Christian monarch of the Merovingian dynasty, made Paris the capital of his kingdom, laying the foundations of the future French nation. From then on, and throughout the Middle Ages, the city gained weight as a political, religious and economic centre.
The great push came with the Capetian dynasty, from the 10th century onwards. Under their rule, Paris was definitively established as the capital of the kingdom of France. The city grew on both sides of the river: royal and religious power was concentrated on the Île de la Cité; the right bank (the 'Ville') became the centre of trade and the crafts; and the left bank (the 'Université') the centre of learning. In 1163 work began on the cathedral of Notre-Dame, one of the summits of Gothic architecture, which would go on for almost two centuries.
In that same period, around the middle of the 13th century, the University of Paris was founded, with its famous Sorbonne college, which became one of the great intellectual centres in all of Europe, drawing students and masters from across the continent. Latin, the language of teaching, gave the Latin Quarter its name. The kings fortified and embellished the city: King Philip Augustus had a great wall built along with the fortress of the Louvre (which was then a defensive castle, not a palace), and Louis IX (Saint Louis) put up the dazzling Sainte-Chapelle to house relics of the Passion. Despite wars, plague epidemics and revolts, by the end of the Middle Ages Paris was one of the largest and most important cities in Europe.
Through the early modern period, Paris remained the centre of the kingdom of France, although the monarchs' relationship with the city was ambiguous. The kings of the Valois dynasty and later the Bourbons embellished Paris with palaces and monuments, but they were also wary of its turbulent population. Henry IV, at the beginning of the 17th century, drove major urban works, such as the Pont Neuf (the oldest bridge in the city, despite its name, which means 'new bridge') and the elegant Place des Vosges, in the Marais.
The reign of Louis XIV, the 'Sun King', in the second half of the 17th century, marked a turning point. Although he moved the court to the new palace of Versailles (partly out of distrust of Parisians after the Fronde revolts during his childhood), he embellished the capital with great projects: Les Invalides for veteran soldiers, royal squares such as the Place Vendôme, the grand boulevards laid out along the line of the old walls. Paris became a monumental capital and a byword for European elegance.
The 18th century was the century of the Enlightenment, and Paris was its epicentre. In its salons, cafés and academies the great thinkers of the Enlightenment gathered —Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Montesquieu— whose ideas about reason, freedom and rights transformed European thought and prepared the ground for the great political changes to come. The city was an intellectual, cultural and economic hotbed, but also an overcrowded one, with enormous social inequalities that would end up exploding at the end of the century.
On 14 July 1789, the people of Paris stormed the Bastille, a fortress-prison that stood for the arbitrary power of the absolute monarchy. That act, now France's national holiday, fired the starting gun of the French Revolution, one of the most far-reaching events in human history, whose ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity transformed the whole world.
Paris was the central stage of the Revolution. Its streets, squares and assemblies saw the great moments of the process: the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the women's march on Versailles that forced the royal family to return to Paris, the proclamation of the Republic in 1792 and, in the most radical period of the Terror, the executions on the guillotine set up in today's Place de la Concorde, where King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette were beheaded, among thousands of other people. The Conciergerie, on the Île de la Cité, served as the antechamber to the guillotine.
The Revolution also transformed the city for good. The Louvre, the former royal palace, became a public museum in 1793. Numerous properties of the Church and the nobility were nationalised. And revolutionary thinking left a mark that reaches down to today in the names of streets and squares and in the symbols of the French Republic. After the convulsive years of the Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte came to power, crowned himself emperor in 1804 (in the cathedral of Notre-Dame) and left imperial monuments in Paris such as the Arc de Triomphe and the column on the Place Vendôme.
By the middle of the 19th century, Paris was still largely a medieval city, with narrow, dark, unhealthy streets. Between 1853 and 1870, under the reign of Napoleon III, the prefect of the Seine, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, carried out an unprecedented urban transformation that gave Paris the look it has today. Haussmann opened wide, straight, tree-lined boulevards through the medieval fabric, built modern water and sewer systems, created parks (such as the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes), and set rules for façades that produced the uniform, elegant image of Parisian buildings in pale stone, with their iron balconies and zinc roofs.
That reform, though criticised for its social cost (whole working-class neighbourhoods were demolished and many residents displaced), modernised the city and turned it into an urban model admired around the world. Paris thus cemented its role as the capital of art, fashion and pleasure. In 1889, for the Universal Exhibition marking the centenary of the Revolution, the Eiffel Tower was inaugurated; at the time it was the tallest structure in the world and, despite the initial criticism from many artists, it ended up becoming the city's eternal symbol.
The turn of the century, known as the Belle Époque, was a time of cultural and scientific splendour: cinema was born (at the hands of the Lumière brothers), so was cabaret (with the Moulin Rouge) and art nouveau (visible in Hector Guimard's famous metro entrances), along with a dazzling artistic life. Paris drew painters, writers and musicians from all over the world, especially to neighbourhoods such as Montmartre and, later, Montparnasse, where the avant-gardes of modern art took shape.
The 20th century tested Paris as never before. During the First World War (1914-1918), the city was threatened by the German advance, which was halted at the battle of the Marne, partly thanks to the famous 'taxis of the Marne' that carried troops to the front. In the interwar period, the 'années folles' (the crazy years), Paris shone again as the world capital of art and culture, drawing artists, writers and musicians from all over the planet, from Picasso and Hemingway to African American jazz musicians.
The Second World War brought the darkest episode: between June 1940 and August 1944, Paris was occupied by Nazi Germany. They were hard years, marked by repression, shortages, the deportation of the Jewish population and the clandestine activity of the Resistance. On 25 August 1944, after a popular uprising and the arrival of the Allied and Free French forces, Paris was liberated; General de Gaulle paraded in triumph down the Champs-Élysées. The city, fortunately, was spared the destruction suffered by other European capitals.
In the post-war years Paris modernised and went on being a cultural and intellectual beacon (with Sartre's existentialism and the cafés of Saint-Germain, the student May of 68, fashion and cinema). Major contemporary works of architecture were built alongside the historic heritage: the Centre Pompidou, the Louvre pyramid, the Grande Arche of La Défense, the Opéra Bastille. Today Paris is a cosmopolitan, diverse metropolis, the capital of France and one of the most visited and influential cities in the world, which in 2024 hosted the Olympic Games again (a century after 1924) and reopened its restored cathedral of Notre-Dame.