Paris is the capital and largest city of France, with an estimated city population of 2.04 million in an area of 105.4 km2 (40.7 sq mi), as of January 2026, and a metropolitan population of 13.3 million (2023). Located on the Seine in the centre of the Île-de-France region, it is the largest metropolitan area and fourth-most populous city in the European Union (EU). Paris is nicknamed the "City of Light" mainly due to its leading role in the Age of Enlightenment.
Administratively, Paris is divided into twenty arrondissements (districts), each with their own cultural identity. Haussmann's renovation of Paris, which created new boulevards, parks, and public works, gave birth to a modern city known as the "capital of the 19th century". Paris is a major railway, motorway, and air-transport hub; in 2024 Charles de Gaulle Airport was the EU's busiest airport. Paris has one of the most sustainable transportation systems in the world and is one of only two cities that have received the Sustainable Transport Award twice. Its Art Nouveau-decorated Métro has become a symbol of the city. Paris is known for its museums and architectural landmarks: the Louvre is the largest and most-visited museum in the world; the Musée d'Orsay, Musée Marmottan Monet, and Musée de l'Orangerie are noted for their collections of French Impressionist art, while the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Musée Rodin, and Musée Picasso are noted for their collections of modern and contemporary art. Parts of the city along the Seine have been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1991.
The president of France and both houses of the French Parliament sit in Paris. Paris is home to several United Nations organisations, including UNESCO, as well as other international organisations such as the OECD, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (in neighbouring Saint-Cloud), the International Energy Agency, the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, the International Federation for Human Rights, and the Fédération internationale de l'Automobile, along with European bodies such as the European Space Agency, the European Banking Authority, and the European Securities and Markets Authority. The city hosts many sporting events, such as the French Open, and is the home of the association football club Paris Saint-Germain and the rugby union club Stade Français. Paris has also hosted the Summer Olympics three times, in 1900, 1924 and 2024.
Etymology
The ancient oppidum that corresponds to the modern city of Paris was first mentioned in the mid-1st century BC by Julius Caesar as Lutetia Parisiorum ('Lutetia of the Parisii') and is later attested as Parision in the 5th century AD, then as Paris in 1265. During the Roman period, it was commonly known as Lutetia in Latin, which is interpreted as either stemming from the Celtic root *lukot- ('mouse'), or from *luto- ('marsh, swamp').
The name Paris is derived from its early inhabitants, the Parisii, a Gallic tribe from the Iron Age and the Roman period. The meaning of the Gaulish ethnonym remains debated. According to Xavier Delamarre, it may derive from the Celtic root pario- ('cauldron'). Alfred Holder interpreted the name as 'the makers' or 'the commanders', by comparing it to the Welsh peryff ('lord, commander'), both possibly descending from a Proto-Celtic form reconstructed as *kwar-is-io-. Alternatively, Pierre-Yves Lambert proposed to translate Parisii as the 'spear people', by connecting the first element to the Old Irish carr ('spear'), derived from an earlier *kwar-sā.
Residents of the city are known by the demonym "Parisiens" ([paʁizjɛ̃] ⓘ) in French, and as "Parisians" in English. They are also pejoratively called Parigots ([paʁiɡo] ⓘ) in the former language.
History
Origins
The Parisii people inhabited the Paris area from around the middle of the 3rd century BC. One of the area's major north–south trade routes crossed the Seine on the Île de la Cité, which gradually became an important trading centre. The Parisii traded with many river towns, some as far away as the Iberian Peninsula, and minted their own coins.
Julius Caesar conquered the Paris Basin for the Roman Republic in 52 BC and began the Roman settlement on Paris's Left Bank. The Roman town was originally called Lutetia, more fully, Lutetia Parisiorum, "Lutetia of the Parisii", modern French Lutèce. It became a prosperous city with a forum, baths, temples, theatres, and an amphitheatre.
By the end of the Western Roman Empire, the town was known as Parisius, a Latin name that later became Paris in French. Christianity was introduced in the middle of the 3rd century AD by Saint Denis, the first Bishop of Paris: according to legend, when he refused to renounce his faith before the Roman occupiers, he was beheaded on the hill which became known as Mons Martyrum (Latin "Hill of Martyrs"), later "Montmartre", from where he walked headless to the north of the city; the place where he fell and was buried became an important religious shrine, the Basilica of Saint-Denis, and many French kings are buried there.
Clovis the Frank, the first king of the Merovingian dynasty, made the city his capital from 508. As the Frankish domination of Gaul began, there was a gradual immigration by the Franks to Paris, and the Parisian Francien dialects were born. Fortification of the Île de la Cité failed to avert sacking by Vikings in 845. Still, Paris's strategic importance—with its bridges preventing ships from passing—was established by successful defence in the Siege of Paris (885–886), for which the then Count of Paris (comte de Paris), Odo of France, was elected king of West Francia. From the Capetian dynasty that began with the 987 election of Hugh Capet, Count of Paris and Duke of the Franks (duc des Francs), as king of a unified West Francia, Paris gradually became the largest and most prosperous city in France.
High and Late Middle Ages to Louis XIV
By the end of the 12th century, Paris had become the political, economic, religious, and cultural capital of France. Maurice de Sully, bishop of Paris, started the construction of the Notre Dame Cathedral in 1163, and was completed after 182 years. After the marshland between the river Seine and its slower 'dead arm' to its north was filled in from around the 10th century, Paris's cultural centre began to move to the Right Bank. In 1137, a new city marketplace (today's Les Halles) replaced the two smaller ones on the Île de la Cité and Place de Grève (Place de l'Hôtel de Ville). The latter location housed the headquarters of Paris's river trade corporation. This organisation later became, unofficially (although formally in later years), Paris's first municipal government.
In the late 12th century, Philip Augustus extended the Louvre fortress to defend the city against river invasions from the west, gave the city its first walls between 1190 and 1215, rebuilt its bridges to either side of its central island, and paved its main thoroughfares. In 1190, he transformed Paris's former cathedral school into a student-teacher corporation that became the University of Paris and drew students from all of Europe.
With 200,000 inhabitants in 1328, Paris, then already the capital of France, was the most populous city of Europe. By comparison, London in 1300 had 80,000 inhabitants. Around 1340 the city had between 250,000 and 300,000 inhabitants. By the early fourteenth century, so much filth had collected inside urban Europe that French and Italian cities were naming streets after human waste. In medieval Paris, several street names were inspired by merde, the French word for "shit".
During the Hundred Years' War, Paris was occupied by England-friendly Burgundian forces from 1418, before being occupied outright by the English when Henry V of England entered the French capital in 1420; despite a 1429 effort by Joan of Arc to liberate the city, it would remain under English occupation until 1436.
In the late 16th century French Wars of Religion, Paris was a stronghold of the Catholic League, the organisers of 24 August 1572 St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in which thousands of French Protestants were killed. The conflicts ended when pretender to the throne Henry IV, after converting to Catholicism to gain entry to the capital, entered the city in 1594 to claim the crown of France. This king made several improvements to the capital during his reign: he completed the construction of Paris's first uncovered, sidewalk-lined bridge, the Pont Neuf, built a Louvre extension connecting it to the Tuileries Palace, and created the first Paris residential square, the Place Royale, now Place des Vosges. Despite Henry IV's efforts to improve city circulation, the narrowness of Paris's streets was a contributing factor in his assassination near Les Halles marketplace in 1610.
During the 17th century, Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister of Louis XIII, was determined to make Paris the most beautiful city in Europe. He built five new bridges, a new chapel for the College of Sorbonne, and a palace for himself, the Palais-Cardinal. After Richelieu died in 1642, it was renamed the Palais-Royal.
Due to the Parisian uprisings during the Fronde civil war, Louis XIV moved his court to a new palace, Versailles, in 1682. Although no longer the capital of France, arts and sciences in the city flourished with the Comédie-Française, the Academy of Painting, and the French Academy of Sciences. To demonstrate that the city was safe from attack, the king had the city walls demolished and replaced with tree-lined boulevards that would become the Grands Boulevards. Other marks of his reign were the Collège des Quatre-Nations, the Place Vendôme, the Place des Victoires, and Les Invalides.
Paris has been one of the world's major centres of finance, diplomacy, commerce, culture, fashion, and gastronomy since the 17th century.
18th and 19th centuries
Paris grew in population from about 400,000 in 1640 to 650,000 in 1780. A new boulevard named the Champs-Élysées extended the city west to Étoile, while the working-class neighbourhood of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine on the eastern side of the city grew increasingly crowded with poor migrant workers from other regions of France. Paris's role in education and sciences led Paris to be known as the City of Light during the age of Enlightenment in the 18th century.
In the summer of 1789, Paris became the centre stage of the French Revolution. On 14 July, a mob seized the arsenal at the Invalides, acquiring thousands of guns, with which it stormed the Bastille, a principal symbol of royal authority. The first independent Paris Commune, or city council, met in the Hôtel de Ville and elected a Mayor, the astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly, on 15 July.
Louis XVI and the royal family were brought to Paris and incarcerated in the Tuileries Palace. In 1793, as the revolution turned increasingly radical, the king, queen, and mayor were beheaded by guillotine in the Reign of Terror, along with more than 16,000 others throughout France. The property of the aristocracy and the church was nationalised, and the city's churches were closed, sold, or demolished. A succession of revolutionary factions ruled Paris until 9 November 1799 (coup d'état du 18 brumaire), when Napoleon Bonaparte seized power as First Consul.
The population of Paris had dropped by 100,000 during the Revolution, but after 1799 it surged with 160,000 new residents, reaching 660,000 by 1815. Napoleon replaced the elected government of Paris with a prefect who reported directly to him. He began erecting monuments to military glory, including the Arc de Triomphe, and improved the neglected infrastructure of the city with new fountains, the Canal de l'Ourcq, Père Lachaise Cemetery and the city's first metal bridge, the Pont des Arts. The Arc de Triomphe was eventually completed in 1836.
During the Restoration, the bridges and squares of Paris were returned to their pre-Revolution names; the July Revolution in 1830, commemorated by the July Column on the Place de la Bastille, brought to power a constitutional monarch, Louis Philippe I. The first railway line to Paris opened in 1837, beginning a new period of massive migration from the provinces to the city. In 1848, Louis-Philippe was overthrown by a popular uprising in the streets of Paris. His successor, Napoleon III, alongside the newly appointed prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, launched a huge public works project to build wide new boulevards, a new opera house, a central market, new aqueducts, sewers and parks, including the Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes. In 1860, Napoleon III annexed the surrounding towns and created eight new arrondissements, expanding Paris to its current limits.
During the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), Paris was besieged by the Prussian Army. Following several months of blockade, hunger, and then bombardment by the Prussians, the city was forced to surrender on 28 January 1871. After seizing power in Paris on 28 March, a revolutionary government known as the Paris Commune held power for two months, before being harshly suppressed by the French army during the "Bloody Week" at the end of May 1871.
In the late 19th century, Paris hosted two major international expositions: the 1889 Universal Exposition, which featured the new Eiffel Tower, was held to mark the centennial of the French Revolution; and the 1900 Universal Exposition gave Paris the Pont Alexandre III, the Grand Palais, the Petit Palais and the first Paris Métro line. Paris became the laboratory of Naturalism (Émile Zola) and Symbolism (Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine), and of Impressionism in art (Courbet, Manet, Monet, Renoir).
20th and 21st centuries
By 1901, the population of Paris had grown to about 2,715,000. At the beginning of the century, artists from around the world, including Pablo Picasso, Modigliani, and Henri Matisse made Paris their home. It was the birthplace of Fauvism, Cubism and abstract art, and authors such as Marcel Proust were exploring new approaches to literature.