Paris

Paris is the capital city of France, and is the political and economic centre of the country. Due to France's Jacobin heritage, much of the country's infrastructure is built in a "star network" centred around Paris. The city is home to 2,165,423 people as of 2019, and its functional area (aire d'attraction) is home to 13,024,518 people, or 19.5% of the French population.

History

The site of Paris was inhabited ever since prehistoric times, with the city of Lutetia being founded in the 3^rd century BCE by a Gallic tribe named the Parisii. After the Roman conquest of Gaul, it became a moderately influential Roman town and spread to the left bank of the river Seine, though Lugdunum (now the site of Lyon) was the capital of Roman Gaul. Following the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Frankish conquest of Gaul, Paris became the capital of the Frankish kingdom for around a century, but it was not until the election of Hugh Capet, count of Paris, as king of France in 987 that the city stayed durably the capital.

During the French Wars of Religion, Paris was the site of many events including the 1572 Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day. In the following centuries, French kings would build monuments in the rapidly expanding city, despite king Louis XIV de Bourbon deciding to move the seat of government from Paris to Versailles.

Paris was the stage of most major events of the French Revolution, such as the storming of the Bastille, the abolition of the monarchy, the execution of Louis Capet (Louis XVI de Bourbon) and many coups d'état such as those that would give way to the Thermidor reaction in 1794 and the Bonapartist regime in 1799. The various regimes that followed would each attempt to shape Paris, most notably during the Second Empire when Georges-Eugène Haussmann would expand and gentrify the capital, notably by creating large boulevards in order to prevent future uprisings from building barricades.

Following the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, the worker-led National Guard which had defended Paris from the Prussians established the Paris Commune on 18 March 1871, in opposition to the reactionary bourgeois government of the Third French Republic led by Adolphe Thiers. The Commune established many progressive policies, but was short-lived, as the armies of the bourgeois republic and of the newly founded German Empire entered the city between 21 and 28 May 1871, massacring the Communards. It was later analysed by Marx and Engels as the first example of a dictatorship of the proletariat.