Paris

The Parisii, a Gallic tribe, lived on and around the islands of the Seine from about the middle of the 3rd century BC, trading along the river and minting their own coins. The Romans built Lutetia on the left bank, and the name Paris, taken from the tribe, appears in its modern form in the 13th century. In 1137 a new marketplace, the future Les Halles, replaced two smaller markets, and over the following centuries the Capetian kings made the city the seat of the monarchy, with its cathedral, its university and the Louvre fortress.

The Revolution began here in 1789: the city elected its first mayor that July, and in 1793 the king, the queen and that mayor were guillotined. Under Napoleon III the prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann cut wide boulevards through the medieval quarters and built new sewers, aqueducts, parks and an opera house, and in 1860 the city annexed its surrounding villages, creating the twenty arrondissements that spiral clockwise from the centre. The world's fairs left the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Palais and the first Métro line, and by 1901 Paris had about 2.7 million people.

Middle-class families left for the suburbs after the war, and the population fell to about 2.15 million by 1990, while the RER and the Périphérique ring road were built. Paris elected its own mayor again from 1977. The 21st century brought the 2015 attacks, the Paris Agreement on climate change in 2016, the Notre-Dame fire of 2019 and the cathedral's reopening in December 2024, the 2024 Olympic Games, and in 2026 the election of Emmanuel Grégoire as mayor.

Paris has been a capital of fashion and gastronomy since the 17th century. The Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay and the Orangerie hold some of the world's best-known paintings, and the city's café culture runs back to the 18th century, when the literary life of Voltaire and Rousseau revolved around cafés and salons. Film was born here in 1895, when the Lumière brothers screened the first motion picture for a paying audience at the Grand Café. Most of the major fashion designers have their showrooms on the avenue Montaigne, and Paris Fashion Week is one of the four great events of the fashion calendar.

Music has many Paris accents: the musette of the Auvergnat bars, the accordion, manouche jazz in late-night cafés and, from the banlieue, French rap. Sport means Paris Saint-Germain in football, Stade Français in rugby, the French Open each spring at Roland Garros and the Tour de France's finish on the Champs-Élysées; the city hosted the Olympic Games for the third time in 2024.

Each arrondissement has its own character, and Parisians identify strongly with their quarter. Manners are formal in small things — the greeting before any request, the vous with strangers, no rush at the table — and the reputation for brusqueness usually softens with a little French and patience.

About 2.04 million people live in the city itself, an estimate for January 2026, down from a peak of 2.9 million in 1921 as rents push families outwards; the metropolitan area holds about 13.3 million, almost a fifth of the population of France. Around four in ten people in the Paris Region are immigrants or have at least one immigrant parent, and the region has the largest Jewish population in the world outside Israel and the United States.

The Paris Region produces close to a third of France's output. Business services cluster in the 8th, 16th and 17th arrondissements, the big companies sit in the city or the towers of La Défense, the luxury houses on the avenues of the west, and tourism draws tens of millions of visitors a year. The city is unusually dense, with a large residential population in the centre itself, and most of its buildings date from 1949 or earlier.

The day begins on the Métro, with a coffee at the counter, lunch around half past twelve and dinner after eight. August empties the city as Parisians go on holiday. Housing costs, short-term rentals, the place of cars as the city adds cycle lanes and green space, and the new lines of the Grand Paris Express are the issues of the moment.

Paris has been famous for its restaurants since the late 18th century, and for haute cuisine — food meticulously prepared and artfully presented — ever since; in 2018 ten of France's 27 three-star Michelin restaurants were in the city. Everyday eating happens in the bistro, the café and the brasserie, which began as a tavern beside a brewery serving beer and food at any hour and now serves through the day. Bouillons, large inexpensive dining halls such as Chartier, founded in 1896, have been revived in several quarters.

The classic dishes are simple. Soupe à l'oignon, onions cooked in stock and served under bread and melted cheese, took its modern form in the mid-19th century at Les Halles, the central market whose fruit, vegetable and flower stalls moved out of the city in 1969. Steak frites, a pan-fried entrecôte with chips, is a brasserie staple; the croque monsieur is a hot ham-and-cheese sandwich; and the jambon-beurre, a baguette spread with butter and filled with ham, is sometimes simply called a parisien.

Bakeries anchor every street, selling baguettes and croissants, made with a yeast-leavened laminated dough, and pâtissiers such as Ladurée are known around the world for their macarons. The rue des Rosiers in the Marais is known for falafel, Belleville and the 13th arrondissement for Chinese and South-East Asian food, and covered markets such as the Enfants Rouges sell produce alongside cooked meals.