Paris & Île-de-France

The Parisii, a Gallic tribe, settled the islands of the Seine in the 3rd century BC; Rome took the site in 52 BC and built Lutetia on the left bank, where an arena and the baths beside the Cluny museum survive. Saint Denis, the city's first bishop, was beheaded on Montmartre around 250, Clovis made Paris his Frankish capital in 508, and when Hugh Capet was elected king in 987 the small royal domain around Paris became the core from which the French monarchy grew — the "island" of France between the Seine, Marne and Oise that gave the region its name.

The Capetians left the region's monuments: Abbot Suger's basilica at Saint-Denis, begun in the 1130s, is the first Gothic building and the burial church of the kings; Notre-Dame was started in 1163; Philip Augustus walled the city and raised the Louvre fortress around 1200; and the fairs of Provins, run by the Counts of Champagne, made that town one of medieval Europe's great markets. François I rebuilt Fontainebleau from 1528, and Louis XIV moved the court to Versailles in 1682, where it stayed until a Paris crowd marched the royal family back to the city in October 1789.

Napoleon abdicated at Fontainebleau in 1814; Haussmann drove the boulevards through the old quarters between 1853 and 1870; the Prussian siege and the Commune of 1871 followed, and the Eiffel Tower and the first Métro line marked the world's fairs of 1889 and 1900. German occupation lasted from June 1940 to the liberation of 25 August 1944, with Drancy, north of the city, the transit camp for deported Jews. Since then the region has built the new towns and the RER, absorbed successive waves of migration and hosted the 2024 Olympics, while the Grand Paris Express metro lines are still being dug around its edge.

Parisians are, in the rest of France's eyes, hurried, well dressed and hard to impress, and the capital's relationship with "la province" — everything outside it — is the country's oldest rivalry. Inside the region a second divide runs between the city within the ring road and the banlieue beyond it, whose housing estates, above all in Seine-Saint-Denis, are home to families from the Maghreb, West Africa, the Caribbean and Asia, and whose verlan slang and rap — NTM came out of Saint-Denis at the end of the 1980s — have shaped the French spoken by the young everywhere. Manners are formal in small things: a bonjour before any request, the vous form with strangers, no rush at the table.

Catholic heritage is everywhere — Notre-Dame, Saint-Denis, the white dome of the Sacré-Cœur — but observance is low, and the region holds the largest Jewish community in Europe, the Grande Mosquée de Paris, built in 1926, and the Buddhist temples of the 13th arrondissement's Chinatown. The calendar is dense: the Fête de la Musique on 21 June, invented in Paris in 1982; the Bastille Day parade on the Champs-Élysées and fireworks at the Eiffel Tower; Paris Plages on the quays in summer; the Nuit Blanche art night in October; Roland-Garros in late May; the Tour de France finishing on the Champs-Élysées; the fashion weeks; and, in Provins, the Médiévales, when the town dresses in medieval costume.

Craft is the region's inheritance too: haute couture on the avenue Montaigne, Sèvres porcelain, the Gobelins tapestry workshops still weaving for the state, the bouquinistes' green boxes along the Seine, and the Saint-Ouen flea market, the largest antiques market in the world.

Île-de-France has just over 12 million people on about 2 per cent of France's land — almost a fifth of the country. Paris itself, inside the boulevard périphérique, has about 2.1 million and is slowly losing residents to high rents; the inner ring of Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne holds another 4.7 million in towns such as Boulogne-Billancourt, Saint-Denis, Montreuil and Argenteuil, and the outer ring stretches through Versailles (about 85,000), the new towns of Cergy-Pontoise, Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, Évry and Marne-la-Vallée, and on to market towns such as Meaux, Fontainebleau and Provins, where the wheat and beet plains of Seine-et-Marne begin.

The region produces close to a third of French output: the headquarters of the big companies and banks are in Paris or the La Défense towers, the luxury houses in the 8th arrondissement, aerospace and car plants in the suburbs, research on the Saclay plateau, and two airports, Roissy-Charles de Gaulle and Orly. Rungis, south of the city, is one of the largest wholesale food markets in the world, and tourism brings tens of millions of visitors a year. Seine-et-Marne is still farmland, and Brie is made there.

Days begin early on the RER and the Métro — commutes of an hour are normal from the outer ring — with lunch at half past twelve, dinner after eight and the café terrace in between. August empties the city as Parisians leave for the coasts. The issues of the moment are housing costs and short-let rules, the divide between city and banlieue, the cycle lanes and car restrictions that have transformed the streets since 2015, and the long-promised Grand Paris Express, whose new lines are opening in stages through the decade.

The Paris kitchen is the classical French one — the bistro and the brasserie were both born here, the latter opened by Alsatians who left their province after 1871 — and its everyday dishes are soupe à l'oignon gratinée from the old Les Halles market, steak-frites, the croque-monsieur, a café staple since the 19th century, and the jambon-beurre, the ham-and-butter baguette that is still one of the country's best-selling sandwiches. Bouillons, the cheap workers' canteens of the 1890s such as Chartier, have been revived across the city.

The countryside supplies real regional products. Brie de Meaux and Brie de Melun, both protected cheeses, come from the plains of Seine-et-Marne, with the smaller Coulommiers alongside; Fontainebleau is a fresh, whipped cream cheese eaten with sugar; Meaux mustard, coarsely ground and sold in stoneware pots, has been made since the 18th century; and the champignon de Paris, the button mushroom, was long grown in the disused quarries under the city. Older market-garden specialities — Argenteuil asparagus, Montmorency cherries, the peaches once trained on the walls of Montreuil — survive in small quantities and on menus.

Pastry is where the region excels: the croissant was popularised by a Viennese bakery on the rue de Richelieu in the late 1830s, the baguette in its modern form is a Paris invention of the early 20th century, the Paris-Brest was created in 1910 at Maisons-Laffitte for the cycle race, the filled macaron was made famous by Ladurée, and the opéra cake, layered with coffee and chocolate, came out of a Paris pâtisserie in the 1950s. Provins makes rose-petal jam and niflettes, small custard tarts eaten around All Saints' Day; the barley sugar of Moret-sur-Loing was first made by Benedictine nuns in 1638; and Grand Marnier came from a distillery at Neauphle-le-Château, in Yvelines.

Paris rewards walking along the Seine, whose banks from the Pont de Sully to the Pont d'Iéna are a UNESCO site: the Louvre and the Tuileries, the Musée d'Orsay in its railway station, the Île de la Cité with Notre-Dame — reopened in December 2024 after the 2019 fire — and the Sainte-Chapelle, the Latin Quarter and the Luxembourg Gardens, the Marais with the Place des Vosges, the Eiffel Tower and Les Invalides, the Champs-Élysées up to the Arc de Triomphe, and Montmartre under the Sacré-Cœur. Beyond the centre lie the Père-Lachaise cemetery, the Canal Saint-Martin, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in the Bois de Boulogne, the catacombs and the Panthéon; the Centre Pompidou is closed for renovation until 2030.

The royal ring comes next. Versailles, about 17 kilometres south-west, has the Hall of Mirrors, Le Nôtre's gardens with their weekend fountain shows, the two Trianons and Marie-Antoinette's hamlet; Fontainebleau, to the south-east, is the château of François I's Renaissance gallery and Napoleon's farewell courtyard, set in a forest of more than 20,000 hectares whose sandstone boulders draw climbers and walkers every weekend, with the painters' village of Barbizon on its edge; and Vaux-le-Vicomte, near Melun, is the château whose owner, Nicolas Fouquet, was arrested weeks after showing it to Louis XIV in 1661. Saint-Denis has the Gothic basilica and the kings' tombs, Rueil-Malmaison Joséphine's house, Saint-Germain-en-Laye the national archaeology museum in a royal château, Auvers-sur-Oise the church Van Gogh painted and the grave where he lies, and Meaux the museum of the First World War's Battle of the Marne.

Further out, Provins keeps its 12th-century ramparts, the Tour César and the underground galleries of the Champagne fairs, with falconry and jousting shows in season, and Disneyland Paris at Marne-la-Vallée, open since 1992, is Europe's most visited theme park. The countryside is greener than expected: the Rambouillet forest and its château, the regional natural parks of the Chevreuse valley, the Vexin plateau and the Gâtinais, and the loops of the Seine at Chatou and Bougival that the Impressionists painted.