The City Research Guide

A Traveller's History of Paris offers a complete history of Paris and the people who have shaped its destiny, from its earliest settlement as the Roman village of Lutetia Parisiorum with a few hundred inhabitants, to 20 centuries later when Paris is a city of well over two million--nearly one-fifth of the population of France.

Beginning his narrative in the 12th century and ending in the mid-20th, Alistair Home divides the city's history into seven ages: the Medieval Paris of Abelard and Heloise and of Philip Augustus, who made the city into the intellectual capital of Europe; Renaissance Paris under the first Bourbon king, Henry of Navarre, who proclaimed the city worth a mass; the glittering 18th-century capital of Louis XIV -- the Sun King -- and Louis XV; revolutionary and Napoleonic Paris, a place both of splendor and of terror and tribulation; the 19th-century city of the Commune, the Exhibition, and the Bloody Week of 1871; the Paris of La Belle Epoque and the cultural ferment that lasted until the outbreak of war in 1914; and, finally, occupied Paris, from its worldshattering fall to the Germans in 1940 to its joyful liberation at the end of World War II.

A century of planned development made Paris both beautiful and exciting. It gave people reasons to be out in public as never before and as nowhere else. And it gave Paris its modern identity as a place that people dreamed of seeing. By 1700, Paris had become the capital that would revolutionize our conception of the city and of urban life.

In this definitive and illuminating history, Colin Jones walks us through the city that was a plague-infested charnel house during the Middle Ages, the bloody epicenter of the French Revolution, the muse of nineteenth-century Impressionist painters, and much more.