‘Paris is the World, the rest of the Earth is nothing but its suburbs.’
So said the playwright Marivaux in 1734. Paris was then at its zenith, the largest city in Europe and unmatched for luxury and style. During the 11C, Paris had grown rich from the silver trade; and it lay on a strategic route for pilgrims and merchants. In medieval times relics drew hordes of pious tourists with disposable cash. King Louis IX (later Saint Louis) built Sainte-Chapelle (13C) to house a job lot of relics bought from Constantinople, including baby Jesus’s nappies.
Paris is named after the Parisii, a Celtic tribe who settled on the banks of the Seine around 300 BC, and minded their business of fishing, until the Romans interrupted them in 52 BC (and called the place Lutetia). Parisians still fish the Seine. What sort of fish? ‘Don’t know’ said a fisherman I asked. ‘Never caught one.’
France and England went to war seven times between 1688 and 1815. Paris was everything the staid and protestant English hated – sybaritic, effervescent (champagne was invented around 1700) and a bit bling – yet the English craved the goodies in Paris shops: silks, porcelain, clocks… ‘We are the whipped cream of Europe,’ said Voltaire in 1735. By 1789 Paris had 1600 cafés (Le Procope, est. 1686, is still going). Without the Paris luxury industry, Baroness d’Oberkirch observed, French international supremacy would collapse. Today luxury persists: Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Dior, Saint Laurent, Balmain…
How Paris looks now has much to do with two men – Baron Haussmann and André Malraux. Haussmann, under Napoleon III, cut wide, straight, tree-lined avenues through the chaos of narrow congested streets, connecting the railway terminals and making Paris GRAND. Malraux, as culture minister, cleaned the city after WW2 and, crucially, stopped high rise excrescence. The Eiffel Tower (built for the Universal Exposition of 1889) was so loathed by Guy de Maupassant that he dined there so he couldn’t see it. 
When I was a student in Paris in 1967, barricades were everywhere. It was the year before ‘les événements’ when Paris erupted in violent protest (OAS terrorist bombings had just ended). Parisians take to the streets with alarming gusto. There were three insurrections during the 100 Years’ War alone. The Paris Mob butchered protestants in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 and the sans-culottes rampaged during the French Revolution (1789–99). Between 1789 and 1871 Paris went through five kings, two Bonapartist empires, two republics, several revolutions and the Commune of 1871. Paris’s motto is ‘Fluctuat nec mergitur’ – ‘Tossed by waves, but does not sink’.
The Paris of my youth, with its pissoirs and queueless museums and smell of garlic and Gauloises in the metro has gone. But there is a Paris profonde, where lunch is unhurried, where lovers meet from cinq à sept, where the ghosts of Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril wander… and where bakers must stagger their holidays to ensure Parisians get their bread. In 1798 a baker, Denis François, was lynched by angry customers for not opening his shop. Liberté, égalité, boulangerie… The Scottish poet David Mallet called Paris ‘that metropolis of dress and debauchery’. Which is exactly why we love her. Parisians are canny too. In 1914 Paris was saved from German occupation by the ‘Taxis of the Marne’ – 3000 poilus in 630 taxis were rushed to the front. But the drivers kept their meters running.
