PARIS, France

For generations of sophisticated urbanites, Paris has been the city against which all others are measured. The French capital, sometimes characterized as the "City of Light," is acknowledged the world over as the perfect example of cosmopolitanism raising city life almost to an art form. In Paris a pervasive elegance threads through the city, stamping the most mundane urban scenes with a quality subject only to definition as Parisian. This flair is exhibited in scores of familiar monuments and landmarks but equally and more poignantly in a thousand simple moments: the bicyclist weaving down a cobbled side street; the day's baguette (a long, thin loaf of bread) tucked under the arm; the languor of patrons rustling newspapers at a sidewalk cafe; the clipped steps of confident, well-dressed men and women; toy sailboats rippling the waters of the basin in the Tuileries Gardens.
Sited in a bowl-shaped depression called the Paris Basin, Paris is encompassed within an oval-shaped perimeter of 22 miles (36 kilometers) 7 1/2 miles (12 kilometers) from east to west and 5 1/2 miles (9 kilometers) from north to south. The city is bisected by the Seine River, which flows from east to west. Ten of Paris' 20 districts, or arrondissements, are located along the river's 8-mile (13-kilometer) urban course. With a population in the early 1980s of approximately 2.2 million, the city, or ville, of Paris is one of the world's most cramped major cities and ranks as the world's fourth most densely populated (after Manila, Shanghai, and Cairo), with nearly 54,000 residents per square mile (21,000 per square kilometer).
This concentration is amplified by the compact region called the Ile-de-France, of which Paris is the hub. This region surrounds the capital city with heavily industrialized and thickly settled suburbs. In total the Ile-de-France consists of about 20 percent of France's population living on 2.2 percent of the nation's surface area. Such magnetism symbolizes the significance of Paris in effect, the spoiled darling of France. Although Paris is approximately 100 miles (160 kilometers) from Le Havre and the English Channel to the north and about 425 miles (684 kilometers) from Marseilles and the Mediterranean Sea to the south, it is perhaps a 6-mile (10-kilometer) vista from atop the Gothic towers of the cathedral of Notre Dame to the farthest point of the city that most clearly defines the Parisian world view. From a point embedded in the stone outside Notre Dame, all French roads begin. In much the same fashion, Paris is often held as the measure for everything else, as in one French epigram that states that "all that is not Paris is the provinces."

Cityscape

The price of Parisian dominance and its attraction to outlanders is congestion. Along the city's widely varying, often quirky, 4,082 streets ranging in size and character from the magnificent 394-foot- (120-meter-) wide Avenue Foch, to the 8-foot- (2.5-meter-) to 23-foot- (7-meter-) wide Rue du Chat-Qui-Peche (Street of the Cat That Fishes), to the 2 2/3-mile- (4.3-kilometer-) long Rue de Vaugirard, to the 19-foot- (5.75-meter-) long Rue de Degres in its 314 places at 8,016 intersections, Parisians and tourists alike jostle for position amid the throng.
Paris developed its mass-transit system from 17th-century origins (the philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal's fiacres, or circulating carriages) to a system that in the 1980s featured more than 4,000 buses, some 14,300 taxis, and the crown jewel Metro subway. Opened in 1900 (built after those of London and Budapest) and still recognizable by the Art Deco entrances designed by the architect Hector Guimard, the Paris Metro boasts 15 lines; 123 miles (198 kilometers) of track; and 360 stations (315 in the city). Each day 4.1 million riders board the notably quiet trains, some of which roll on rubber-coated wheels. At rush hour the trains arrive every minute and a half, and no point in Paris is more than 1,640 feet (500 meters) away from a Metro stop.
For all its crowds and congestion, Paris remains a city known for its sublime beauty and style. The 20 arrondissements (with populations that range from approximately 20,000 to 225,000) offer a beguiling array of parks and gardens. One fifth of Paris is parkland. There are 12 square yards (10 square meters) of green space per resident. In addition to parks, there are cathedrals, palaces, pinched quarters, and elegant squares. The familiar yet durable views that have launched many thousands of postcards include the wide boulevards, some of which are paved on the rubble of obsolete perimeter fortifications (the word boulevard refers to the flat top of a rampart); such monuments as the Arc de Triomphe, commissioned by Napoleon to honor the French military, and the Eiffel Tower, the structural steel "flagpole," at 1,050 feet (320 meters) the highest point in Paris, designed and erected by Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel to outraged if ultimately forgotten carping from cultural luminaries (see Eiffel Tower); the venerable cathedral and religious structures of Notre Dame, Ste-Chapelle, and Sacre-Coeur; and the great public edifices of the Louvre, the Opera, and the Hotel des Invalides (once an army hospital, now the site of an army museum and Napoleon's tomb). Nightly illumination of buildings and monuments (155 monuments lighted in the early 1980s) combines with the glow of approximately 11,000 street lamps to lend particular enchantment to the Paris nightfall.
Of similar scenic resonance are the 35 ponts, or bridges, that stitch the seam of the city across the Seine. The bridges vary in length, style, and period, with the oldest (Pont Neuf, or New Bridge) dating from 1578 to 1604 and the most recent (Peripherique Amont) constructed in 1969. Many have histories that mirror the rich past of the city itself: the original Pont au Change, leading across the Seine to the Place du Chatelet, was constructed in the early 14th century and in the Middle Ages was the site of a foreign-currency exchange for visitors; the Petit Pont, built on the site of a Roman wooden span (and erected in stone in the 12th century by the architect of nearby Notre Dame, Bishop Maurice de Sully), was the only bridge in medieval times to allow minstrels free passage onto the Ile de la Cite a boat-shaped island in the Seine (ten streets long and five streets wide) that is the center of Paris. Linked end to end, the bridges of Paris would span only 3 miles (5 kilometers).
The beauty of present-day Paris bears the stamp of Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann, who undertook an ambitious and ultimately acclaimed replanning of the city during the Second Empire of Napoleon III (1852-70). But the logic of history, far more than Baron Haussmann's designs, accounts for the 20th-century face of Paris. As the settlement of the Ile de la Cite passed from the Gallic Parisii tribe to the Romans and the Christians, the city's population expanded. By the Middle Ages settlement spread from the island to both banks of the Seine. Abbeys and the universities (prominently the University of Paris, founded in the 12th century, and the Sorbonne, a division of this university, established in about 1257) with their trappings of intellectual life found greater room and autonomy on the river's Left, or south, Bank (Rive Gauche), while economic activity germinated on the Right, or north, Bank (Rive Droite).
The Cite remained the center of temporal and spiritual authority, including the cathedral of Notre Dame, a Gothic masterpiece constructed from the 12th to the 14th century; Ste-Chapelle, a small, narrow chapel built in the 13th century by the French king St. Louis to house religious relics; the Palace of Justice (law courts); and the Conciergerie, a royal palace used during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror to house prisoners.
Succeeding centuries, which pushed the perimeter walls ever outward in widening concentric rings, did little to erase the long-held associations of the Cite and the Left and Right banks. More precise demarcations imposed on the Paris geography are the arrondissements, which proceed from the center city in a clockwise spiral in rough approximation of the rings of expansion.
From the telescoping Louvre palace and its long majestic antechamber, the Tuileries Gardens, and the elegant shopping districts abutting the park to the north, the arrondissements circle through the bustling streets of the Right-Bank commercial hub to the two islands the Ile de la Cite and the quiet, almost cloistered 17th-century preserve of the Ile St-Louis. Across the Seine is the Left Bank and its more casual, student-flavored precincts. From the Latin Quarter so named for the language spoken in its medieval institutions of learning the districts continue westward. St-Germain-des-Pres was once a powerful Benedictine monastery and, with parts of the building dating back to the 10th century, it is the oldest church in Paris. The Luxembourg Palace, built in the 17th century for Henry IV's widow, Marie de' Medici, after she tired of the Louvre, now houses the French Senate. The Faubourg St-Germain was originally a suburb (faubourg means "outskirts") that arose around the abbey of St-Germain-des-Pres and by the 18th century was a fashionable residential district dotted with grand town houses. It is now filled with state ministries and embassies.
From the Eiffel Tower the city plan recrosses the Seine, proceeds past the Grand Palais (now an exhibition and cultural center) and the Elysee Palace (the home of the French president), up the broad, open sweep of the city's main promenade, the Avenue des Champs-Elysees, and culminates in the commanding vista of the Arc de Triomphe. From here the arrondissements continue their spiral northeastward, circling through the railroad terminals and residential neighborhoods toward the suburbs situated beyond the girdling superhighway that rings the Paris interior.

People

By the early 1980s the pull that brought French men and women from the provinces to Paris was tamed by government policies and sheer saturation. The city's population grew more than 40 percent from 1901 to 1946 while the rest of France experienced a decline. The population of Paris has decreased steadily since then. In 1968 Parisians constituted 30 percent of France's entire urban population. Since 1975 Paris has lost an average of 0.8 percent of its population each year. This loss has been predominantly to the suburbs (banlieues), however, and the increase in population of the Ile-de-France region from 8.7 million in 1975 to more than 10 million at the 1982 census has more than offset the center city's decline.
The stereotypical Parisians slender, elegantly dressed women and darting, impatient men have been augmented by many foreigners. Prominent among these etrangers, who by the early 1980s numbered almost one in five Parisians, are immigrants from such former French colonies as Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. These Arab residents lend a North African flavor to the otherwise homogeneous Northern European cosmopolitanism of Paris. Other major immigrant groups include Spaniards, Portuguese, Slavs, and Italians. In 1982 the capital received about 25,000 refugees, mostly from Southeast Asia and from behind the Iron Curtain.

Culture

The city's temples of high and low culture in the early 1980s numbered 85 museums, 83 municipal libraries, ten orchestras, 48 concert halls, about 300 art galleries (mounting 1,400 exhibitions per year), 61 theaters, 32 cafe-theaters, 95 cabarets, 22 music halls, 499 motion-picture theaters, and two circuses. These numbers do not begin to tell the influence of several of these world-renowned institutions.
Foremost among these is the art museum located in the Louvre, the part Gothic-style, part Renaissance-style royal palace that commands the Right Bank of the Seine in the center city. At least six rulers from Francis I to Napoleon III left their imprint on the sprawling exterior of this huge palace, one of the world's largest. The palace left its mark on French royalty as well. In June 1792, during the French Revolution, a Paris mob stormed the Louvre, pulled a red bonnet over the ears of King Louis XVI, and forced him to pledge allegiance to the new nation. In the late 1980s, as the expansion of the museum proceeded, the Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei roused a storm of a different sort with his design for a huge glass pyramid in the Louvre's interior courtyard to cover and illuminate expanded underground spaces and a new entranceway. Inside in long, high-ceilinged galleries such as the Grande Gallery on the first floor, at 984 feet (300 meters) the longest in the world are some of the world's best-known works of art. These include Leonardo da Vinci's 'Mona Lisa', the 'Venus de Milo', and the 'Winged Victory of Samothrace' from a total collection of approximately 300,000 with selected works displayed in 198 galleries. About 3 million people visited the Louvre in 1982.
While the Louvre dominates, the city's other museums are similarly distinguished. The Pompidou Center, a huge museum of modern art in the Beaubourg, is noted for a futuristic design that features the external display of its functional systems. The Carnavalet, which features Paris history, and the Picasso are both located in the increasingly chic Marais. The Orsay with 19th-century art housed in a renovated belle epoque railroad station, the Orsay Station and the Rodin are both in the Faubourg St-Germain. The Cluny is a building of the late Middle Ages that houses a collection of medieval sculpture, tapestries, and decorative arts.
Paris is similarly rich in institutions of higher learning. In the Latin Quarter stand two of the most prominent the College de France and the Sorbonne and the former home of a third prestigious academy, the Ecole Polytechnique (now located in the suburbs).
The density of the city's cultural institutions cannot alone explain the symbolic importance of Paris to the generations of artists and intellectuals who have found inspiration and nourishment here. There was the Paris of such novelists as Honore de Balzac and Victor Hugo, both provincials who set their masterworks 'The Human Comedy' and 'Les Miserables' in the bright lights of the capital; Marcel Proust and Charles Dickens (whose 'Tale of Two Cities' portrays Paris at the time of the Revolution); along with expatriates of virtually every stripe the Irishman James Joyce, the Russian Vladimir Nabokov, the Czech Milan Kundera, Americans of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s (notably Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald), to name only a few. There were philosophers ranging from Voltaire and many other 18th-century encyclopedists to Jean-Paul Sartre and his fellow existentialists. Composers included Jean-Philippe Rameau and Christoph Willibald Gluck, Hector Berlioz, Frederic Chopin and Franz Liszt, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez. A long line of painters runs from at least the Limburg brothers of the 15th century to the 20th-century masters Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and countless others. Sculptors range from Jean Goujon in the 16th century to Auguste Rodin to Picasso in the 20th century.

Economy

The kernel of the French economy is contained in the Ile-de-France region. In the early 1980s the area's industry constituted about one quarter of the national total, including the lion's share of manufacturing of aircraft, automobiles (including such companies as Citroen and Renault), and precision-engineered and chemical products. Industry in the Paris region employed about a million people in the early 1980s.
To support this industry as well as its densely packed populace, the Paris region consumes a large share of the nation's total energy output (15 percent in 1987, down from previous estimates). Although the region contains only about a fifth of the total work force in France, its share of the country's wage bill has been as high as twice this, indicating the relative desirability of jobs in the capital area.
In 1981 the working population of the city proper made up about a quarter of the regional work force, and these workers earned their livelihoods at more than 100,000 different establishments. Among those most characteristic of the center city are the manufacturers and sellers of articles de Paris high-quality and fashionable luxury items exemplified by the couturiers (dressmakers). These custom designers, many found in the Faubourg St-Honore district, set world fashion with their twice-yearly displays of haute-couture collections.
Government policies that favor decentralization, and the problems created by the city's dramatic clustering of economic power, have slowed the rate of growth if not precipitated an outright decline. The Paris region lost an estimated 200,000 manufacturing jobs from 1964 to 1984, but such changes have not visibly altered the economic landscape. Moreover, Paris is primary in such sectors of the economy associated with capital cities as finance, services, and tourism. Paris has a quasi-monopoly on French insurance and banking 90 percent of bank headquarters, with total deposits in 1984 of 416.7 billion dollars, placing Paris third among world banking centers after Tokyo and London. The Ile-de-France region accounts for half of all French bank loans. Similarly Paris is the site of the commodities and securities exchanges (bourses) as well as about 80 percent of the head offices of French corporations. In 1982 they placed Paris fourth among international cities in corporate sales.
Paris also possesses more than two thirds of the nation's researchers and more than a third of French workers with university degrees. About a quarter of French civil servants work in Paris, and in the early 1980s more than 700,000 people were employed in government administration in the Paris region. Concentrated political power and centralized decision making explain why so many French businesses have located close to the capital, much as 18th-century French nobles gravitated to the court of Louis XIV at the Palace of Versailles on the outskirts of Paris.
This economic centralization is facilitated by the city's efficient lines of communication to the rest of France and beyond. In a single year in the early 1980s, about 444 million travelers passed through the six main rail-passenger stations each located in the center city. In 1982 another 29.6 million came through the three Paris airports, all located in the suburbs Orly, with about 160,000 flights per year; Charles de Gaulle, with 120,000; and Le Bourget, with 52,000. The airports also handled approximately 626,000 tons of freight in 1982. Landlocked Paris, 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the nearest seaway, ranks as France's fifth largest port. About a quarter of the region's supplies were transported by water through about 300 port installations along the Seine in 1979. The Paris mail speeds through an underground network of pneumatic tubes. A letter written on a small blue form (petit bleu) arrives at its destination within hours of posting.
Most visible in the Paris economy is the tourist industry. In 1982, 13 million visitors strolled Paris streets, slept in the city's 3,783 hotels (with more than 128,000 rooms), dined at approximately 10,000 restaurants and cafes (with choices ranging from the world's most exalted cuisine to simple workman's fare), and spent an average of 300 French francs per day over the course of a median 2.6-day stay. Of the hotel guests, Americans ranked first in number (about 678,000 in 1982), with visitors from Germany and the British Isles a close second and third.

Government

The city of Paris, distinct from the surrounding Ile-de-France region, is itself both a department and a county for administrative purposes. The city is subdivided into 20 smaller governmental units, the arrondissements, which themselves are further divided into 80 quartiers, or quarters four per arrondissement. In 1977 Paris elected its 12th mayor after a mayoral hiatus of more than 100 years. (During the interregnum Paris was administered by an appointed prefect.) The mayor is elected by the municipal council (163 councillors in 1983) and exercises power similar to that of mayors of American cities. Significantly different from the American models, however, are the autonomy of the Paris police, headed by an appointed prefect, and the power dispersed to the town halls of the arrondissements each of which has its own mayor and is responsible for local administration.

History

The first Parisians, the Parisii tribe, were Gauls who lived, fished, and farmed on the Ile de la Cite. The first recorded name of this settlement was Lutetia (Latin for "midwater dwelling") in the 3rd century BC. Julius Caesar mentioned it in his 'Commentaries' (52-51 BC). Soon after attracting Roman notice, the Gauls were defeated and expelled from the island, and a prosperous Roman encampment replaced the Parisii village.
This period of growth ended with the 3rd-century-AD invasions by Germanic tribes often called barbarians whose forays hastened a contraction of the village to within fortified walls on the Ile de la Cite. The name Paris, after the original inhabitants, replaced Lutetia, and in the reign of King Clovis (late 5th to early 6th century) Paris became the capital city of the Franks. For centuries it remained a small, precarious place, subject to periodic raids, epidemics, and displacement as when Charlemagne promoted Aix-la-Chapelle above Paris as the seat of his kingship in the 8th century.
It was the Capetian Dynasty that presided over the transformation of Paris. In the late 12th and early 13th centuries, under King Philip II, streets were paved, a water supply established, and a perimeter wall erected beyond the Ile de la Cite claiming more land for the expanding city. The construction of the cathedral of Notre Dame progressed along with other projects, and the University of Paris was founded on the Left Bank. Expansion continued, hobbled by cycles of war and pestilence, but by the end of the 14th century King Charles V had expanded the perimeter wall to encompass the area bounded by the grand boulevards of modern Paris. Even the new construction was unable to contain the building that spilled farther out onto the Right Bank.
In succeeding years Paris provided the stage for the many dramas of the Valois kings, including the loss of the city to, and subsequent recapture from, the English in the early 15th century. The bloody 16th-century Wars of Religion between Roman Catholics and Protestants culminated in the 1572 massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, in which thousands of Huguenots were slaughtered in the city streets. After the default of the Valois male line, Henry IV converted to Catholicism and attained the crown with the explanation "Paris is worth a mass." The dynamic growth of Paris from the late 16th to the late 18th century under the Bourbon kings from Henry IV to Louis XVI mirrored France's rise as a world power.
By the end of the 18th century, Paris streets were again awash in blood and drama. In 1789 the Bastille, a former royal fortress turned prison, was stormed and immediately dismantled. This symbolic step was followed by a more decisive popular revolt. In 1791 an angry crowd seized the fleeing royal family and returned them to the Tuileries, and a year later the mob returned to the Tuileries and proclaimed the end of the reign of kings. In 1793 came a still more definitive action Louis XVI was guillotined. Monarchy yielded to a series of fevered forms of government. The most radical the Reign of Terror filled the Square of the Revolution (subsequently renamed the Place de la Concorde) with severed heads from "the nation's razor," including at last the head of the terror's principal architect, Maximilien Robespierre.
Paris after the Revolution became imperial Paris. Seizing the opportunity created by the postrevolutionary chaos, the Corsican artillery officer Napoleon Bonaparte became Emperor Napoleon I. The emperor thereafter set himself to the task of molding his capital in the neoclassical style he favored. In many respects the work of Napoleon and his 19th-century successors (notably Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann) placed an unmistakable cast on modern Paris. A prosperous progression continued notwithstanding wars, occupations (the German army held the city from 1940 to 1944), and even sieges (Paris was shelled by the Germans in a four-month siege during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71) from the First Empire to the late 20th century. (See also France.)

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