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The city's escape from Attila proved a short-lived reprieve, as it was attacked and overrun in 464 by Childeric I (Childeric the Frank). His son Clovis I made the city his capital in 506 and was buried there on his death in 511, alongside St. Geneviéve.

The government agreed an armistice with the invaders and moved south to Vichy, while Paris remained - along with two thirds of France - under German occupation. Hitler himself arrived on 23 June to inspect his latest conquest and, in a famous piece of film footage, seem to dance a triumphant jig below the Eiffel Tower (this effective piece of Allied propaganda was created by film maker John Grierson, who looped a few frames of Hitler stomping his foot once in delight, making the dictator appear to dance).

The city was neglected by the Empire and suffered grievously from Viking raiders who repeatedly sailed upriver to attack it. On March 28, 845 Paris was sacked by Viking raiders, probably under Ragnar Lodbrok, who collected a huge ransom in exchange for leaving. The weakness of the late Carolingian kings led to the gradual rise in power of the Counts of Paris.

The next four years saw an increasingly brutal occupation regime imposed on the city. On the surface, things continued much as before - the "City of Light" was an extremely popular assignment for German forces and a favourite destination for those with time off.

As an exception to the normal rules for French cities, some powers normally vested in the mayor of the city are instead vested in a representative of the national government, the Prefecture of Police which also controls the Paris Fire Brigade. As an example, Paris has no municipal police force, though it has some traffic wardens. This is a legacy of the situation that up to 1977, Paris had no mayor and was essentially run by the prefectoral administration.

Charles VII of France tried but failed to retake the city in 1429, despite the assistance of Joan of Arc (who was wounded in the attempt). The following year, Henry VI of England was crowned King of France at Notre-Dame. French persistence paid off in 1437 when Charles finally managed to retake the city after several failed sieges.

The following month, more than 2,000 people were massacred in Paris as revolutionary mobs hunted down and killed anyone seen as an opponent of the new order. The monarchy was formally abolished on 22 September 1792, "Day I of Year I of the French Republic."

Traditionally Paris was known as Paname in French slang, but this vulgar appellation is gradually losing currency. ( "I'm from Paname"?..)

Under Napoleon's rule, Paris became the capital of an empire and military superpower. He crowned himself Emperor in a ceremony held in Notre-Dame on 18 May 1804. Like his royal predecessors, he saw Paris as a "new Rome" and set about building public monuments befitting the capital of an empire. Some of these were conscious copies of great Roman buildings, such as the Église de la Madeleine.

France's political divisions were a major factor in its ill-preparedness for the outbreak of the Second World War on 3 September 1939. Some of the Catholic Right were openly hostile to parliamentary democracy, Socialism and Communism, and welcomed the possibility of a fascist regime, even imposed by foreign forces.

The city was saved, however, by a desperate French effort to reinforce their lines and by a German failure to press home the attack. In the most famous incident of the "miracle on the Marne", as it became known, thousands of Parisian taxis were commandeered to carry soldiers to the front lines. The Germans were pushed back to the Oise some 75 miles away from the city.

The Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes were both transformed into large public parks. Although Haussmann was forced to resign in 1869 after financial irregularities, his scheme is largely responsible for the present-day look and layout of Paris.

The following day, 14 July the mob seized the arsenal at the Invalides, acquiring thousands of guns, and stormed the Bastille. A brief battle ensued in which 87 revolutionaries were killed before the fortress surrendered. This event marked the first real manifestation of the Revolution, and is still marked in France as Bastille Day.

Tensions were high, and led to the largest abuse in the city's postwar history, when the Paris police, told wrong news about policemen having been murdered by independentists, massacred an estimated 300 pro-independence demonstrators on 17 August 1961; remarkably, the event, though known in some circles, was largely ignored until the 1990s. (See Paris massacre of 1961)

After the restoration of civilian rule and the proclamation of the Fourth Republic in 1946, Paris made a rapid recovery from the war, aided by its lack of much physical damage. Like the rest of France, however, it was caught up in the bloody but unsuccessful wars against nationalist guerrillas in Indochina and Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s. During the Algerian war of independence, independentists detonated bombs in Paris.