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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.

Royalist France achieved its greatest heights under Louis XIV, the "Sun King." His minister of finance Jean-Baptiste Colbert undertook lavish building projects in Paris in an effort to make it a "new Rome" fit for the Sun King. The king himself, however, detested Paris, preferring instead to rule France from his vast chateau at Versailles. The city had by this time grown far beyond its medieval boundaries, with some 500,000 inhabitants and 25,000 houses by the mid-17th century.

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).

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.

Influent members of Chirac's party, such as Alain Juppé, were convicted of such felonies. Chirac successfully asserted presidential immunity from prosecution, but some sort of legal action seems inevitable when his shield of immunity evaporates on leaving office.

The new rulers organised themselves into a five-man Directoire but had only a shaky grip on power. In 1795 they were saved from a royalist revolt by a young army officer named Napoleon Bonaparte, who dispersed a hostile Parisian mob by the simple expedient of firing into it with cannons at point-blank range.

The name of the city comes from the name of a Gallic tribe (parisis) inhabiting the region at the time of the Roman conquest. The historical heart of Paris is the Île de la Cité, a small island largely occupied by the huge Palais de Justice and the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. It is connected with the smaller Ile Saint-Louis (another island) occupied by elegant houses built in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Chirac also suffered problems, although he was lucky that the worst of these did not emerge until after his election as President in May 1995. He was soon embroiled in a number of corruption scandals, many dating from his period as mayor when - allegedly - corrupt "favours" for relatives and party supporters were granted.

The French Revolution effectively began in Paris, which the king had garrisoned with foreign troops to quell any unrest. On 13 July 1789 a hitherto unknown lawyer named Camille Desmoulins sparked the revolt when he jumped on a café table in the Palais-Royal and denounced Louis XVI's dismissal of his minister, Jacques Necker, who was widely seen as the only honest man in the government. Desmoulins ended his speech with the call "Aux armes!" ("To arms!").

It was under Napoleon's rule that Paris in its modern form was created. In 1853 he appointed Baron Haussmann as Prefect, charged with modernising the city. This Haussmann did to a drastic extent, demolishing much of the old city and replacing it with a network of wide, straight boulevards and radiating circuses.