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The city emerged into an energetic but restless interwar period, enlivened by the arrival of glamorous émigrés such as Josephine Baker. It was a troubled political period, however, especially when the Great Depression hit Paris.

A concentration camp was established in the Parisian suburb of Drancy to serve as a waystation en route to Auschwitz. Some 70,000 people passed through the camp. Contrary to later assertions by postwar French governments, the camp was run by the French authorities on behalf of the Nazis until July 1943, and the roundups were orchestrated by the Vichy French police. This was only acknowledged by the French government in 1995 and memorialised only as recently as 2001.

The grateful Directoire sent Napoleon to Italy to aid the defence against the various foreign armies threatening France. He was spectacularly successful and in 1798 was given command of an expedition to Egypt, which he nearly conquered. He returned with great prestige, which he used to ruthless effect in November 1799 to seize power. The following year, Napoleon was declared first consul.

The weakness of the late Carolingian kings of France led to the gradual rise in power of the Counts of Paris; Odo, Count of Paris was elected king of France by feudal lords while Charles III was also claiming the throne. Finally, in 987 Hugh Capet, count of Paris, was elected king of France by the great feudal lords after the last Carolingian king died.

Roman rule in northern Gaul effectively collapsed in the 5th century. In 451 the region was invaded by Attila the Hun, prompting fears that Paris would be attacked. According to legend, the city was saved by the piety of Sainte Geneviève and her followers, whose prayers for relief were answered when Attila's march turned away from Paris to the south. Ste Geneviève remains Paris' patron saint to this day.

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.

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.

Citizens of Paris elect in each arrondissement some municipal council members. Each arrondissement has its own council, which elects the mayor of the arrondissement. Some members of the arrondissement councils form the Council of Paris, which elects the mayor of Paris, and has the double functions of a municipal council and the general council of the département.

Prior to 1968, département 75 was the Seine département, which contained the city of Paris and its immediate suburbs. The splitting up of the Seine département resulted in the creation of four new départements: Paris proper (75), and three départements (Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne) forming a ring around Paris, often called la petite couronne (i.e. the "small ring", as opposed to the "large ring" of the more distant suburbs of Paris).

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.

Lutetia was a prosperous place and occupied a very strategic position on the river, controlling shipping in both directions. It came under Roman control after the revolt of 52 BC when Vercingetorix led a Celtic uprising against the Romans under Caesar.

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 history of Paris spans over 2,000 years, during which time the city grew from a small Celtic settlement to the multicultural capital of a modern European state.

The area of modern Paris has been inhabited since at least the fourth millennium BC, although little is known about these early inhabitants. The first known permanent settlement on the site was founded about 250 BC by a Celtic tribe called the Parisii, who established a fishing village on the Seine island that was later to become the Ile de la Cité. This was known as Lutetia, a name first recorded by Julius Caesar in his Gallic Wars.