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The lines stayed mostly static for the next four years, with Paris experiencing the occasional bombardment from enemy aircraft and the giant "Big Bertha" long-distance artillery guns. The city's hedonistic life survived for a while before being subdued by the bloodshed on the front and the impact of rationing and a devastating flu epidemic in 1916. The war was finally ended by the Armistice of 11 November 1918, signed at Compiegne to the northeast of Paris.

His grandson Louis IX, renowned for his extreme piety (and later canonised as St Louis) established the city as a major centre of pilgrimage in the 13th century with the construction of the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, the Basilica of St Denis and the Sainte-Chapelle on the Ile de la Cité. The latter was one of the finest medieval Gothic religious buildings ever constructed and was built to house Louis' most precious possession - the (alleged) Crown of Thorns, purchased from the bankrupt Byzantine Empire at an extortionate price.

With the recapture of the city, the Valois monarchs and French nobility sought to impose their authority on the city through the construction of various grandiose ecclesiastical and secular monuments, including churches and mansions. Over the following century the city's population more than tripled. Francois I had probably the greatest impact of any Valois monarch, transforming the Louvre and establishing a glittering court including such notables as Leonardo da Vinci and Benvenuto Cellini.

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.

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.

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).

Algeria gained its independence in 1962 and over 700,000 French colonists and pro-French Algerians migrated to the mother country, many to Paris. In response, the government built huge new residential suburbs - the now-notorious banlieues of Paris - which rapidly gained a reputation for soulless architecture, deprivation, racial tension and crime.

A general uprising in Paris followed with three days of fighting between loyalists and rebels, including whole regiments of the Paris garrison. The king was forced to abdicate, being replaced by the more acceptable Louis-Philippe.

Louis died in 1643, leaving the throne to his five-year-old heir Louis XIV. The new king and his family were forced to flee the city in 1648 by a rebellion, known as the Fronde, against royal authoritarianism and excessive taxes. Rebel rule proved considerably worse, however, and the king returned to a hero's welcome in 1653.

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.

The powers of the monarchy were in theory confined by a Charter of Liberties but in practice both Louis and Charles ran an authoritarian regime reliant on Church support. On 25 July 1830 Charles issued the repressive Ordinances of St-Cloud, abolishing the freedom of the press, dissolving the Chamber of Deputies and restricting voting rights to the landed gentry only.