Camping Holiday Paris Sources of camping holiday paris resources from the Web

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 XIII became king at the age of only eight, with political power exercised by his mother Marie de Médicis in the role of regent. Although Louis took over when he reached the age of majority, at 15, the real power was exercised by the brilliant but ruthless Cardinal Richelieu, who greatly expanded royal power.

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.

Napoleon's military campaigns against the British, Austrians and Russians initially met with great success but hubris, overconfidence and poor planning caused the annihilation of his army in 1813 in the depths of a Russian winter. Russian and Austrian armies invaded France in 1814 and on 31 March 1814, Paris fell to the Russians - the first time in 400 years that the city had been conquered by a foreign power.

Fierce fighting broke out a few days later as government troops retook the city district by district. It only ended on 29 March, by which time an estimated 4,000-5,000 people on both sides had been killed. In the aftermath, another 10,000 Communards were shot, 40,000 were arrested and 5,000 were deported.

By this time, Paris was a typically crowded early medieval city with timber buildings alongside surviving Roman remains. According to the chronicler Geoffrey of Tours, it suffered a disastrous fire in 585. The city grew beyond the boundaries of the Ile, with suburbs being established on both banks of the river.

The revolutionaries became steadily more extreme, turning on the "enemy within." This included not just royalists but those accused of simply being not sufficiently revolutionary, including Danton and Camille Desmoulins. Over 1,300 people were executed in just six weeks in 1794. In the end, the extremists' bloodthirstiness destroyed their own moral standing; a group of moderates seized control in July 1794, sending Robespierre and his allies to the guillotine in a last spasm of bloodletting.

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.

With other European powers mobilising to crush the Revolution, which they saw as threatening their own monarchies, the political climate in Paris worsened as rumours of foreign plots and invasions took hold.