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Napoleon's brief return from exile in 1815 saw him pass through Paris, en route to destiny at Waterloo on 18 June. His replacements, the restored Bourbon monarchs Louis XVIII (1814, 1815-1824) and Charles X (1824-1830), managed between them to provoke yet another revolution in Paris, confirming the saying that the Bourbons could "learn nothing and forget nothing."

When Hitler invaded France on 14 May 1940 it took the German army only a month to reach Paris, invading through neutral Belgium around the Maginot Line, where the French defenses were massed. Paris fell with virtually no resistance on 14 June. Much of the city's population fled, with 1.6 million of its 3.5 million people leaving between May and June 1940.

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

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.

Louis' reign saw major changes to the face of Paris; his mother commissioned the Palais du Luxembourg, while Cardinal Richelieu built the Palais Royal and rebuilt the Sorbonne. He also commissioned a number of major Baroque churches as a statement of the Catholic Counter-Reformation.

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.

Several schools on the Left Bank were grouped together into the Sorbonne, which counts Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas among its early scholars. In the Middle Ages Paris prospered as a trading and intellectual nucleus, interrupted temporarily when the Black Death struck in the 14th century. Under the reign of King Louis XIV, the Sun King, from 1643 to 1715, the royal residence was moved from Paris to nearby Versailles.

Under Louis XVI, Paris reached new heights of prestige as a centre of the arts, sciences and philosophy. It was in Paris that the Montgolfier brothers made their historic balloon ascents in 1783. However, the French state was by now virtually bankrupt, its finances drained by the Seven Years' War and the French intervention in the American War of Independence.