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PARIS, France

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Bianca
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« on: July 08, 2008, 07:33:21 am »










                                                               P A R I S






In spite of all sources stating that Paris, France was founded on July 8, 951 C.E., I could not find any

proof of it.



Nevertheless, let us celebrate the CITY OF LIGHTS........





« Last Edit: July 09, 2008, 10:33:13 am by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

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« Reply #1 on: July 08, 2008, 07:43:22 am »

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« Reply #2 on: July 08, 2008, 07:47:23 am »



MAP OF THE CITY OF PARIS TODAY








Paris is the capital of France and the country's largest city.

It is situated on the River Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region (also known as the "Paris Region"; French: Région parisienne).

The city of Paris within its administrative limits (largely unchanged since 1860) has an estimated population of 2,167,994 (January 2006). The Paris unité urbaine (or urban area) extends well beyond
the administrative city limits and has an estimated population of 9.93 million (in 2005).

The Paris aire urbaine (or metropolitan area) has a population of nearly 12 million, and is one of the
most populated metropolitan areas in Europe.

An important settlement for more than two millennia, Paris is today one of the world's leading business and cultural centres, and its influence in politics, education, entertainment, media, fashion, science and the arts all contribute to its status as one of the world's major global cities.

The Paris Region (Île-de-France) is Europe's biggest city economy, and is fifth in the World's list of
cities by GDP. With €500.8 billion (US$628.9 billion), it produced more than a quarter of the gross domestic product (GDP) of France in 2006.

The Paris Region hosts 36 of the Fortune Global 500 companies in several business districts, notably
La Défense, the largest purpose-built business district in Europe.  Paris also hosts many international organizations such as UNESCO, the OECD, the ICC and the informal Paris Club.

Paris is the most popular tourist destination in the world, with over 30 million foreign visitors per year.

There are numerous iconic landmarks among its many attractions, along with world famous institutions and popular parks.
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« Reply #3 on: July 08, 2008, 07:50:22 am »



RUINS OF ANCIENT PARIS
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« Reply #4 on: July 08, 2008, 07:52:01 am »

                                               




« Last Edit: July 09, 2008, 07:51:38 am by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

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« Reply #5 on: July 08, 2008, 07:58:00 am »











The History of Paris spans over 2,500 years, during which time the city grew from a small Celtic settlement to the multicultural capital of a modern European state and one of the world's major
global cities.

The name Paris pronounced derives from that of its pre-Roman-era inhabitants, the Gaulish tribe known as the Parisii.

The city was called Lutetia (more fully, Lutetia Parisiorum, "Lutetia of the Parisii"), during the first- to sixth-century Roman occupation, but, during the reign of Julian the Apostate (361–363), the city was renamed as Paris.

Paris has many nicknames, but its most famous is "The City of Light" (La Ville-lumière), a name it owes both to its fame as a centre of education and ideas and its early adoption of street lighting. Paris since the early 20th century has also been known in Parisian slang as Paname ([panam]; Moi j'suis d'Paname  i.e. "I'm from Paname").

Paris' inhabitants are known in English as "Parisians"  or and in French as Parisiens .

Parisians are often pejoratively called Parigots by those living outside the Paris region, but the term may be considered endearing by Parisians themselves.
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« Reply #6 on: July 08, 2008, 08:22:46 am »



Roman baths beneath Paris










The earliest archaeological signs of permanent habitation in the Paris area date from around 4200 BC.

The Parisii, a sub-tribe of the Celtic Senones, known as boatsmen and traders, inhabited the area near the river Seine from around 250 BC.

The Romans conquered the Paris basin in 52 BC, with a permanent settlement by the end of the same century on the Left Bank Sainte Geneviève Hill and the Île de la Cité island.

The Gallo-Roman town was originally called Lutetia, but later Gallicised to Lutèce. It expanded greatly over the following centuries, becoming a prosperous city with a forum, palaces, baths, temples, theatres and an amphitheatre.

The collapse of the Roman empire and the third-century Germanic invasions sent the city into a period
of decline.

By 400 AD Lutèce, by then largely abandoned by its inhabitants, was little more than a garrison town entrenched into the hastily fortified central island.

The city reclaimed its original appellation of "Paris" towards the end of the Roman occupation.
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« Reply #7 on: July 08, 2008, 08:27:28 am »



The Louvre castle

from the 15th century
Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry








Around AD 500, Paris was the seat of Frankish king Clovis I, who commissioned the first cathedral and its first abbey dedicated to his contemporary, later patron saint of the city, Sainte Geneviève.

On the death of Clovis, the Frankish kingdom was divided, and Paris became the capital of a much smaller sovereign state.

By the time of the Carolingian dynasty (9th century), Paris was little more than a feudal county stronghold.

Counts of Paris gradually rose to prominence and eventually wielded greater power than the Kings of Francia occidentalis.

Odo, Count of Paris was elected king in place of the incumbent Charles the Fat, namely for the fame he gained
in his defense of Paris during the Viking siege (Siege of Paris (885-886)).

Although the Cité island had survived the Viking attacks, most of the unprotected Left Bank city was destroyed; rather than rebuild there, after drying marshlands to the north of the island, Paris began to expand onto the Right Bank.

In 987 AD, Hugh Capet, Count of Paris, was elected King of France, founding the Capetian dynasty which would raise Paris to become France's capital[citation needed].

From 1190, King Philip Augustus enclosed Paris on both banks with a wall that had the Louvre as its western fortress and in 1200 chartered the University of Paris which brought visitors from across Europe. It was during
this period that the city developed a spatial distribution of activities that can still be seen:

the central island housed government and ecclesiastical institutions,

the left bank became a scholastic centre with the University and colleges, while

the right bank developed as the centre of commerce and trade around the central Les Halles marketplace.




Paris lost its position as seat of the French realm while occupied by the English-allied Burgundians during the Hundred Years' War, but regained its title when Charles VII reclaimed the city in 1437.

Although Paris was capital once again, the Crown preferred to remain in its Loire Valley castles.

During the French Wars of Religion, Paris was a stronghold of the Catholic party, culminating in the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre (1572).

King Henry IV re-established the royal court in Paris in 1594 after he converted to Roman Catholicism, with this historic sentence:

                                                      "Paris is well worth a Mass"



During the Fronde, Parisians rose in rebellion and the royal family fled the city (1648). King Louis XIV then
moved the royal court permanently to Versailles in 1682.

A century later, Paris was the centre stage for the French Revolution, with the Storming of the Bastille in 1789
and the overthrow of the monarchy in 1792.
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« Reply #8 on: July 08, 2008, 08:48:18 am »



Gare du Nord, a symbol of the Industrial Revolution









The Industrial Revolution, the French Second Empire, and the Belle Époque brought Paris the greatest develop-
ment in its history. From the 1840s, rail transport allowed an unprecedented flow of migrants into Paris attracted by employment in the new industries in the suburbs.

The city underwent a massive renovation under Napoleon III and his préfet Haussmann, who levelled entire dis-
tricts of narrow, winding medieval streets to create the network of wide avenues and neo-classical façades of modern Paris. This programme of "Haussmannization" was designed to make the city both more beautiful and more sanitary for its inhabitants, although it did have the added benefit that in case of future revolts or revolutions, cavalry charges and rifle fire could be used to deal with the insurrection while the rebel tactic of barricading so often used during the Revolution would become obsolete.

Cholera epidemics in 1832 and 1849 affected the population of Paris—the 1832 epidemic alone claimed 20,000 of the then population of 650,000.

Paris also suffered greatly from the siege which ended the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871): in the chaos caused by the fall of Napoleon III's government, the Commune of Paris (1871) sent many of Paris's administrative centres (and city archives) up in flames while 20,000 Parisians were killed by fighting between Commune and Government forces in what became known as the semaine sanglante (Bloody Week).

Paris recovered rapidly from these events to host the famous Universal Expositions of the late nineteenth century.

The Eiffel Tower was built for the French Revolution centennial 1889 Universal Exposition, as a "temporary" display of architectural engineering prowess but remained the world's tallest building until 1930, and is the city's best-known landmark, while the 1900 Universal Exposition saw the opening of the first Paris Métro line.

Paris's World's Fairs also consolidated its position in the tourist industry and as an attractive setting for international technology and trade shows.
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« Reply #9 on: July 08, 2008, 08:54:35 am »



The skyscraper business district of La Défense.










Twentieth century


 
During World War I, Paris was at the forefront of the war effort, having been spared a German invasion
by the French and British victory at the First Battle of the Marne in 1914. In 1918-1919, it was the scene
of Allied victory parades and peace negotiations. In the inter-war period Paris was famed for its cultural and artistic communities and its nightlife.

The city became a gathering place of artists from around the world, from exiled Russian composer Stravinsky and Spanish painters Picasso and Dalí to American writer Hemingway.

In June 1940, five weeks after the start of the Battle of France, Paris fell to German occupation forces who remained there until the city was liberated in August 1944, two months after the Normandy invasion.

Central Paris endured World War II practically unscathed, as there were no strategic targets for Allied bombers (train stations in central Paris are terminal stations; major factories were located in the suburbs), and also because of its cultural significance. German General von Choltitz did not destroy all Parisian monuments before any German retreat, as ordered by Adolf Hitler, who had visited the city in 1940.

In the post-war era, Paris experienced its largest development since the end of the Belle Époque in 1914.

The suburbs began to expand considerably, with the construction of large social estates known as cités and the beginning of the business district La Défense. A comprehensive express subway network, the RER, was built to complement the Métro and serve the distant suburbs, while a network of freeways was developed in the suburbs, centred on the Périphérique expressway circling around the city.

Since the 1970s, many inner suburbs of Paris (especially the north and eastern ones) have experienced deindustrialization, and the once-thriving cités have gradually become ghettos for immigrants and oases of unemployment.

At the same time, the city of Paris (within its Périphérique ring) and the western and southern suburbs have successfully shifted their economic base from traditional manufacturing to high value-added services and high-tech manufacturing, generating great wealth for their residents whose per capita income is among the highest in Europe.

The resulting widening social gap between these two areas has led to periodic unrest since the mid-1980s, such as the 2005 riots which largely concentrated in the northeastern suburbs.
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« Reply #10 on: July 08, 2008, 09:05:50 am »











In order to address social tensions in the inner suburbs and revitalise the metropolitan economy of Paris, several plans are currently under way.

The office of Secretary of State for the Development of the Capital Region was created in March 2008 within the French government. Its office holder, Christian Blanc, is in charge of overseeing President Nicolas Sarkozy's plans for the creation of an integrated Grand Paris ("Greater Paris") metropolitan authority, as well as the extension of the subway network to cope with the renewed growth of population in Paris and its surbubs, and various economic development projects to boost the metropolitan economy such as the creation of a world-class technology and scientific cluster and university campus on the Saclay plateau in the southern suburbs.

In parallel, President Sarkozy also launched in 2008 an international urban and architectural competition for the future development of metropolitan Paris. Ten teams gathering architects, urban planners, geographers, landscape architects will offer their vision for building a Paris metropolis of the 21st century in the post-Kyoto era and make a prospective diagnosis for Paris and its suburbs that will define future developments in Greater Paris for the next 40 years. The goal is not only to build an environmentally sustainable metropolis but also to integrate the inner suburbs with the central City of Paris through large scale urban planning operations and iconic architectural projects.

Meanwhile, in an effort to boost the image of metropolitan Paris in the global competition, several supertall skyscrapers (300 m / 1,000 ft and higher) have been approved since 2006 in the business district of La Défense, to the west of the city proper, and are scheduled to be completed by the early 2010s. The City of Paris authorities also made public they are planning to authorize the construction of skyscrapers within the city proper by relaxing the cap on building height for the first time since the construction of the Tour Montparnasse in the early 1970s.
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« Reply #11 on: July 08, 2008, 09:12:40 am »

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« Reply #12 on: July 08, 2008, 09:14:52 am »

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« Reply #13 on: July 08, 2008, 09:18:10 am »







ARC DE TRIOMPHE
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« Reply #14 on: July 08, 2008, 09:20:44 am »

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