Paris: The Biography of a City

Paris has been the center of French culture and politics, the great stage of kings, poets, and revolutionaries, the inspiration of artists, and the prize of armies since the Middle Ages. More distinguished than London, more central to world events than Rome, Paris has long been the world’s capital of art, beauty, and ideas. British historian Colin Jones unfolds the entire history of Paris in a single splendid volume that is simultaneously exuberant and erudite. Fluent in cultural as well as political history and keenly attuned to the ongoing drama of the city’s evolution, Jones brings to life the people, ideas, social movements, and architectural upheavals that have made and remade Paris. Beginning with the late-Stone Age settlement on the banks of a muddy river, Jones’s brisk, authoritative narrative moves through every epoch—from the Roman town loved by the Emperor Julian to the early Christian capital of Clovis and Clotilda, from the plague-infested alleys of the Middle Ages to the brilliant salons of the Enlightenment, and from the bloody epicenter of the revolution to the brilliant backdrop of Impressionism. Caesar and Colette, Saint Louis and Gertrude Stein, Napoleon and Jacques Chirac take their places, along with hundreds of others, in this dazzling history of the world’s most glorious city.