10. Paris
From its Roman beginnings as Lutetia, the city of Paris was developed around L’Ile de la Cité on the River Seine during the 13th century with Notre Dame Cathedral and Sainte-Chapelle.
Further developed during the Renaissance, and with fine churches and palaces at the time of Louis XIV, its essential urban structure became defined by a series of squares and avenues on either side of the river.
Its resulting townscape is well described during a foreign visit by British Queen Victoria during 1855.
“We drove by the Bois de Boulogne, the new Route de l’Impératrice which will be very fine, through that splendid Arc de Triomphe, finished in Louis Philippe's time – along the Champs Elysées to the Exposition des Beaux Arts which together with the Palais des Expositions and the Palais de l’Industrie… The Elysée is very pretty… with many souvenirs of Napoleon… (Later we) drove along the beautiful Boulevards, the Rue de Rivoli and quite new, the Emperor having cleared away many streets, making the new ones quite magnificent… By the new part of the Louvre, the whole of which is truly splendid – the Place de la Concorde where Marie-Antoinette and so many others were guillotined – past the Hôtel de Ville on to the Palais de Justice… We visited the adjoining Sainte-Chapelle most exquisitely restored. It is small, of the purest Gothic architecture. In passing the bridge from which one has a very fine view of the town, one sees the Conciergerie… We next went to the Cathedral of Notre Dame… The Hôtel de Ville is magnificent and the street leading to it has been much opened and widened out. We passed along the boulevards by the Porte St Martin and Porte St Denis along the Rue de la Paix, Rue Castiglione full of shops and fine houses by the Place Vendôme and the Place de la Bastille where the Colonne de Juillet is placed”. *
The city as described was to be further reshaped during the Second Empire under Napoleon III by Baron Haussmann during the third quarter of the 19th century as new road axes and Boulevards Sebastopol and Saint-Germain were driven across the city as part of a broader public works programme, and new major parks were realised to the east and west as the Bois de Vincennes and Bois de Boulogne.
With the surrounding Boulevards des Maréchaux, this essentially determined the shape of the city at that time.
As a tightly built city with its residential buildings and Mansard roofs, the centre is densely populated. The next influence on the shape of the city was realisation and extension of the underground ‘Métropolitain’.
From its first lines with elegant Art Nouveau styled entrances built at the beginning of the 20th century, the centre was well served with lines extending out into the near suburbs.
The number of lines was increased to provide wider coverage by the 1930’s.
Despite the set-back of World War II and the occupation of Paris, after renewal and reconstruction travel demand rose again across the city.
Accordingly, in the 1970’s a new series of higher capacity routes was designed the ‘Réseau Express Regional’ which was built in stages of longer distances across Paris.
These new lines, east-west and north-south greatly enhanced capacity.
Still later, a yet larger expansion programme has been developed more recently, the ‘Grand Paris Express’ with 4 new orbital lines operated by RATP around L’Ile-de-Fran
increased suburbanization of the city as new growth poles were built around the perimeter of the city as at La Défense, Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines in the west, Evry and Melun-Sénart in the south and Marne-la-Vallée and Cergy Pontoise.
Hence the continuing demand now to accommodate inhabitants in the ‘Grand Paris Région’ and to afford general mobility by public transport over the wider urbanised area of the Métropole of Greater Paris has extended well beyond the historic centre of L’Ile de la Cité and ancient Notre-Dame Cathedral on the River Seine.
*Queen Victoria – Journals – August, 1855.
