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Paris is known for its famous buildings and works of art, its chic fashion scene and its modern literary, artistic, and intellectual ideals, and is a must for anyone wishing to experience the best of both contemporary and age old European culture. If you have limited time, make sure to go to the area north of the river, the Rive Droite, to see the tree-lined Avenue des Champs Elysees, running west from the Arc de Triomphe. East of the avenue is the

Musee du Louvre, the Centre Georges Pompidou and a lively district of museums, shops, markets and restaurants. Immediately south of the Pompidou Centre on the Ile de la Cite is Notre Dame Cathedral. If you still have time, head west along the river and you will find the city’s trademark, the Eiffel Tower. If you are intrigued by Paris’ famous academic, artistic and intellectual enclave, the Saint Germain de Pres and Montparnasse districts are located just to the east. 

Paris, France, is affectionately called the City of Light, but few know the reason why or how the name cam to be

Webster’s defines cliché as a trite ex-pression and trite as worn out by constant use. Happily, the title Ville Lumière or City of Light is neither a cliché nor trite. Though it is constantly used in reference to Paris, it has become a nickname, a sobriquet, an endearment.

The images it evokes are rooted in history but remain very much alive today.

Say Ville Lumière and some will see old-fashioned street lamps spilling pools of light along the Seine where lovers stroll hand in hand. Others will think of the Champs-Elysées and Eiffel Tower ablaze. Still others will envision night-lit monuments perched on hills—the Panthéon, Sacré Cœur, Trocadéro—and a cityscape bathed in an other-worldly glow.

Personally I’ve often imagined the expression had more to do with the welcoming lights of the city’s cafés, its bookshops, museums and universities, where minds meet and tongues wag into the night. Certainly, for centuries, men and women from across the world have been drawn to Paris like the proverbial moth to a flame—or a light.

Professors and philosophers like to say that the appellation Ville Lumière isn’t about physical sources of light at all. Rather it’s a metaphor for political, spiritual, cultural and intellectual energy. Louis XIV, the enlightened despot, was known as the Sun King (though he abandoned luminous Paris for swampy Versailles). The 18th-century’s Enlightenment found fertile ground here for its philosophical, social and political ideals: empiricism, skepticism, tolerance and social responsibility. Voltaire, Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other proponents were called les lumières.

In his writings on the French Revolution, historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874) was probably the first to call Paris la Lumière du Monde—Light of the Earth, a beacon for humanity. During Michelet’s lifetime, Paris underwent radical change: its population more than doubled. By the second half of the 19th century (starting with the Second Empire in 1852), Paris had indeed become the most stimulating, the most modern and best-loved of European cities.

In some ways it was an ideal city, a military man’s Utopia conceived by Emperor Napoléon III and built by his prefect Baron Haussmann. It was anything but ideal, though, for the nostalgic, romantic or visionary. In Les Fleurs du Mal and other works, Charles Baudelaire scented death and urban anguish in Haussmannization. Old Paris is gone, he wrote in The Swan, no human heart changes half as fast as a city’s face.

Haussmann’s was an ideal cosmopolis for those who believed in order, uniformity, and the hygienic properties of open air and sunlight. At Napoléon III’s behest, the prefect demolished some 25,000 centuries-old buildings in fewer than 20 years. Broad cannon-shot boulevards and regular street alignments with uniform facades rose where a tangle of dark medieval alleys had once been.

With few exceptions the Impressionists and early photographers who documented this remade world were fascinated by its novel cityscapes and seemingly endless perspectives. They sought above all to capture the effects of a new kind of light that was at once physical and spiritual. It was the light that sifted through the trees planted on the new boulevards. Or the light cast by the hundreds of gas lamps erected in the 1860s on the sidewalks of those boulevards. Light streamed into the windows of modern buildings. Lights burned round the clock in the new cafés, theaters and train stations that sprang up all over town. And, by association, la lumière was also the enlightened attitude of the inhabitants of this marvelous new world.

The late 19th-century’s Universal Expositions, in particular that of 1889, which marked the centennial of the Révolution and the building of the Eiffel Tower, seemed at the time to herald a new age of technical progress and scientific reason flanked by the artistic flowering of the Belle Epoque. We may marvel today at their ingenuousness, but most of the spectators of all classes and walks of life who crowded around to watch the Eiffel Tower’s inauguration in 1889 were astonished, transfixed and delighted. The world’s tallest structure was lit by 10,000 gas lamps. Fireworks and blazing illuminations drew the spectator’s eye to the tower’s various levels. A pair of powerful electric searchlights—among the earliest of their kind—raked the city’s monuments from the summit at a height of 984 feet. Some say it was this signal even that engendered the name Ville Lumière, but there are no records to prove this.

Admittedly not everyone was bowled over by the tower, its lighting display or what it stood for. Caricatures and political cartoons of the period show strollers shading their eyes at night, blinded by Paris’ newfound modernity. One cartoon’s caption noted that from then on, people would need to use seeing-eye dogs to go out for an evening stroll. By the 1890s, most of the city’s gas lamps had already been replaced by even brighter electric lighting (though the last gas réverbère was removed only in 1952).

It’s no surprise then that at the height of the Belle Epoque (which coincided with the Exposition Universelle of 1900 and its further technical wonders), a novelist named Camille Mauclair wrote a book titled La Ville Lumière. This is the earliest documented use of the term as applied to Paris. The book was published in 1904 and has been out of print for decades. No one seems to remember precisely what it was about. Georges Frechet, conservateur at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, has suggested that the book probably drew inspiration for its title and content from both the Universal Exposition (one of the exhibits, La Fée Electricité, was a celebration of the miracle of electricity) and the intellectual ferment generated by the period’s artists, performers and writers, Stéphane Mallarmé foremost among them.

Though it has been modernized, Paris intra-muros—i.e., the city within the Boulevard Périphérique beltway—has changed relatively little since the Second Empire. Other than minor damage in 1870-71 caused by the Franco-Prussian War and Commune struggle, it was never bombed or burned.

But this changelessness goes beyond the physical. Jean-Paul Sartre described Baudelaire as a man who chose to advance backwards with his face turned toward the past. In many ways the same can be said of Paris and the people who live here. This isn’t a museum city—it is far from dead. But the sheer weight of its history, its institutions and above all its culture forces it and its inhabitants to constantly look back while moving forward.

This is particularly true when it comes to both the nuts-and-bolts of lighting the Ville Lumière, and the philosophy that lies behind the myriad of lighting-related technical and bureaucratic constraints.

For a down-to-earth example, consider the many light fixtures on Paris streets that were installed during the Second Empire. Haussmann-style lamps are still manufactured today. There are also Art Nouveau fixtures and others that were added in the 1930s. Are they obsolete? Of course. That’s the point: no one would dream of removing them.

Why? In a word, atmosphère. The atmosphere these old-fashioned lamps create is warm, welcoming and infused with nostalgia. Nostalgia is both a state of mind and a cultural ID card. No other city goes to such lengths to create a light-identity, an ambience that immediately says you’re in Paris, the City of Light. In many places you could be walking alongside Baudelaire or Brassaï or Sartre through a crepuscular time tunnel.

This is something most denizens and visitors alike take for granted. But behind the scenes, a score of éclairagistes and concepteurs-lumières (lighting designers)—plus architects, engineers and some 400 technicians—are hard at work round the clock creating Paris’ evening magic.

Glance up from anywhere in town and you’ll see how lighting designer Pierre Bideau has illuminated the Eiffel Tower with hundreds of small sodium lamps. The tower’s golden lacework glows from within, recalling the gas lighting of 1889. Louis Clair has turned the church of Saint-Eustache (at Les Halles) into a kind of magic lantern, with light tracing the flying buttresses and spilling outward through stained glass windows. Clair’s delicate lighting of the Rotonde de la Villette underscores the curves and colonnades of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s fanciful 18th-century canal-side customs house.

Roger Narboni and Italo Rota—two other bright stars in the French lighting firmament—have worked together or separately to capture with lights the physical and spiritual essence of Notre Dame cathedral, the Louvre, a handful of bridges over the Seine, and famous avenues like the Champs-Elysées. But there are dozens of other equally impressive night-time scenes: the Place Vendôme and its storied facades seem like a stage set; the fountains of the Place de la Concorde or the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir splash both water and light….

What all of these projects share is the goal of bringing forth the history and symbolism of each site. Flamboyant or experimental lighting displays that might seem marvelous in America, for example, simply don’t fit in here on anything more than a temporary basis. True, avant-garde French light-sculptors like Yan Kersalé do create works in Paris for special occasions (July 14th extravaganzas, bicentennials and so forth). And many French lighting designers rightly consider themselves artists or créateurs. But for them to succeed here, their talents must be solidly anchored to the city’s multi-layered historical reality. To transpose Sartre’s image of Baudelaire, they must light the future by illuminating the past.

If you don’t know exactly where you’re going, at least you can look back to the past and form some ideas, says François Jousse, musing about the Parisian worldview in general and how it applies to lighting in particular. Jousse is the chief engineer of Paris’ municipal lighting and street maintenance department, a title that describes only a few of his functions.

Modest yet contagiously jovial, the bushy-bearded Jousse is famous among French lighting professionals for his expertise on everything from the performance of electric bulbs to the philosophy of monument illumination or the history of lighting since antiquity. Indeed if any one person is responsible for setting the city’s nocturnal mood it’s Monsieur Jousse.

Individual monuments, buildings and bridges may take on a beautiful sculptural quality at night, Jousse readily admits, but what most intrigues him is the night-lit city as a physical, spiritual and emotional whole—the grand display case of Paris and its lifestyles. Drive into town at night from the suburbs and you feel the difference immediately, he tells me. From the linear, traffic-oriented lights leading you through and out of the banlieue you enter the floating blanket of Paris light—a destination, a place, the arrival point.

As far back as the Middle Ages, lanterns or candles marked the limits and strategic points of the city, Jousse explains. There were originally three. They were highly symbolic because they lit the Louvre’s Royal Palace; the Tour de Nesle (a watchtower that once stood on the Seine); and the cemetery of the Saints Innocents, a favorite meeting place near Les Halles for thugs and lovers alike. Over the centuries, oil lamps were added here and there around town. But it was the Sun King who lived up to his title and in 1669 inaugurated the first systematic public lighting scheme (he even had a commemorative lantern medal minted to celebrate it). By the 1780s, a pulley system had been invented to hang new, elegant lamps over the streets. And then came le déluge of 1789. The refrain in the Revolutionaries’ song Ah! ça ira is all about hoisting aristocrats from the lampposts, Jousse laughs. And those new pulleys came in very handy.

Paris’ night-time identity as we know it today was largely defined with the advent of modern outdoor lighting in the mid-19th century. Ever since then, the city’s street lamps have been erected at the same heights: 6, 9 or 12 meters (though the Champs-Elysée’s new fixtures, designed by Jean-Michel Wilmotte, are exceptions at 11.5 meters). Posts are staggered along the sidewalks on both sides of the street to create overlapping, gentle pools of light. The light laps at the buildings and hints at the roofline above the tops of the lampposts.

The overall effect is to give Paris a human dimension, making it an inviting yet safe place to enjoy after the sun goes down.

It’s the little things I like most, says Jousse, echoing the sentiments of many Parisians. For example, there’s a 19th-century wall fountain on the Rue de Turenne not far from the Place des Vosges that no one notices during the day. Even at night, drivers don’t see it. But when it’s lit with two small spots, it’s a wonderful discovery for strollers….

Beyond the poetry and aesthetics, skillful lighting is one way to diminish vandalism in rough neighborhoods. Jousse is proud that since his technicians have illuminated a contemporary sculpture in the 18th arrondissement’s notorious Goutte d’Or quarter near Barbès, the locals have adopted it as their own: no more graffiti or damage. At the Porte de Clignancourt, under the spaghetti bowl of freeways where the city’s main flea market is held, Jousse and his lighting technicians have lit a wall built there as a safety measure to divide a wide sidewalk. Now, instead of being viewed as an ugly obstacle, the wall is a noctambulist’s landmark, a kind of luminous welcome mat on the city’s edge.

Half a dozen other cities probably have more and brighter lights than Paris these days. New York is a forest of flaming skyscrapers and throbbing, colored bands. Parts of Tokyo and Berlin look like immense, garish outdoor advertisements, the objective correlatives of our age of consumerism. These three cities in particular also sparkle as among the world’s great artistic, intellectual and economic centers. Yet no one would dream of renaming them the City of Light. It is not simply because Paris claimed the title a century ago. There’s another, intangible reason. Something about the quality of life, the outlook of the people and the essence of Paris makes the name Ville Lumière ring true. So even if it sounds like a cliché to the uninitiated, countless others—including me—will go on using it for as long as the city shines.

History

Paris began life at the tail end of the 3rd century BC as a Celtic fishing village inhabited by the appropriately named Parisii tribe. However it wasn't long before the fledgling settlement fell under Roman control, before being declared the country's capital in 508AD with the arrival of the fearsomely titled Frankish king, Clovis the First.

By the Middle Ages, Paris was really beginning to take shape; and with the building of Notre-Dame Cathedral (www.notredamedeparis.fr) and the Sorbonne University (www.english.paris-sorbonne.fr/), the city established itself as France's intellectual and spiritual hub.

The Hundred Years war put the brakes on Paris' economic development and after defeat at Agincourt the English took control of the city in 1420. English influence was to be short lived and within a decade a teenage upstart named Joan of Arc (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_of_Arc) was well on her way to seeing off the Brits for good.

The Parisian post-card industry owes a debt of gratitude to the Renaissance, which saw many of the city's landmarks built. Meanwhile religious tensions flared between the protestant Huguenots and the Catholics sparking the bloody Wars of Religion (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Wars_of_Religion).

With the ascension of Louis XVI to the throne in 1774 (at the worldly age of four) time was running out for the monarchy. Louis' lavish spending spree came to an end on July 14th 1789 with the storming of the Bastille prison triggering the French Revolution (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution). Napoleon (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon) saw the ensuing mayhem as an opportunity to seize power as a springboard to Empire building.

Greed led to Napoleon overstretching himself and was defeated on the eastern Russian front. Years later Napoleon III would suffer a similar fate at the hands of the Prussians, although he did manage to give Paris an impressive neo-classical facelift first. With Napoleon III (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_III) locked up in a Prussian jail the city took to the streets and the third republic was bloodily formed.

La belle époque saw Paris flourish as an artistic hub, and the Left Bank gave birth to first Dadaism then Surrealism. Come the onset of WWII the occupying Nazis had little time for the avant-garde and creative Paris was squashed under the Nazi jackboot until the allies liberated the city in 1944.

Come 1968 and the city was once again in the soup as protesting students overran the Sorbonne and won the sympathy of 7 million of their fellow countrymen who promptly went on strike. Since, despite several front-page political scandals, the city has gone from strength to strength and today is a serious contender for Europe's favourite weekend break.

Geography

Paris, the capital of France and of the Ile de France region, covers a surface area of 105 km² and has a population, according to the last census in 1999, of 2,125,246. At the end of the 20th century, the Paris agglomeration counted 11,131,412 inhabitants, of which 2,147,274 within the city proper.

Parisians make up 19.4% of the population of the Ile de France region (estimated 1st January 2003). The overall population of the region has been in constant decline for over 70 years.

Paris is administrative department 75, and within the department, the city is divided into 20 administrative arrondissements. The arrondissements are set out in the form of a spiral, with the first arrondissement in the centre and the numbers increasing outwards in a clockwise direction.

Paris occupies the heart of a sedimentary basin in the western reaches of the great plains of Northern Europe. In the centre of the fluvial plain of the Seine, the city lies just downstream of the Seine-Marne confluence and upstream of the confluence with the Oise. The naturally occurring waterway crossroads explains the existence and exceptional development over fifteen centuries of this urban pole.

More precisely, Paris formed around the l'île de la Cité at the junction of two great waterways. The north-south axis weaves between the hills of Montmartre and Belleville over the hillock of la Chapelle, the gateway to gares du Nord et de l'Est and the Saint-Martin canal.

At Châtelet in the centre, the east-west axis runs alongside the Seine on the right bank, through la Bastille, the Louvre and the Champs-Élysées, over to the suburbs in Chaillot and beyond, la Défense.From there, the axis runs along Rue Saint-Martin and Rue Saint-Denis, crosses the Seine at the pont au Change and climbs up the right bank, following the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève.

This axis was followed underground when the first metro line was built, inaugurated in 1900, the line ran from Porte Maillot to Vincennes (later extended to Neuilly in the west). This route through the city is dotted with prestigious monuments, which, together with the presence of Place de l’Etoile and Nation at either end of the line, then the forests of Vincennes and Boulogne beyond, demonstrates the east-west symmetry of the city. City facts : Insee 

The UNESCO has classified as a collective world heritage site over 30 bridges that cross the Seine in Paris, from Pont-Neuf, completed in 1607, to Pont Charles de Gaulle, inaugurated in 1996. Upriver, the banks of the Seine have changed radically since the 1980’s; the right bank has seen the emergence of the ZAC (Concerted Development Zone) at Bercy, with the new Ministry of the Economy rising above the river.

The opposite bank is occupied by the big construction zone of Tolbiac, dominated by the four towers of the National Library, now called the Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand (architect : Dominique Perrault). Once past the gare de Lyon (right bank) and the d'Austerlitz (left bank), the Seine moves into the historical heart of Paris, flowing around the little islands of Ile Saint-Louis and Ile de la Cité.There, in an area of less than 20 hectares, are gathered the Cathedral Notre-Dame, the Hôtel-Dieu and, inside the walls of the old royal palace, Sainte-Chapelle and the Palais de justice. Just across the river, on the right bank, stands the Hôtel de ville.Beyond, the Seine stretches before the long colonnade of the Louvre.

Further to the west are the Jardin des Tuileries and Place de la Concorde on the right bank. The monuments here bring to mind the Universal Expositions that took place in Paris: the Eiffel tower, put in place for the exposition of 1889; the Petit et Grand Palais (1900); the Palais de Chaillot (1937).

Before leaving Paris the Seine passes the Maison de la Radio and the towers of operation Front de Seine. Paris has served for ten centuries as a political capital for a number of reasons: its geographical situation in the centre of the Parisian basin, which is the site of important river confluences; the busy crossroads that it naturally forms for road and rail networks, as well as busy flight paths; its easy access to the sea via the navigable river Seine; its proximity to North-Western Europe, which is one of the most concentrated industrialised and urbanised regions in the world. Paris is in a marginal position relative to the industrial axis that stretches from Rotterdam to Milan, however the putting in place a European fast rail network would largely compensate for this, making Paris the hub for transport through the channel tunnel into the U.K.

Paris has the highest rates of business activity and productivity in France. The tertiary sector alone employs 3 million people in the Greater Paris area. Almost a third of that employment stems from the city’s function as the political and administrative capital.

In other words, the standard of living is