When Henry III was assassinated in 1589 at St.Cloud by the young
Jacques Clement, the city was besieged for four long years until the
gates were opened to Henry IV who had renounced his original faith
and converted to Catholicism. At the beginning of the seventeenth
century, the population of Paris was already three hundred thousand.
The city assumed ever more importance as a cultural and political centre,
especially under the powerful cardinal Richelieu who, in 1635, founded
the Academie Francaise whose forty members became known as the
'immortals'. During the Bourbon dynasty, the city grew even more:
in Louis XIV's reign in 1715, it was reckoned to have half a million
inhabitants. The Revolution was initiated with the storming of the
Bastille by the populace who saw it as the symbol of absolute power
and tyranny. The fall of the monarchy saw the advent of the Terror
and then the Thermidorean reaction which, in a short time, removed
from the Parisian political scene those notabilities who had dominated
it for such a long period. The city's suffering over those years was then
forgotten during the period of the Empire, and up to the creation of
the luxurious court set up by Napoleon when he was crowned at Notre Dame
by Pope Pius VII. From1804 to 1814, Paris was constantly being
embellished by artistic works: the column in the Place Vendome
was raised; the Arc de Triomphe erected and the construction of the
Louvre continued. It was here, in fact, in the luxurious Salon Carre,
in 1810, that the marriage of Napoleon to Maria Luisa of Austria was
celebrated. Subsequently, Paris saw the fall of other monarchies,
those of Charles X and Louis Philippe Bourbon-Orleans, witnessing
the birth of the Second Republic and the rise to the throne of Napoleon III.
It was during his reign that the Baron Haussman was entrusted with
the continuing urban restoration of the city, constructing the market place
of Les Halles, setting out the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes,
building the Opera and reorganising the great boulevards. In 1870, the
sudden defeat of Napoleon III by the Prussians at Sedan led to a revolt
by the Parisians - the Commune (18th March to 28th May 1871). Unfortunately,
many buildings of great beauty and historical merit were destroyed in
that revolt, amongst others the grand Hotel de Ville and the Tuileries.
With the advent of the new century, Paris experienced new periods of
splendour with the Universal and International Exhibitions, construction
of the Grand Palais and Petit Palais, together with development in the
arts of painting and literature. Unfortunately, two long and bloody wars
subjected the city to bombardment and some destruction. Falling to the
Germans in 1940, it was liberated by the Allies in 1944. From that
moment on, Paris has maintained its place in the history of culture
and humanity.
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