“A History of Paris Lecture 1 of 6 Cara Lutetia”

LECTURE 1 OF 6: ” . . . Cara Lutetia . . . ” Lutetia of the Parisii, a city centered on an island in the middle of a river surrounded by swamps and marshes, attracted little attention for centuries after its foundation in the third century BC. Serving sporadically as a military base during the Roman Empire and occasionally as a capital for the itinerant Merovingian Frankish kings, Paris hardly seemed destined for greatness. The Viking raids of the ninth century left the city in ashes. A HISTORY OF PARIS: AN ADULT EDUCATION SERIES BY DR. WILLIAM J. NEIDINGER (6 Lectures). Few cities boast so many famous and identifiable landmarks as Paris: the Louvre, Notre-Dame, the Bastille (in memory, at least), the Champs-“lys”es, and the Eiffel Tower. Yet the Parisians have been rough on their own monuments; the Louvre has been demolished and rebuilt a number of times; the Bastille is gone; Notre-Dame was ransacked during the Revolution; and the Eiffel Tower, much maligned at the time, was supposed to have been only a temporary structure. When Baron Haussmann laid out many of the wide and splendid boulevards of the city in the nineteenth century, he was lambasted for having destroyed “the charms of medieval Paris.” In these six lectures we will trace the history of Paris from its humble beginnings as a crossing station in the marshes along the Seine, to its foundation as a fortified capital city, to its rise as a center of learning, to its role as exporter of revolution, and finally to its position in the vanguard of the avant-garde. The lectures will not only focus on the surviving monuments of the city, but also on some of the more flamboyant characters who have graced the pages of the city’s history. This program contains Lecture 1. Lectures 2 through 6 are available separately at this site.