Paris

Paris entered the 14th century as the largest city in Europe, some 200,000 people in 1328, and the next hundred years broke much of that strength. The plague of 1348–1349 killed a quarter of them, and in 1357 the merchants' provost Étienne Marcel led a revolt to curb the monarchy, until royal troops retook the city and Marcel was killed. Charles V answered with a new wall and the fortress of the Bastille at the Porte Saint-Antoine, yet the Hundred Years' War still brought the English in, and the infant Henry VI was crowned king of France here in 1431. When they left in 1436, half the population had gone, and the kings kept to the Loire valley until Francis I brought the court back in 1528.

The return of the kings did not make Paris an obedient capital. The Catholic city killed some 3,000 Protestants in the St Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572 and held out against Henry IV until he converted and entered it in 1594. It doubled to some 400,000 people under Louis XIII, but the Fronde of 1648–1653 twice drove the boy Louis XIV from the city, and he later moved his court out to Versailles. Paris kept growing, to more than 600,000 by 1789. That July a crowd stormed the Bastille, and in October Parisians marched to Versailles and brought the royal family back to the city, almost as prisoners.