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In 1850 Paris had approximately 600,000 inhabitants. It then grew rapidly as industrial expansion attracted a constant stream of people from the provinces. By 1870 the population had surpassed 1,000,000, and by 1931 the conurbation contained some 5,000,000 people, more than half of them living in the city of Paris, the administrative city within the old gates. After World War II this growth continued, and in the early 21st century Greater Paris had over 10,000,000 inhabitants. The population of the city of Paris, however, steadily declined, from a peak of about 2,900,000 in 1931 to roughly 2,200,000 in 2012, so that about four out of five Parisians were suburbanites. The shift took place in part because massive rehousing reduced the city’s high density, though it remained well above the northern European average. Many families moved out to newer and more spacious homes in the smaller towns around the capital, leaving the city of Paris with an aging, curiously solitary population, with almost half of the households consisting of just one person. Yet within the first few years of the 21st century, the city’s population slowly began to increase. With birth rates rising and older persons tending to retire outside the capital region, the Parisian population also grew younger.
Paris-born Parisians are outnumbered by those born outside the city, many of whom keep their provincial or international ties. Hence, many shops, restaurants, and neighbourhoods have a French regional or international flavour. While most nonnative Parisians are French, more than one-tenth of the population is foreign-born. About a third of the city’s foreign residents are from European Union member countries, but the largest immigrant groups are peoples of African origin—particularly Muslim Arabs from the North African countries of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. In general, families of North African origin cluster in the poorer northern quarters or, increasingly, in the peripheral banlieues (suburbs) surrounding the capital. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, high unemployment and low social mobility fed racial and religious tensions in the banlieues.
Those tensions boiled over in October 2005 when two teenagers were accidentally electrocuted while hiding from police in an electricity substation in Clichy-sous-Bois, a banlieue northeast of Paris. The rioting by ethnic minorities that followed dispelled the belief held by many French people that their country had been exemplary in terms of the integration of people of different religions and ethnicities. Over three weeks the unrest spread from the satellite towns around Paris to much of the rest of the country. Discrimination and lack of opportunity in France’s heavily immigrant suburbs fueled the protests, which peaked on the night of November 7, affecting 274 communes around the country. The following day Pres. Jacques Chirac declared a state of emergency. It was not until November 17, after nearly 9,000 cars had been burned and nearly 3,000 arrests made, that the French police declared that the level of car burning had returned to “normal.” The state of emergency was not lifted until February 2006.
The city’s sizable black population is made up of immigrants from the French overseas departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe as well as from West and Central African countries such as Senegal, Mali, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Many of these immigrants inhabit the northeastern portions of Paris, as do people of Chinese and Turkish origin. Immigrant groups from Southeast Asia are concentrated in southeastern Paris.
Most of the population is nominally Roman Catholic, though only a small percentage attend Mass regularly. Muslims are an important presence in the city, as evidenced by its dozens of mosques, including the Grande Mosquée de Paris (1922–26) in the 5th arrondissement. The Jewish community is centred on the rue des Rosiers quarter of the Marais neighbourhood, where there are numerous synagogues, kosher stores, and Hebrew bookshops.
Economy
Paris is not only the political and cultural capital of France but also its major financial and commercial centre. Despite some pockets of poverty, it is a very wealthy city, home to many vast private fortunes, both French and foreign. It serves as the base for numerous international business concerns, and even if large French firms have their manufacturing plants in the provinces, they nearly all keep their headquarters in Paris, conveniently close to the major banks and key ministries. Greater Paris does still contain a significant portion of French manufacturing concerns, but as an industrial centre the Île-de-France region is less dominant in France than it was in its heyday in the 1930s. Today more than four-fifths of the region’s workforce is employed in the services sector, notably in business services and public- and private-sector administration and commerce. This proportion is even higher in the city of Paris itself. As a whole, the region is characterized by an above-average concentration of senior management and administrative and research personnel.
Manufacturing
It was largely because it was already the political capital, with firms thus attracted to it, that Paris became an actively industrial city in the 19th century. Unlike other older French industrial areas, such as Lorraine and Nord-Pas-de-Calais, it was not near mineral resources. But it did have some natural assets of its own, notably the Seine River, which is still used for barge traffic moving principally between the capital and the downstream ports of Rouen and Le Havre. Traditional industries were devoted mainly to handicrafts and luxury goods, but, when the growth of railways and canals in the 19th century made the northern coalfields more accessible, heavier industries began to develop. These soon spread beyond the city into the new industrial suburbs. To the northwest, along the Seine’s loop from Suresnes to Gennevilliers, armaments factories, heavy engineering works, and chemical plants were created, and automobile and aircraft factories eventually were established in the Seine valley toward Rouen.
More recently, manufacturing has developed principally in the capital’s outer ring, particularly in strategic sites such as the area around the Roissy–Charles de Gaulle airport (northeast of Paris) or newer suburban towns. The nature of industry also has changed. Many traditional activities, such as metallurgy, food processing, and printing, progressively disappeared, while electronics, telecommunications, and other high-technology industries gained emphasis. These have become located preferentially in a broad arc to the southwest of Paris, stretching from Versailles southeast to Évry.
For much of the period between 1950 and 1980, the policy of successive French governments was to limit the industrial growth of the Paris region in favour of the provinces. The policy also was used to effect a better distribution of industry within the region, with the aim of favouring the development of new towns. The idea of restraining industry in Paris itself had lost currency by the end of the 20th century, however, as the central and inner areas of the capital already had been largely deindustrialized. Nevertheless, the city of Paris is still the home of many small-scale but typically Parisian activities: haute couture, notably on the avenue Montaigne and the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré; the clothing industry, in the Sentier quarter; jewelry, in the Place Vendôme and the rue de la Paix; and furniture making, in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
Finance and other services
The major French banks, insurance companies, and other financial bodies are all centred in Paris, predominantly in the main financial quarter on the Right Bank around the Stock Exchange (Palais de la Bourse) and the central offices of the Banque de France. Scores of foreign multiservice banks also have branches in Paris. In 2000 the Paris Stock Exchange merged with the Amsterdam and Brussels exchanges to form the Euronext equities market, which in turn merged with the New York Stock Exchange in 2006.
After World War II, Paris developed greatly as a centre for international business and commerce, especially in the new skyscraper quarter of La Défense (just west of the city, in the Hauts-de-Seine département), where many large company headquarters are situated. The centre of the capital also houses many businesses, as do numerous other towns in Hauts-de-Seine and the rest of the Île-de-France region. In addition, Paris is one of the world’s most popular sites for international business conferences. It has several major modern convention centres, notably the Palais des Congrès at the Maillot Gate (Porte Maillot), as well as important exhibition facilities, including those at Villepinte in the northern suburbs.
It was the French who invented the modern department store (grand magasin), with the opening of the Bon Marché on the Left Bank in the 19th century. Other quintessential grands magasins, such as Printemps and Galeries Lafayette, are found on the Right Bank. Numerous shopping centres also have been built in various central and suburban locations. In the 1960s the major food and wine wholesale markets were transferred from their central locations at the Halles on the Right Bank and the Halle aux Vins (the wine market) on the Left Bank to new and more spacious homes in the suburbs.