What is the capital of France?

Paris, and it has been the seat of French power since Clovis made it his capital around AD 508 - a continuity that few European capitals can match. It sits where it does because of the Ile de la Cite, an island in the Seine that was defensible and controlled the river crossing, which is why the Romans found a settlement there already and called it Lutetia.

The city everyone pictures is barely 160 years old. Between 1853 and 1870 Baron Haussmann drove wide boulevards through a medieval tangle on Napoleon III's orders, demolishing about 20,000 buildings and displacing enormous numbers of poor residents. The stated aims were light, air, sewers and traffic; a widely repeated additional motive is that broad straight streets are harder to barricade and easier to sweep with artillery, after decades of revolution.

It also standardised the look. Haussmann's rules fixed building heights, roof angles, facade materials and even the alignment of balconies along a street, which is why Paris has a visual uniformity that grew up piecemeal elsewhere. The result was hated at the time by people who watched their neighbourhoods come down, and is now the thing several million visitors a year come to look at.