From the mid-thirteenth to mid-fourteenth centuries, Paris shared the same unhappy fate as the rest of France, embroiled in the long and destructive Hundred Years War with the English. The country reached its lowest point when the English king, Henry VI, had himself crowned king of France in Notre-Dame in 1430.

 

It was only when the English were expelled - from Paris in 1437 and from France in 1453 - that the economy had a chance to recover from decades of devastation. It received a further boost when François I decided to re-establish the royal court in Paris in 1528. He began reconstruction work on the Louvre, and built the Tuileries palace for Cathérine de Médicis.

However, before these projects could be completed, war again intervened, this time civil war between Catholics and Protestants. It was sparked off by the massacre of some three thousand protestants on August 25, 1572, St Bartholomew's Day. The Protestants had gathered in Paris for the wedding of Henri III's daughter, Marguerite, to Henri, the Protestant king of Navarre. They were massacred at the instigation of the Catholic Guise family. When, through his marriage, Henri of Navarre became heir to the French throne in 1584, the Guises drove his father-in-law, Henri III, out of Paris. Forced into alliance, the two Henris laid siege to the city. Five years later, Henri III having been assassinated in the meantime, Henri of Navarre entered the city as king Henri IV . "Paris is worth a Mass", he is reputed to have said to justify renouncing his Protestantism in order to soothe Catholic susceptibilities.

The Paris he inherited was not a very salubrious place. No domestic building had been permitted beyond the limits of Philippe-Auguste's twelfth-century walls, and the population had doubled to around 400,000, causing an acute housing shortage and a terrible strain on the rudimentary water supply and drainage system. It is said that the first workmen who went to clean out the city's cesspools in 1633 fell dead from the fumes