The Parisii - Before Paris Was Paris

Part One of the History of Paris

Transcript:

Picture the Seine. Not the Seine you know today - no stone bridges, no grand boulevards, no Eiffel Tower piercing the sky. Go back further. Much further. To a time before Paris was Paris, before the very word “Paris” existed.

It’s the third century before the Common Era. The river flows through dense forests of oak and beech. Mist rises from the water at dawn. And on the banks, in clearings carved from the wilderness, a people are building their world. They call themselves the Parisii.

This is their story.

Welcome to the Chicano In Paris Podcast, I’m [Host Name], and today we begin our journey on the history of Paris. Over the course of the next several episodes, we’re going to explore every chapter of this city’s extraordinary journey - from Celtic hillfort to Roman city, from medieval capital to modern metropolis. But every story has to start somewhere. And ours begins with a people who lived, loved, fought, and died along these riverbanks more than two thousand years ago.

The Parisii. The people who gave Paris its name.

PART ONE

So who were the Parisii? That’s actually a harder question to answer than you might think. They left no written records of their own. No histories, no letters, no poetry. What we know about them comes from three sources: the archaeological evidence they left behind, what Roman writers recorded about them - often through the lens of conquest - and what we understand about Celtic culture more broadly across ancient Europe.

But let’s start with the basics. The Parisii were a Gallic tribe. “Gallic” is the Roman term for the Celtic peoples who lived in what’s now France, Belgium, and parts of Switzerland and Germany. The Romans called this vast territory Gaul - Gallia in Latin. And Gaul in the third and second centuries BCE was a patchwork of tribes, each with its own territory, its own leaders, its own identity. The Aedui, the Arverni, the Senones, the Carnutes, the Remi - dozens of tribes, sometimes allied, sometimes at war, always fiercely independent.

The Parisii were one of these tribes. Not the largest, not the most powerful, but significant nonetheless. Their territory was in the north, in what Romans would later call Gallia Lugdunensis - the region around what’s now the Île-de-France. And at the heart of their territory was the Seine.

You cannot understand the Parisii without understanding the river. The Seine was everything to them. It was their highway for trade and travel. It was their source of food - fish in abundance, water for crops and livestock. It was their boundary and their connection to the wider world. Following the Seine downstream would take you northwest toward the ocean, toward trade with the distant island of Britain. Following it upstream connected you to the heart of Gaul.

And crucially, the Seine had islands. Natural islands formed by the river’s meandering course. Islands that could be fortified, defended. Islands that controlled the river crossing. One island in particular - what we now call the Île de la Cité - would become central to the Parisii story. But we’ll come back to that.

The name “Parisii” itself is mysterious. We don’t know exactly what it meant to them. Some scholars think it might come from a Celtic word related to “cauldron” or “container” - perhaps referring to the river basin they inhabited. Others suggest it could mean “the commanders” or “the spear people.” The truth is, we simply don’t know. What we do know is that by giving their name to the settlement that would grow on their land, the Parisii achieved a kind of immortality. Every time someone says “Paris,” they’re speaking the name of a people who vanished two thousand years ago.

PART TWO

To understand the Parisii, we need to zoom out and look at the bigger picture - the Celtic world they were part of. Because in the centuries before Rome dominated Europe, Celtic culture stretched from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, from the British Isles to northern Italy.

The Celts weren’t a unified empire. They were a cultural group - people who shared similar languages, similar art styles, similar religious beliefs, similar social structures. But they were organized into tribes, each fiercely protective of its independence. The idea of bowing to a single ruler, of being absorbed into someone else’s empire, was anathema to them. This independence, this fractiousness, was both their strength and - as we’ll see - their fatal weakness.

Let’s talk about what daily life might have looked like for the Parisii. They weren’t primitive. Far from it. This was a sophisticated culture with impressive technological achievements.

The Parisii were farmers first and foremost. They grew wheat, barley, and rye. They raised cattle, pigs, sheep, and horses. The forests provided game - deer, wild boar, birds. The river provided fish. They knew how to preserve food for the winter, how to brew beer from grain, how to make cheese from milk.

But they were also skilled craftspeople. Celtic metalwork was renowned throughout the ancient world - the Celts had mastered ironworking long before the Romans. Parisii blacksmiths would have forged weapons, tools, cauldrons, and decorative objects. Their warriors carried long iron swords and spears. Their farmers worked the land with iron plowshares.

And then there was gold. The Celts loved gold. They wore gold jewelry - torcs around their necks, bracelets on their arms, brooches to fasten their cloaks. They buried their dead with gold objects. And crucially for our story, they minted gold coins.

The Parisii were among the Gallic tribes that produced their own coinage. And this is one of the most tangible connections we have to them today. Archaeologists have found Parisii coins - beautiful objects stamped with stylized horses, with human faces, with abstract Celtic designs. These coins tell us several important things. First, the Parisii had wealth - enough gold and silver to mint currency. Second, they were trading - you don’t need coins if you’re just bartering locally. And third, they had a degree of political organization - minting coins requires centralized authority.

Some of these coins bear names - abbreviated Celtic names of leaders or magistrates. These are the only written words we have from the Parisii themselves, and they’re frustratingly brief. But they remind us that real people lived here. People with names, with ambitions, with stories we’ll never know.

What did the Parisii look like? Again, we have to piece together clues. Roman writers described the Gauls as tall, with fair skin and often light-colored hair - blond or red. They said Gallic warriors wore their hair long and often treated it with lime to make it stand up in spiky styles, both for intimidation and for fashion. Men often wore mustaches. Both men and women wore colorful clothing - the Celts were famous for their dyed fabrics, especially their love of bright plaids and checks. Imagine a warrior in a bright checkered cloak, gold torc at his neck, iron sword at his side, his hair bleached and spiked. That was the Gallic style.

But clothing and appearance varied by status. There was definitely a hierarchy in Parisii society. At the top were the aristocracy - the warriors and nobles who owned land, who led in battle, who made decisions for the tribe. Below them were free farmers and craftspeople. And at the bottom were slaves - prisoners of war, debtors, people born into bondage.

This hierarchy wasn’t as rigid as it would become under feudalism centuries later, but it was real. And at the very top of Parisii society were two groups who wielded enormous influence: the chiefs and the druids.

PART THREE

The druids. Even today, the word carries a certain mystique. And for good reason. The druids were the intellectual elite of Celtic society - priests, yes, but also judges, teachers, advisors, keepers of tradition and memory.

Here’s something remarkable: becoming a druid required twenty years of training. Twenty years. All of it oral, because the druids refused to write down their sacred knowledge. They believed that writing weakened the mind, that true wisdom had to be memorized, internalized, passed from master to student through years of study.

What did they learn in those twenty years? Poetry and history, law and philosophy, astronomy and healing, ritual and prophecy. The druids could recite the genealogies of noble families going back generations. They knew the movements of the stars and planets. They could identify medicinal herbs and cure diseases. They could interpret omens and predict the future. They memorized thousands of verses of sacred poetry.

And they wielded real power. When disputes arose between families or between tribes, it was often a druid who served as judge. When a chief needed counsel on whether to make war or peace, he consulted the druids. When the community needed to appease the gods, it was the druids who performed the sacred rituals.

The Parisii, like all Gallic peoples, believed in many gods. Gods of the sky and the earth, gods of the forest and the river, gods of war and healing and craftsmanship. We know some of their names from later Roman sources. Toutatis, the tribal protector god. Taranis, the thunder god. Esus, associated with trees and sacrifice. But the Parisii would have had their own local deities too, spirits of the Seine, guardians of sacred groves.

Sacred groves. This is key to understanding Celtic religion. The Celts didn’t build temples - at least not in the way Greeks and Romans did. Their sacred spaces were in nature. A grove of ancient oaks, a spring bubbling up from the earth, a clearing in the deep forest. These were their temples. These were where the druids performed their rituals.

And some of those rituals were dark. The Romans - who, let’s be clear, had their own violent practices - were shocked by Celtic religious customs. They wrote about human sacrifice, about prisoners and criminals being burned alive in wicker cages as offerings to the gods. How much of this was true and how much was Roman propaganda designed to justify conquest? Hard to say. But there’s archaeological evidence that human sacrifice did occur in Celtic society, though probably not as frequently or as brutally as Roman sources claimed.

What we can say is that the Parisii believed in a world filled with spirits and magic, where the boundary between the natural and supernatural was thin. They believed the gods were everywhere - in the river that sustained them, in the forests that surrounded them, in the thunder that rolled across the sky. And they believed that the druids could communicate with these forces, could intercede on behalf of the tribe.

But the druids weren’t the only leaders. The Parisii, like other Gallic tribes, were ruled by aristocratic chiefs. In some tribes, power was hereditary - passed from father to son. In others, chiefs were elected by the warrior elite. We don’t know for certain how the Parisii chose their leaders, but we know they had them.

These chiefs weren’t absolute monarchs. They ruled with the support of the aristocracy and the counsel of the druids. A chief who ignored his advisors or lost the confidence of his warriors could find himself replaced. This was a society that valued personal prowess, martial skill, and honor. A chief had to prove himself worthy of leadership.

And worthy meant brave in battle. Celtic warfare was intensely personal. Before armies clashed, champions would sometimes step forward to fight single combat while both sides watched. Warriors would boast of their deeds, challenge enemies to face them one-on-one. There was a theatrical quality to it - warfare as both deadly serious and a kind of performance.

The Parisii warriors would have fought with long swords and spears, protected by wooden shields sometimes reinforced with metal. Some might have worn chainmail - another Celtic invention. They fought on foot and on horseback. And they were fierce. Roman writers, even while describing Gallic defeats, consistently praised Celtic courage and fighting spirit.

PART FOUR

The Parisii weren’t isolated. Far from it. Their position on the Seine made them natural middlemen in trade networks that stretched across Europe.

Gold and silver flowed through Parisii territory. So did tin from Britain - essential for making bronze. Amber from the Baltic coast, traded hand to hand across hundreds of miles, eventually reached Gallic markets. Wine from the Mediterranean - the Celts loved wine, even though they didn’t produce it themselves - traveled north in distinctive amphoras, clay vessels that archaeologists still find buried in Gallic settlements.

And the Parisii had things to trade too. Agricultural surplus - grain, livestock, leather. Metalwork and crafted goods. Possibly slaves, though this is one of the darker aspects of ancient trade we have to acknowledge. Tribes would raid each other, take prisoners, and those prisoners became commodities.

The Parisii minted coins not just for local use but as part of this wider trading network. Some of their coins show influence from Greek designs - evidence of contact, however distant, with Mediterranean cultures. Trade routes were channels for ideas as much as goods.

But here’s what’s important to understand. When we talk about trade, we’re not talking about anything like modern commerce. There were no shops, no markets in the way we’d recognize them. Trade was bound up with social relationships, with gift-giving between chiefs, with feasting and alliance-building. When a Parisii chief gave a gold torc to a chief from a neighboring tribe, was it trade? A gift? A political alliance? All of the above?

And most Parisii, most of the time, would never have seen a foreign trader. Daily life was local, centered on the village or farm, on the cycle of seasons and harvests. The vast majority of people lived their entire lives within a few miles of where they were born. The world was both larger - with connections stretching to distant lands - and smaller - with life centered on immediate community - than we can easily imagine today.

PART FIVE

For generations, the Parisii lived their lives in the way their ancestors had. The wheel turned through seasons and years. Chiefs rose and fell. Druids passed on ancient knowledge to new students. Warriors raided and fought and feasted. Farmers planted and harvested. Children were born, grew up, had children of their own.

But in the south, something was stirring. Something that would change everything.

Rome.

By the second century BCE, Rome had become the dominant power in the Mediterranean. They’d conquered Italy, defeated Carthage, subjugated Greece. And now they were looking north. In 121 BCE, Rome conquered southern Gaul - the region along the Mediterranean coast. They called it Provincia Nostra, “our province.” We know it today as Provence.

For the Parisii, far to the north, this might have seemed distant. Southern Gaul was another world. But Rome had a way of expanding. What started as securing a province became establishing trade relations with neighboring tribes, which became intervention in tribal disputes, which became military campaigns, which became conquest.

The Gallic tribes watched this with growing alarm. Some tribes tried to ally with Rome, hoping to use Roman power against their enemies. Other tribes resisted. But they couldn’t unite. Remember that fierce independence I mentioned earlier? It was killing them. Dozens of tribes, each proud, each unwilling to submit to anyone else’s leadership, facing an enemy that was unified under a single command.

In 58 BCE, everything accelerated. A Roman general named Gaius Julius Caesar arrived in Gaul as governor. Caesar. We know that name. But in 58 BCE, he was just an ambitious politician with debts to pay and glory to win. He saw Gaul as his opportunity.

Caesar’s own writings - his “Commentaries on the Gallic Wars” - are one of our main sources for this period. But remember, Caesar was writing propaganda, justifying his actions to an audience back in Rome. He portrayed himself as a protector of civilized Gauls against barbarian invaders, as a reluctant warrior forced to defend Roman interests. The reality was more complicated. Caesar wanted conquest. He wanted victory. He wanted the wealth and prestige that would make him the most powerful man in Rome.

The Parisii watched as, one by one, tribes fell to Rome. The Helvetii, crushed as they tried to migrate to new lands. The Germanic tribes under Ariovistus, defeated in battle. Tribes that had seemed powerful, invincible even, humbled by Roman legions.

The legions. This was Rome’s great advantage. Not individual warrior prowess - there, the Gauls could match or exceed them. But organization. Discipline. Tactics. The legions fought as a unified machine. Thousands of soldiers moving in formation, shields locked, working together. Against warriors who fought as individuals, who valued personal glory above all, the legions were devastatingly effective.

By 53 BCE, much of Gaul was under Roman control or influence. Caesar had campaigned across the region, accepting the surrender of tribe after tribe. Some had fought and lost. Others had submitted without battle, hoping for better terms.

But submission wasn’t the same as acceptance. Beneath the surface, resentment simmered. The Gallic tribes hadn’t forgotten who they were. They hadn’t forgotten their freedom.

PART SIX

In the winter of 53-52 BCE, something happened that changed everything. The spark was the execution of several Gallic leaders by Caesar’s officers. The tinderbox was years of accumulated grievances. And the fire that resulted would nearly drive Rome from Gaul entirely.

His name was Vercingetorix. A young aristocrat from the Arverni tribe, one of the most powerful in central Gaul. Vercingetorix did something that had seemed impossible - he united the Gallic tribes. Not all of them, but enough. Tribe after tribe pledged to join him, to fight together, to drive out the Romans.

The Parisii joined the revolt.

Think about what that meant. The Parisii chiefs - whose names we don’t know, whose faces we can’t picture - made a choice. They could have stayed neutral, stayed safe. They could have maintained their arrangement with Rome. Instead, they committed their warriors to Vercingetorix’s army. They chose resistance over submission.

NARRATOR: Vercingetorix proved to be a brilliant commander. He understood that the Gauls couldn’t beat Rome in open battle - the legions were too disciplined, too well-organized. So he adopted a strategy of scorched earth. Deny the Romans supplies. Burn your own villages if necessary to keep them from Roman hands. Harass them with cavalry, raid their supply lines, make them bleed.

And it was working. Caesar found himself in desperate situations, his army hungry, his supply lines stretched. Vercingetorix was winning.

But then came Alesia.

Alesia was a hillfort in the territory of the Mandubii tribe. Vercingetorix withdrew there with his army, expecting reinforcements from allied tribes. Caesar surrounded it with siege works - walls and ditches designed to keep the Gauls trapped inside.

And then Caesar did something audacious. He built a second set of walls facing outward. He was going to trap Vercingetorix inside while also defending against the relief army he knew was coming.

And that relief army came. Tens of thousands of Gallic warriors from across Gaul, including Parisii fighters. The largest Gallic army ever assembled, gathered to save Vercingetorix and break Caesar’s siege.

The battle that followed was one of the most dramatic in ancient history. The Gauls attacked from inside and outside simultaneously, trying to crush the Romans between two forces. For a time, it seemed they might succeed.

But the legions held. And in the end, the Gallic relief force broke and fled. Vercingetorix, seeing that the cause was lost, surrendered himself to spare his remaining men.

The Great Revolt was over.

The Parisii warriors who survived the battle returned home. Returned to villages that had sent fathers and sons to war. Returned to a world that was about to change forever.

Because Caesar’s patience was exhausted. The time for lenient terms was over. Gaul would be brought to heel completely, utterly. The old way of life - the fierce independence, the tribal autonomy - was finished.

Picture the Seine again. The same river flowing through the same landscape. But everything else was different. Roman soldiers patrolled the riverbanks now. Roman engineers surveyed the islands, planning where to build. Roman merchants calculated profits. Roman administrators took censuses, assessed taxes, redistributed land.

The Parisii were still there. But their world - the world of the druids and sacred groves, of independent chiefs and gold torcs, of tribes that answered to no one - that world was ending.

In its place, something new was coming.

A Roman city. Orderly streets laid out in a grid. Stone buildings and public baths. Temples to Roman gods standing where sacred groves once grew. A city that would be called Lutetia Parisiorum - Lutetia of the Parisii.

The people who gave Paris its name were about to watch their identity transform, dissolve, merge into something new. The Parisii as a distinct people would fade into history within a few generations. But their name - their name would endure.

The Romans were coming to the banks of the Seine. And nothing would ever be the same.

Next time, on the History of Paris: the birth of Lutetia. How Rome transformed a Celtic settlement into a city. What happened to the Parisii people. And how the seeds of Paris were planted in the ruins of the old world.

Thank you for listening.