Land Acknowledgment: Paris, France

Today, we gather in what we call “Paris” to acknowledge and to honor the land on which we stand, which previously was known by its original inhabitants as…well, we don’t know, because they were Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and they lived 10,000 years ago.

Lascaux Cave Painting: JoJan, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

These noble people faded into the mists of time, when farmers and sheepherders from the east gradually displaced them, not necessarily peacefully,¹ and settled the area in about 4,500 BCE.²

Next came the first people for whom we have a tribal name: the Parisii, a Celtic tribe who inhabited the region starting in about 200 BCE. They made lovely gold coins.

Parisii coin. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

What goes around comes around, though: In 52 BCE, the Romans moved in and colonized them. The Parisii burned down their own homes and villages rather than let the Romans have them. But the Romans conquered the Parisii anyway, took their lands, and stayed for hundreds of years, naming the city Lutetia and doing the usual Roman things, like building aquaducts and amphitheaters, like this one, which is still in Paris today:

The Amphitheater at Lutetia. Mbzt, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Then eventually the Roman Empire’s power diminished, too. The last Roman general who had power in the region, Syagrius, was defeated by Clovis, king of the Franks— those colonizers-of-the-colonizers-of-the-colonizers-of-the-colonizers— in the Battle of Soissons in 486 CE. Although the Franks were a Germanic tribe who came originally from the regions now called Belgium and the Netherlands, Clovis made Paris his new capital and ruled a unified Gaul. He was a pagan, but married a Christian princess and later converted and was baptized, in an act of religious colonization. 

Clovis, King of the Franks, being baptized. Public domain.

Although Clovis established centuries of Frankish rule, the Franks were not without their own problems. In 845 CE, five thousand Vikings invaded Paris, pillaging and plundering the city, bringing plague with them. They sacrificed 111 Frankish prisoners to Odin, the Norse god of death and war, in an effort to get rid of the plague, but only after the Vikings were convinced to pray to the Christian God did the plague subside. (Over the next couple centuries, the Vikings would give up their own gods, religion, and traditions and adopt Christianity altogether.)

The Vikings left Paris after being given nearly three tons of silver and gold, but they came back and invaded and pillaged Paris many more times over the next 40 years, demanding more gold each time: This culminated in tens of thousands of Vikings laying siege to Paris for nearly a year in 885-886.  

Viking Siege of Paris. Public domain.

After the Vikings stopped plundering, things settled down for a bit and then a lot of stuff happened, like the establishment of universities and cathedrals, and somewhere in there, “the Franks” eventually developed into the nation of  “France.” 

Notre Dame Cathedral. Most of its construction took place from 1163 to 1260. MathKnight, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

But after a few hundred years of flourishing came the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) in which the English invaded France again and again:

“Beginning in 1346, the English army of King Edward III pillaged the countryside outside the walls of Paris. Ten years later, when King John II was captured by the English at the Battle of Poitiers…mercenary soliders looted and ravaged the surroundings of Paris.

“More misfortunes followed. An English army…invaded Paris during the night of 28–29 May 1418. Beginning in 1422, the north of France was ruled by [England]… During her unsuccessful attempt at taking Paris on 8 September 1429, Joan of Arc was wounded …not far from the Louvre…

“…Paris fell to the English between 1420–1436… When the English left Paris in 1436, [the French king] Charles VII was finally able to return. Many areas of the capital of his kingdom were in ruins, and …half the population had left the city.”

The Battle of Agincourt (public domain). More than 40% of the French nobility died in this battle, and shortly after, the English king was proclaimed King of France.

After the English left, things were quiet for another hundred years or so, until the general widespread slaughter of Protestants began in the mid- to late 1500s. Henry of Navarre, a Protestant king, decided to lay siege to Paris to stop the massacre. He failed —but he converted to Catholicism and was crowned King of France. Go figure.

Paris became the cultural capital of Europe, and then came the Enlightenment, blah blah blah. There was a lot of talk about how to improve government and society for everyone. In the late 1700s there was the Revolution of course, but that was just the silly French against themselves.

After that, the Prussians were bothersome from time to time, threatening to invade and bombing things a little bit, but the next major occupation came when Germany occupied France from 1940 to 1944. Hitler especially hated the French after the Treaty of Versailles (a particularly brutal peace agreement which humiliated and weakened Germany after World War I). He was therefore keen to visit Paris after it fell to the Germans. His first stop was to Napoleon’s grave, but no trip to Paris is complete without a visit to the Eiffel Tower.

Hitler in Paris. Public domain.

A few years later the Americans arrived in the Liberation of Paris, and although they weren’t a hostile occupying force, they hung out for a while too. They bought sexual favors from the local women with cigarettes, candy, and army rations, and they fathered little French babies.

American soldiers liberate Paris on a postage stamp. Public domain.

A US Army photographer kisses a random French baby during the Liberation of Paris. Public domain.

So, who are the people of Paris?

The people are “Parisian,” but what does that mean? The Parisians are a melange of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, Neolithic farmers, Celtic Parisii, Romans, Germanic Franks, Viking invaders, English invaders, German invaders, American liberators, all joined by a bunch of more recent immigrants from northern and sub-Saharan Africa.³

Whatever else you might say about the history of Paris, it’s surely unique, this unending series of historical conquests and mistreatment of one people by another, which is why we make this land acknowledgment today:

We honor and acknowledge the indigenous, noble, and peaceful Mesolithic hunter-gathers of Paris, who lived in harmony with nature and never did a single bad thing.

Just don’t ruin the moment by asking any questions about what happened to the Neanderthals.⁴

We honor all the ancestral stewards of this land on which we meet today and their descendants, who are living…well, they’re living where, exactly?

Everywhere. Nowhere.⁵

As we work to reduce the harm of Parisian cathedrals, museums, and haute couture, and the scourge of traffic and tourism across this land, we also acknowledge and work to dismantle the violence and repression done to the original indigenous peoples and cultures of Paris. 

We also would like to acknowledge that this land acknowledgment comprises the full extent of our gratitude to all those who came before us. 

For those who don’t get the hint: We’re not, you know, giving anything back to anyone. That would be expensive. 

1. As one article describes it, “Genetic studies have confirmed that [the farmers] interbred somewhat with the existing inhabitants of the region…, although evidence suggests that the relationship was not always peaceful…. Europe was transformed into agricultural communities, and [hunter-gatherers] were displaced to the margins.”

2. For the interested, this article describes the distinct ancestral populations of modern-day Europeans.

3. And that’s just Paris. We haven’t looked at the colonization history of the rest of France, with its Goths and Visigoths and Vandals and Normans and Burgundians and Ligurians and …many, many more.

4. The Neanderthals may be gone but their genes live on in about 1-2% of the DNA of each European. This DNA screams “J’accuse!” Or it would if the Neanderthals spoke the language of their oppressors.

5. What happens to an ethnic group like the Parisii over time? What happened to their language, their culture? What is the right word for it?