For centuries Paris has been the home and frequently the subject matter of the most important novelists, poets, and playwrights in French literature, including Moliere, Voltaire, Balzac, Victor Hugo and Zola and Proust.

He was raised to the title of Emperor by his soldiers in 360, and thereafter spent his summers on military campaigns in different parts of the Empire, and his winters in Paris, in the Roman governor's palace on the Ile de la Cité where the Conciergerie is located today.

His writings were mostly philosophical, largely criticism of the new religion of Christianity, which had recently appeared in Gaul, but he also wrote about nature, geography, and his philosophy of life.

One of the most important new schools was established on the left bank at the Abbey of Sainte-Genevieve; its teachers included the scholar Pierre Abelard (1079–1142), who taught five thousand students.

Erasmus also taught and wrote at the university, as did the religious reformer John Calvin, before he was forced to flee to Switzerland because his writings were considered heretical.

As the Middle Ages progressed and the illuminated works became more valuable, they began to be produced by noted artists in workshops for the court and for the wealthy merchants.

One notable example is the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux, made by Jean Pucelle for the third wife of Charles IV between 1325 and 1328, now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

The most prominent Paris novelist of the period was François Rabelais (1494–1553) best known for his novel Gargantua and Pantagruel, which gave the word "Gargantuan" to the English language.

He formed a literary circle with Joachim du Bellay and a group of other poets, and published a series of books of poetry on love and romance and a volume of erotic poems.

Love revealed to you the secrets of my heart, And how much pain had filled my soul...)[10] Of the prominent French writers of the century, Moliere, the Marquise de Sévigné, La Rochefoucauld and Charles Perrault were all born in Paris.

Pierre Corneille was from Normandy, Descartes from the Touraine, Jean Racine and La Fontaine from Champagne; they were all drawn to Paris by the publishing houses, theaters, and literary salons of the city.

This happened to one of the founding members of the academy, Roger de Bussy-Rabutin, who in 1660 wrote a scandalous satirical novel about life at the court of Louis XIV, which was circulated privately to amuse his friends.

Of the great French writers of the 18th century, the two most famous, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, spent most of their careers far from Paris, either in exile or under strict censorship.

His 1748 book The Spirit of the Laws, proposing a separation of powers between the executive, legislature and courts, had an enormous impact on political thinking outside France, especially in England and the United States.

[12] The Revolution brought an abrupt end to the literary salons, as the aristocrats were executed or forced into exile, and some of the most promising writers, including the poet André Chenier, went to the guillotine.

Freedom of the press had been proclaimed at the beginning of the Revolution, but had quickly disappeared during the Reign of Terror, and was not restored by the succeeding governments or by Napoleon.

"[13] Supervision of the press was the responsibility of the Ministry of the Police, which had separate bureaus to oversee newspapers, plays, publishers and printers, and bookstores.

He began the Restoration as a committed defender of the Catholic faith and royalist, but gradually moved into the liberal opposition and became a fervent supporter of freedom of speech.

His novel Les Misérables was published in Paris in April and May 1862, and was a huge popular success, though it was criticized by Gustave Flaubert who said he found "no truth or greatness in it.

"[16] Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) left Paris in 1851, just before the Empire, partly because of political differences with Napoleon III, who was then Prince-President, but largely because he was deeply in debt and wanted to avoid creditors.

When Hugo died May 28, 1885, at the age of eighty-three, hundreds of thousands of Parisians lined the streets to pay tribute as his coffin was taken to the Panthéon, on 1 June 1885.

He described in intimate details the workings of Paris department stores, markets, apartment buildings and other institutions, and the lives of the Parisians.

Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) moved to Paris in 1881 and worked as a clerk for the French Navy, then for the Ministry of Public Education, as he wrote short stories and novels at a furious pace.

He died in the shabby Hotel d'Alsace (now called L'Hôtel) on the rue des Beaux-Arts on the Left Bank, after pointing at the wallpaper and declaring "One of us has got to go."

Ernest Hemingway, hired as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, moved to Paris with his first wife Hadley in 1922 and made his first residence in a small upstairs apartment at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine.

Dutch author E. du Perron spent most of 1922 in Paris, where he mingled with the literary and artistic crowds of Montmartre, and wrote his first novel.

Hemingway first met Ezra Pound here, and Beach published Jame's Joyce's Ulysses, which was banned in Britain and the United States.

The literary life of Paris after World War II was also centered in Saint-Germain-des-Prés on the left bank, where there was a large concentration of book stores and publishing houses.

[19] The legends of Saint-Germain-des-Pres describe him a frequenting the jazz clubs of the neighborhood, but Sartre wrote that he rarely visited them, finding them too crowded, uncomfortable and loud.

[20] Simone de Beauvoir (1902–1986), the lifelong companion of Sartre, was another important literary figure, both as an early proponent of feminism and as an autobiographer and novelist.