Council of Paris

The Council of Paris (Conseil de Paris) is the deliberative body responsible for the governing of Paris, the capital of France. It possesses simultaneously the powers of a Paris Municipal Council (Conseil municipal) and those of a General Council for the Département de Paris, as defined by the so-called PLM Law () of 1982 that redefined the governance of Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles. Paris is, in effect, the only territorial collectivity in France to be, at one time, a commune and a département (county, shire, or state), and this arrangement has been a fact even longer, since the passage of the law of 10 July 1964 which totally reorganized the Paris region.

The mayor of Paris presides over the Council of Paris and therefore holds in her hands the powers of mayor and of president of the departmental council. There are presently 163 councillors for Paris.

The Council of Paris is indirectly elected by the voters of the commune using a party-list proportional representation. The commune is divided into 20 municipal arrondissements (arrondissements municipaux), each of which directly elects a sector council (conseil d'arrondissement), which in turn elects an sector mayor (maire d'arrondissement) from amongst its members. No sector elects fewer than 10 members, and there are 354 sector members in total. A selection of members from each sector council — roughly half the number of seats of their respective sector councils, and the names at the top of the lists in those sectors — form the 163-member municipal council (conseil municipal) called the Council of Paris (Conseil de Paris), the body which elects the mayor of Paris.

Although the history of Paris is long, that of its municipal government, in its present form, is less than half a century old. Paris and its environs were always governed directly by the highest French polity of the time: the Crown before the French Revolution, and a state-appointed préfet (governing the Seine département) afterwards. The office of mayor of Paris existed for brief periods during the 18th and 19th centuries, but it was not an institution of government before 1977.

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