Although the history of Paris spans millennia, 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 (governing the
Seine ) afterwards. The office of mayor of Paris existed for brief periods during the 18th and 19th centuries, but was not an institution of government before 1977. From the creation of the mayoral office in 1977 until 2019, Paris functioned as both a and as a , and had a unique method for governing both; the Council of Paris, with the Mayor of Paris as its president, met either as a municipal council () or as a departmental council ( or ) depending on the issue to be debated. In 2017, the
National Assembly passed a law merging the functions of the commune and department into the City of Paris (), which came into effect on 1 January 2019. The modern administrative organization of Paris still retains some traces of its previous incarnation as the government of the Seine . France's national government still controls the
Paris Police Prefecture (), which also has authority over the
Paris Fire Brigade, for example, and has jurisdiction extending to the ('small corona' or 'halo') of Paris, the three bordering (
Seine-Saint-Denis,
Hauts de Seine, and
Val de Marne) for some operations such as
fire protection and rescue operations. Paris has no municipal police force, although it does have its own brigade of
traffic wardens. ==Electoral system and composition==