Pictured postcard Paris. If President Nicolas Sarkozy gets his way, the city will undergo a transformation not seen since the 1850s.

SPRING … and so to Paris. Is there any city in the world more written about, more painted, more photographed, more visited or more famous?

For centuries, Paris has been on the frontline of fashion, art, architecture, literature and food.

In the week that President Nicolas Sarkozy went on French television news channels to promote his grand ideas for a new ‘greater Paris’, my wife, Suzanne, and I had been whiling away our time in some of those famous Parisian cafes on the Boulevard St Michel.

It’s more than 50 years since my first visit to Paris when, as one of a group of students from Elizabeth College, we were sent on a course at the Sorbonne University.

The very same bars and brasseries of the 1950s are still there on the famous boulevards.  So, too, are the numerous shops and bouquinistes which line the Left Bank of the Seine selling second-hand books, posters and artwork.

I searched out the old College Stanislas on the Rue Notre-Dame-Des-Champs where we stayed all those years ago.

It’s now the largest private school in France and boasts the likes of Charles de Gaulle, Christian Dior and Jacques Cousteau as its former pupils.

College Stanislas is much the same as I remembered, as are the nearby imposing buildings of the Sorbonne where we went to lectures.

Part of the attraction of it for the 45 million tourists who visit the city every year, Paris is still the intoxicating place it’s been for as long as anyone can remember.

It underwent huge reconstruction 150 years ago when the civic planner Baron Haussmann, on the orders of Napoleon III, levelled vast areas of narrow streets and slums to make way for the grand boulevards, parks, railway stations and buildings which are so familiar today.

Not everything has stayed the same. The Eiffel Tower changed the skyline dramatically 120 years ago.

Every French president of recent years has wanted to leave a legacy in the form of a building.

Francois Mitterand planted his glass pyramid outside the Palais de Louvre.

The modernistic arts complex, pipes and air-conditioning ducts exposed for all to see, was the brainchild of Georges Pompidou.

Only slightly less controversial is Jacques Chirac’s riverside museum containing 300,000 artefacts of African and Asian culture.

What, though, are we to make of Sarkozy’s seeming support for the latest grandiose plans which even include extending Paris northwards via Rouen to the Channel port of Le Havre?

Sarkozy likes comparing himself with his forebear, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had similar ambitions and is claimed to have dreamed of ‘Paris-Rouen-Le Havre: one single city with the River Seine as its main road’.

Although thousands have been stolen or damaged, there are still 16,000 bicycles to hire in Paris as the mayor’s way of tackling the city’s traffic problem. (Picture by Bruce Parker, 0779275)

The problem Sarkozy is addressing is what to do with the dreadful immigrant suburbs outside the city of Paris itself, the tinderbox of rioting and looting by unemployed under-25s.

Tourists are mostly familiar with only the inner city of Paris, which hasn’t changed in size much since Haussmann. Its population of two million is eight times smaller than Berlin and 15 times smaller than Greater London.

The Ile de France, though, the area outside the Paris peripherique (equivalent to London’s M25), is one of the largest urban communities in Europe, with a population of 12 million.

Sarkozy wants to modernise and reorganise inner and outer Paris and bring them together into one huge economic unit ‘playing a role in the European and the world economy’ and a solution to the high unemployment and high crime rates of marginalised mobs in the outer banlieues.

To alleviate current accommodation shortages, the President also appears to have given the green light to once-forbidden skyscrapers in the city.

‘Why ban building towers if they are beautiful, if they fit harmoniously into the landscape?’ he asked.

Whatever the merits or otherwise of these latest plans for the French capital, one scheme, in operation for two years now, is being hailed as a success – even if a qualified one.

To solve decades of mounting traffic problems in the city, free bicycles were introduced in July 2007.

A computer-controlled rental system allows you to pick up and return any of the thousands of three-speed unisex cycles stationed at points all over the city. Journeys under half-an-hour are free, the cost of a day’s hire around £1 and a week, £5.

Although thousands of the bicycles have been stolen or damaged since the scheme started, 16,000 bicycles are successfully in circulation. Now, the Mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, even hopes to extend the scheme to self-service electric cars.

So, it’s the changing face of romantic Paris, City of Light – let’s hope the diminutive Nicolas Sarkozy, with all his skyscraper plans, can just keep his feet on the ground.