Which city in France has the second highest population?

Marseille is the French city with the second-highest population, after Paris.

That ranking refers to population within the city proper, or commune. Marseille had about 886,000 inhabitants in 2023, compared with Paris’s more than two million residents. It is therefore France’s second-most populous municipality and the largest city in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region.

Marseille is also one of France’s oldest cities. Greek settlers from Phocaea founded it as Massalia around 600 B.C. Its position on the Mediterranean made the Old Port a major centre for trade, migration and naval activity. Today, the city remains an important commercial port and a gateway between France, the Mediterranean and North Africa.

A common source of confusion is the difference between city-proper, urban-area and metropolitan rankings. Marseille’s wider metropolitan region includes Aix-en-Provence and many surrounding municipalities, while Paris’s metropolitan area is defined differently. Depending on the boundary used, population rankings can look different; under the standard municipality comparison used by this question, Marseille is the clear second-place answer.