But Paris has never been run by a woman, with les Parisiennes confined to a largely decorative role while men get on with the serious business of urban planning.
Now the city is in for a shock. Its next boss is almost certain to be female for the first time in its 2000-year history. All the candidates to succeed Bertrand Delanoe, the socialist Mayor - or at least all the serious ones - are women who have fought their way through the hornets' nest of Parisian politics.
Their emergence has been hailed as a sign of deep change in a country that has long been a bastion of sexism in public life.
The race appears to be a consequence of the specifics of Parisian demography, and notably the rise of bourgeois bohemians - or Bobos - with their fat wallets and avant-garde aspirations. For them, a woman mayor would be a statement of modernity.
The favourite in next year's mayoral election is Mr Delanoe's deputy, Anne Hidalgo, 53, who has long had backroom roles within the council and is now all but certain of being made the socialist candidate.
Her main rival is Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, 39, a former ecology minister who left her rivals in the centre-right in the starting blocks when she announced her intention to run. They wailed and threatened to teach her a lesson, then realised they had no option but to support NKM, as she is known.
The aristocrat Ms Kosciusko-Morizet is odds-on to win the centre-right primary to choose a candidate for Paris, although she will first have to see off Rachida Dati, France's feisty former justice minister. Ms Dati, 47 - one of very few second-generation immigrants to reach the upper echelons of French politics - is probably too divisive to win, with her "extraordinary capacity for destruction", says political commentator Thierry de Cabarrus.
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