The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space

The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space

The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space

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Sewers are perhaps the most enigmatic of urban infrastructures. Most citizens of modern cities are aware of their existence, yet few could accurately describe their layout or appearance. This paper takes as its starting point a key moment in the cultural representation of urban space: the photographs of the Paris sewers taken by Félix Nadar in the early 1860s. These images capture a dramatic transformation in subterranean Paris, initiated in the early 1850s by Baron Georges Haussmann and his chief engineer Eugène Belgrand as part of the comprehensive reconstruction of the city’s infrastructure during the Second Empire of Napoléon III. This paper argues, however, that with respect to the underground city, we cannot consider the Haussmann era to be the unproblematic epitome of modernity. The reconstruction of subterranean Paris revealed a series of tensions that were only to be resolved in the post-Haussmann era in response to the combined influence of growing water usage, the persistent threat of disease and changing conceptions of public health policy. It is concluded that the flow of water in Second Empire Paris is best conceived as a transitional phase in the radical reworking of relations between the body and urban form engendered by the process of capitalist urbanization.

key words sewers water modernity urban planning nineteenth-century Paris Félix Nadar Baron Georges Haussmann

Department of Geography, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AP email: m.gandy@ucl.ac.uk

revised manuscript received 21 July 1998

Introduction

. . . un enchevêtrement difforme de sentines et boyaux à défier l’imagination de Piranèse. (Félix Nadar)1

Les grands égouts de Paris ont toujours préoccupé l’attention publique et ont été honorés des plus illustres visites. Il n’est pas un souverain étranger, pas un personnage important qui ait quitté Paris sans avoir visité les collecteurs. (Eugène Belgrand)2

The rebuilding of Paris between 1850 and 1870 is a crucial moment in urban history. The attempt by Emperor Napoléon III and his Préfet de la Seine, Baron Georges Haussmann, to rationalize urban space is one of the formative legacies in the devel- opment of urban planning. For Frederick Hiorns, the Second Empire reconstruction of Paris was a time in which,

Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 24 23–44 1999 ISSN 0020-2754 © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute

the evils of long-continued civic neglect were redeemed and Paris placed in the forefront of modern cities by imaginative reforms applied to the most onerous of human problems.3

Edmund Bacon echoed similar sentiments in describing the new spatial structure of Paris as a

reversal in the direction of energy, from the outward explosion of avenues and palaces of the Louis Kings to the implosion of the connecting and life-giving boulevards of Haussmann.4

For many authors, the Haussmann era has been read as axiomatic of modernity; yet the reality is far more complex, involving an interweaving of ideas and developments spanning both modern and pre- modern conceptions of urban form.5 In fact, as this paper will show, the flow of water in Paris did not

of British Geographers) 1999

Matthew Gandy24

become modern, in the sense that we would now recognize, until after the fall of the Second Empire, with new legislative developments in the 1890s in response to rising water usage and the continuing threat of cholera. One of the least studied of these extensive public works projects is the reconstruc- tion of the Paris sewers.6 This paper describes how the reorganization of subterranean Paris held implications far beyond the modernization of drainage and sanitation. Metaphors of progress and the application of scientific knowledge became entangled with wider cultural and political developments surrounding the transformation of nineteenth-century Paris.

Sewers enjoy a special place in the pantheon of urban mythology. They are one of the most intricate and multi-layered symbols and structures underlying the modern metropolis, and form a poignant point of reference for the complex lab- yrinth of connections that bind urban space into a coherent whole. Sewers have long been used as metaphors for the hidden worlds of crime, poverty and political insurrection, and there is a rich legacy of representations ranging across literature, cinema and music.7 In Les misérables, perhaps the most famous literary evocation of the underground city, Victor Hugo depicted the Paris sewers of the 1830s as ‘the evil in the city’s blood’, a place where the poor and the outcasts of society lurked together as a threatening formation for the world above ground.8 This paper develops a rather different perspective from the genre of urban horror, by emphasizing how sewers have also been portrayed as symbols of progress. Sewers are considered in this context as an integral element in the emer- gence of what the architectural historian Anthony Vidler terms the ‘technical ideology of metropo- lis’.9 Just as sewers are repeatedly associated with dirt, danger and the unseen, they are also physical manifestations of new patterns of water usage, bodily hygiene and the progressive application of new advances in science and technology. Rosalind Williams traces a similar theme through her explo- ration of the symbolic and metaphorical meanings attached to underground technologies in modern societies. For Williams, the growing scientific and technological sophistication of the built environ- ment necessarily alters our relation with nature and the organic world. She emphasizes the poign- ancy of the vertical axis to our understanding of the cultural appropriation of urban technologies, since the subterranean environment is not

only a technological construct, but also ‘a mental landscape, a social terrain, and an ideological map’.10

The search for spatial order has been an integral element in the contradictory experience of moder- nity, yet, hidden within the more progressive con- ceptions of urban transformation lie the ideological trappings of imperial and pre-modern conceptions of social and elemental harmony. This paper argues that the process of ‘Haussmannization’ was predi- cated on a holistic conception of the relationship between the body and the city, which drew on a series of organic analogies to compare the new city with a healthy human body:

These underground galleries would be the organs of the metropolis and function like those of the human body without ever seeing the light of day. Pure and fresh water, along with light and heat, would circulate like the diverse fluids whose movement and replenish- ment sustain life itself. These liquids would work unseen and maintain public health without disrupting the smooth running of the city and without spoiling its exterior beauty.11

The material presented here, however, suggests that the circulatory dynamics of economic exchange were to overwhelm organic conceptions of urban order and institute a new set of relation- ships between nature and urban society. By tracing the history of water in urban space, we can begin to develop a fuller understanding of changing relations between the body and urban form under the impetus of capitalist urbanization. This inter- disciplinary task involves exploring changing relationships between the body, architecture and ideological conceptions of nature as part of a broader project to expand our understanding of modern cities and their cultural meaning.12

The paper begins with an examination of the photographs of the newly modernized Paris sewers, taken by Félix Nadar in the early 1860s. These images are used to introduce a series of ideas surrounding progress, modernity and the aesthetic representation of the modern city. It is suggested that Nadar’s photography, and his passionate advocacy of the progressive potential of techno- logical innovation in society, hold important implications for our understanding of the often-contradictory dynamics behind capitalist urbanization. Secondly, the reconstruction of the subterranean city is set in its broader political and historical context, in order to draw out some of the tensions inherent in the drive to modernize urban

The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space 25

space. It is argued that these contradictory dimen- sions to the control of water were only satisfac- torily resolved in the post-Haussmann era. Such complexities are traced to the rapid growth of Paris and the growing consumption of water for wash- ing and bathing in private dwellings, which led to a breakdown in pre-modern conceptions of the organic cycle linking the body and the city. The representation of riparian urban leisure in the art of Seurat is used to delineate the emergence of a distinctively ‘metropolitan’ experience of nature. Finally, the paper considers how the reconstruction of subterranean Paris involved the reworking of corporeal metaphors in the development of aes- thetic sensibilities towards urban infrastructure. These changes are related to wider developments in French society, including the sharpening sense of self-identity under modernity in the context of widening social and economic polarities across the city. It is suggested that the sewers form an endur- ing element of the ‘urban uncanny’, through their integral interrelationship with changing conceptions of bodily abjection and urban order.

Photographing the Paris sewers

Among the strangest images we have of nineteenth-century Paris are the underground photographs of Félix Nadar (1820–1910). The photographic legacy of Nadar provides a remark- able record of the complex and often contradictory interweaving of political, technological and scien- tific developments underlying the rebuilding of Second Empire Paris. Nadar was born Gaspard- Félix Tournachon in Paris in 1820, just two years before Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833) began the first experimentation with photography (using a bitumen ground technique on pewter and glass). Following a brief spell as a medical student in the late 1830s, Nadar began to devote increasing energy to literary and political pursuits. In the 1840s, Nadar worked on the republican daily Le Commerce and also as a cartoonist for the satirical journals Le Corsaire-Satan and La Silhouette.13 The political turmoil of 1848, and the subsequent coup that brought Napoléon III to power, were to have a decisive impact on Nadar, along with many of his contemporaries. With the utopian and revolution- ary Left greatly weakened, there was now a grow- ing divide between the romantic attachment to artisan labour and newer political ideas that

embraced technological change.14 Nadar looked increasingly to a dynamic and progressive combi- nation of science and politics as the most realistic means to transform society. In 1856, for example, he published a collection of stories, Quand j’étais étudiant, dedicated to the socialist writer George Sand. In these stories, he brought together a number of his main concerns: the power of science and medicine to dispel death, disease and ignor- ance; a sense of society in a state of rapid and chaotic change; and the power of reason to bring about both individual and collective advance- ment.15 Under the repressive regime of Napoléon III, Nadar turned increasingly to the use of satire and allegory as a vital means of expression under the tight censorship and surveillance of the time. He soon established his reputation as a novelist, journalist and caricaturist, and worked closely with the radical publisher Charles Philipon on his satirical papers La Caricature, Le Charivari and Le Petit Journal pour Rire.16

From the late 1840s onwards, Nadar began to take an increasing interest in photography. In 1854, he set up his own studio under the direction of Adolphe Bertsch and Camille d’Arnuad. The poor sales of his last major lithographic venture, the Panthéon, must also have encouraged Nadar to focus his energies on the new medium of pho- tography. Nadar’s reputation for portrait pho- tography developed rapidly, and he was soon able to charge some 100 francs a sitting: Charles Baudelaire, Claude Debussy, Gustave Doré, Hector Berlioz and many other leading cultural and politi- cal figures of the time had their portraits taken at his Paris studios.17 Nadar became convinced of the status of photography as a new art form equal to that of painting, which was, moreover, uniquely capable of capturing the ephemeral and fragmen- tary qualities of modern life. With photography, he was able to convey images with unprecedented speed and accuracy, introducing an extraordinarily intense kind of realism into the aesthetic represen- tation of Paris and its people.18 By the late 1850s, he had begun to gain international critical acclaim for his work, and, in 1858, filed a patent for the first aerial photography based on a series of urban panoramas taken from a hot air balloon.19

In 1861, Nadar sought to expand the medium of photography radically by transcending any reliance on natural light. In order to do this, he began making a series of underground photo- graphs using electric light. The first outcome of this

Empire.

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experimentation was 73 views of the Paris cata- combs, taken in 1861–62. In the winter of 1864–65, Nadar extended his underground work further by producing 23 photographs of the Paris sewers under the invitation of the city’s chief water engineer, Eugène Belgrand (1810–78), who had been appointed by Haussmann in 1853 to oversee the reconstruction of the city’s sewer system. The extension of photography into the underground city not only radically extended the possibilities for the meticulous visual documentation of hitherto unknown places and spaces, but reinforced the ambiguous role of modern technologies in provid- ing an illusion of complete control and comprehen- sion of complex urban societies. In photographing the sewers, Nadar contributed powerfully to new ways of seeing and understanding the city, by challenging a series of metaphorical axes ranging across light, cleanliness, verticality, knowledge and control.

When first shown, these unfamiliar images intrigued and astounded the French public. A com- pletely new and strange world lying beneath the streets of Paris had been revealed: not a threaten- ing and chaotic mass of tunnels, but a clean, well-lit network of structures at the leading edge of engineering science. In Figure 1, we can observe a spacious, symmetrical and well-lit tunnel amen- able to easy movement, observation and control. In Figure 2, a mannequin is shown seated next to an example of the new sewer technologies introduced as part of the modernization programme (the lengthy 18-minute exposure time precluded the inclusion of a real worker). Before their improve- ment, the dominant imagery of the Paris sewers had been of an unexplored urban realm shrouded in darkness and mystery, a threatening maze beneath the streets of the city. Yet, as Maria Hambourg suggests,

in the photographs of the vaulted sewers, which might have conveyed the horrors of Piranesi’s prisons, one sees rational structure and channelled cleanliness.20

The sewers were no longer to be feared, but rather venerated and enjoyed as symbols of progress. Victor Hugo, for example, was quick to recognize that his imaginary representation of the 1830s sewers bore little resemblance to the new reality of the 1860s: ‘The sewer today has a certain official aspect’, he reflected, ‘Words referring to it in administrative language are lofty and dignified . . . Nothing is left of the cloaca’s primitive ferocity’.21

With the introduction of electric light into the sewers, the ‘spectacle of enlightenment’ now extended both above and below ground,22 as the new boulevards and shopping arcades had their subterranean counterpart beneath the city streets. The transformation of Paris made urban space comprehensible and visible to the public, thereby dispelling much of the opacity and heterogeneity of the pre-modern city. The Paris sewers were rapidly acknowledged to be ‘unequalled in any other city in the world’, and attracted a steady stream of international delegations of engineers and urban planners.23 The subterranean photo- graphs of Nadar played a key role in fostering the growing popularity of sewers and catacombs with middle-class Parisians, and, from the 1867 Expo- sition onwards, the city authorities began offering public tours of underground Paris.24 Yet, as David Pinkney wryly notes, most visitors to the Paris sewers over the years have probably been disappointed to find,

not the dark and dangerous caverns through which Jean Valjean made his perilous escape in 1832 but the spacious, clean and well-lighted galleries of the Second

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From city of mud to city of light

In order to understand the significance of Nadar’s images, we need to explore the background to the transformation of the Paris sewer system. If, as Raymond Williams has suggested, the modern city becomes ‘the physical embodiment of a decisive modern consciousness’, then what do the Paris sewers tell us about changes in nineteenth-century French society?26 The historical context to the reconstruction of Paris is well known. As early as 1827, an official report on the city’s health had noted how ‘the sense of smell gives notice that you are approaching the first city in the world, before your eyes could see the tips of its monuments’.27

The population of Paris had increased from 786 000 in 1831 to over 1 000 000 by 1846. Growing conges- tion threatened to bring social and economic life to a standstill. The devastating cholera epidemics of 1832–35 and 1848–49 had spread panic in rich and poor quarters alike. And, by 1848, the Paris economy was also facing a deep downturn, a major factor behind the political turmoil that was to usher in the new regime of Napoléon III.28

The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space 27

Figure 1 ‘The sewers’ Félix Nadar (1864–65) (Courtesy of the Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques et des Sites, Paris)

In June 1853, less than a year after his successful coup d’état, Emperor Napoléon III appointed Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann as Préfet de la Seine, with responsibility for the reconstruction of Paris. Before his appointment, Haussmann had already acquired extensive public service in Vienne, the Gironde and the Var. More critically, though, he had lent vociferous political support to Napoléon III and closely shared his republican ideals, rooted in a powerful role for the French state.29 Since no accurate map of Paris existed, one of Haussmann’s first tasks was to undertake a detailed survey and

triangulation of the whole city. Napoléon III envis- aged that the new Paris would be an imposing ‘city of marble’, worthy of comparison with Augustan Rome, and a lasting symbol of French international power and imperial ambition.30 Haussmann was charged with the responsibility for transforming a congested medieval city into a dynamic modern metropolis. The changing role of Paris within the newly integrated national economy demanded an urgent transformation in the physical structure of the city. Central to the modernization of Paris lay a combination of faith in the application of scientific

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Figure 2 ‘The sewers (sluice system)’ Félix Nadar (1864–65) (Courtesy of the Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques et des Sites, Paris)

principles with a programme of centrally directed public investment. The underused capital and labour behind the economic depression and politi- cal violence of 1848 were to be channelled into the reconstruction of the built environment through a deficit-financed economic strategy, rooted in Saint-Simonian ideas.31

By 1870, Haussmann had carried out some 2·5 billion francs-worth of public works through inno- vative debt financing equivalent to approximately 44 times the total city expenditure on all services in 1851.32 At the time of peak reconstruction, one in

five Parisian workers were employed in construc- tion activity, and one-fifth of the Paris streets were rebuilt.33 The programme of reconstruction required not only financial innovation but also a radical reorganization in the balance of political and economic forces in the city. Second Empire Paris was to grow out of the articulation of a general interest resting on the imposition of a new form of capitalist rationality, which was ‘alien to the privatism of traditional property owners’.34

For Anthony Saalman, the reconstruction of Second Empire Paris was the most influential

The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space 29

Figure 3 The Paris sewer network in 1837 Source: Belgrand E 1887 Les travaux souterrains de Paris V: les égouts et les vidanges Dunod, Paris

nineteenth-century solution to the problem of rapid urbanization. The transformation of Paris gave the bourgeois revolution its most radical architectural expression of any European city. The reconstruction reflected the needs of an urban mercantile class who faced the consequences of modernity not by an escape into romantic anti-urbanism, but through a celebration of the possibilities for the techno- logical mastery of urban space and the search for progressively greater degrees of social and spatial order.35 Yet, as we shall see, these new discourses of order and control both reflected and constituted emerging tensions and inequalities, driven by the processes of capitalist urbanization.

When Haussmann and Belgrand began their work in the early 1850s, the city was still served by a medieval network of sewers clustered around the city centre (Figure 3).36 The preliminary investiga- tions of Haussmann and his chief engineer Eugène Belgrand soon revealed a series of design faults in the existing sewer system. The size of the sewers had been determined by the height of a sewerman, and they were inadequate for handling large quan- tities of water after heavy rain. The layout, elev- ation and gradient of the sewers were unable to prevent water from periodically flooding onto the

streets, and much of the growing city was not even integrated into the existing drainage system.37

In 1857, the sewer reconstruction programme began in earnest. The first major project was the construction of the Collecteur Général d’Asnières, a new elliptical structure approximately 14 feet high and 18 feet wide. The purpose of this complex channel, far bigger then the existing Collecteur de la Rue de Rivoli, was to ensure that waste waters would be diverted into the River Seine down- stream of the city.38 Both Haussmann and Belgrand believed that a modern sewer system should, as far as possible, be mechanically cleaned, in order to eliminate the need for dangerous and degrading human labour (the sewers had hitherto been cleaned by hand using the most rudimentary of tools). Their conception of spatial rationalization thus extended to the application of new labour practices, as well as to the use of the latest advances in the engineering and empirical sci- ences. The most significant technological achieve- ment of all, however, which effectively completed the major part of the new sewer system, was the construction of a vast siphon under the Seine in 1868, in order to connect the two sections of the Collecteur de la Bièvre.39 By 1870, the city was

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Figure 4 Paris sewers built between 1856 and 1878 Source: Belgrand Les travaux souterrains de Paris V op cit

served by a network of 348 miles of sewers – a virtual fourfold increase on twenty years earlier (Figure 4).

But what were these new sewers actually for? When the reconstruction of the sewers began in the 1850s, it was assumed that only limited quantities of human faeces from individual homes would enter the sewer system (only a fifth of private dwellings were connected at this time), and that there would be a continuation in the work of night-soil collectors.40 The initial scope of the reconstruction was thus concerned primarily with the drainage of storm waters; however, the steady increase in personal water consumption unsettled this conception of the public works that would be required. Haussmann was reluctant to allow any human faeces to enter the magnificent collecting channels of the new sewer system, and only did so under intense pressure from the city’s municipal authorities.41 The desire to separate ‘clean’ storm water from ‘dirty’ human waste was integral to Haussmann’s conception of an orderly flow of water through urban space. His objections to human excrement entering the sewer system were not only related to the contamination of the under- ground city; he feared that the dilution of human

waste in water would reduce its value as a ferti- lizer, and thereby disrupt the organic economy of the city.42 Human faeces, collected as night-soil, had long been used profitably in northern France as a fertilizer for agriculture, and in the manufac- ture of saltpetre for gunpowder, thereby allowing a cyclical integration of bodily functions into the regional economy.43

Haussmann was not alone in his desire to sepa- rate the drainage of storm water from the continu- ing reliance on cesspits for human waste. In the 1850s, opposition to the connection of sewers to individual homes came from various quarters. A vociferous source of hostility were the cesspool cleaning companies, who feared that they would be ruined by alternative means of treating waste water. The city itself also made money out of night-soil collection and the processing operations at Montfaucon and Boncy, and therefore favoured a continuation in existing arrangements.44 The users of night soil in agriculture also drew attention to the declining nitrogen content caused by the greater mixing of faeces with water. Consequently, the lowest-value material was being collected from the richer parts of the city where the use of water closets was gaining popularity. Before the

The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space 31

extensive application of deficit-financing for public works, there was also concern as to how the costs of sewer construction would be spread, since only a third of dwellings were directly supplied with running water.45

In the 1860s, an apparent compromise was reached by allowing human faeces to enter parts of the sewer system and diverting this water for agricultural use. The leading city engineer, A A Mille, successfully used sewer water for the irri- gation and fertilization of vegetables in the fields of Clichy and Gennevilliers near the city’s main sewage outlets. He advocated the use of the same sewers for the handling of storm water and human waste, based on his knowledge of sanitary improvements carried out in England. However, this solution met with official resistance in Paris, where most engineers continued to insist on just two options: either a separate sewer system for human waste or an improvement in night-soil collection.46 In nineteenth-century Amsterdam, for example, the Lieurnur sewer system had been adopted, with separate networks for storm water and human waste, but this was to be rejected in Paris on the grounds of cost.47 Property owners fiercely resisted higher taxes for sewer construc- tion, as well as the construction of impermeable cesspools to replace the fosses à fond perdu that seeped their contents into the subsoil. Landlords continued to eschew any connection to piped water supplies, despite the free installation of rising mains from 1881, because increased water usage would necessitate the reconstruction and more frequent emptying of cesspools if their prop- erties remained separate from the sewer system. Powerful resistance to draining human waste into the Seine also came from the ‘fanatics of Seine water’, who advocated the continuing use of the river for drinking water, along with Pasteur and other influential microbiologists, who feared the public health effects of contaminating the Seine with cholera and typhoid.48 What was distinctive, however, about the immediate post-Haussmann era was the co-existence of a number of competing conceptions of the most appropriate means to regulate the flow of water in the city.

It was not until 1894 that the link between private dwellings and the sewer system was finally made obligatory, as rising water usage (which doubled between 1870 and 1890, despite the recal- citrance of private landlords) and the cholera epi- demics of 1884 and 1892 eventually overwhelmed

the traditional reliance on cesspools.49 The fact that tenants themselves were, in increasing numbers, seeking out properties that were connected to the city’s water and sewer system must also have increased the pressure to complete the moderniz- ation of urban infrastructure.50 Furthermore, tech- nical and scientific opinion was beginning to shift decisively towards the tout à l’égout solution, in recognition that combined sewers for storm water and human waste were increasingly being adopted by other European cities.51 By the end of the nineteenth century, the dual pressures of disease and growing water usage, along with the advent of inorganic fertilizers and growing public aversion to human waste, eventually overwhelmed the rem- nants of pre-modern conceptions of urban order and introduced a new set of relationships between water and urban society.52

Water, modernity and the bashful civic body

The eventual cross-connection of Haussmann’s storm sewers to accomodate human faeces, the tout à l’égout solution to public health, reflects a com- plex shift in attitudes towards the use of water. During the medieval and early modern period, there was little use of water in Europe for personal hygiene, and hence little need for sewers to drain water away from private dwellings. In the pre- modern period, the use of water for washing remained predominantly a collective endeavour, and was often therapeutic or recreational.53 Evi- dence suggests that group bathing in Europe began to decline from the fifteenth century onwards in the wake of the Counter-Reformation and chang- ing moral codes towards public nudity. In the eighteenth century, however, we find a rediscovery of bathing that undermined existing conceptions of the relationship between water and the body.54 The sensuous flow of water (and even the advocacy of cleanliness in readiness for sexual pleasure) struck at the heart of conflicting concerns with moral purity, hygiene and social order. Washing had long been associated with pagan sensuality in early Christian belief, and, for most of the nineteenth century, the bathroom was restricted to the homes of the rich, tourist hotels and luxury brothels. Consequently, the associations of water with opu- lence, debauchery and pre-revolutionary court society persisted into the modern period.55

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A decisive change occurred with what the cul- tural historian Alain Corbin terms the ‘olfactory revolution’, whereby the bourgeois sense of smell became newly sensitized to body odour, thus lead- ing to an increasing desire for private space. It was not so much that conditions had suddenly changed, but that there was a new intolerance under the sensory realignment of modernity.56 The emergence of new standards of cleanliness brought individuals into contact with their own bodily smells and contributed to the emergence of a ‘new narcissism’. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were firmly barred doors to washrooms and bathrooms and an elimination of the ‘old promis- cuity in defecation and the jumble of excremental odors’.57 As the places for washing and defecation became separated, this led to the increasingly com- plex design of private space and the interior of buildings.

During the later decades of the nineteenth cen- tury, more and more towns and cities across Europe became integrated into comprehensive water supply and sewerage systems, in order to accommodate the increasing demand for personal use of water.58 With the growing use of private washrooms, the smell of human excrement began to lose the last semblance of its rural associations with fertility: from now on it was to be indicative of disorder, decay and physical repulsion. This is reflected in a survey of Parisian smells published in 1881, which recorded that cesspits, refuse and sewers were the three most unpleasant odours, and that the proliferation of regulations for the con- struction and operation of cesspits had proved utterly futile in solving this problem.59 The new- found bashfulness towards bodily functions in bourgeois French society emphasized the associ- ation of sewers with excrement. With the growing involvement of the state, under the guise of public health reform, the management of excrement became an increasingly rationalized activity, result- ing in a steady decline in the use of cesspits, the activities of night-soil collectors and communal places for defecation. Henceforth, the ‘regimes of the alimentary’ were to be confined increasingly to domestic space under a new set of relation- ships between the body, technology and urban architecture.60

One of the consequences of the reconstruction of the sewer system was that all waste water was now discharged into the Seine at just two points along the river, Asnières and Saint-Denis. Unlike

contemporary integrated sewage treatment sys- tems, Haussmann’s sewers were only intended for storm water and lacked any means for pollution control. With the increasing quantities of human and industrial wastes entering the sewer system, these two outlets left stretches of the river ‘a cauldron of bacteria, infection and disease’.61 With declining water quality, the irrigation systems at Gennevilliers were abandoned and the pre-modern ‘organic economy’ was gradually lost to the demands of modern pollution control. With the loss of the organic continuities of pre-modern nature, a ‘modern’ nature was being constructed through the planting of trees, the building of parks and new transport links, which enabled excursions to the city’s hinterland. The Haussmanization of Paris was, above all, a process of redefining nature in metropolitan terms, of inscribing new patterns of social and spatial order within which nature was increasingly to be a focus of leisure and conven- ience rather than of material necessity. In Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières, for example, we find a set of figures relaxing by the Seine (Figure 5). This post- impressionist scene has for many observers served as a poignant critique of the emerging isolation and ennui of late nineteenth-century urban life. A succession of art historians and critics from Félix Fénéon onwards have seen this type of work as the epitome of a kind of scientific realism which grew out of the prevailing rationalist and positivist ideologies of the time. Meyer Schapiro, for example, conceived of Seurat’s vision as a counter- part to the technical and engineering outlooks of the Parisian lower-middle classes. Schapiro even went so far as to suggest that Seurat’s pointillist technique represented a combination of rationalist aesthetics with existential social critique.62 Ranged against these materialist readings of the work are those critics who have conceived of the Bathers as lying closer to idealist and symbolist traditions wherein art is not predicated on the faithful mi- mesis of social reality, but is a means of accessing a higher order of creative perfection.63 The problem, however, with relegating Seurat to some form of neoplatonic aesthetic universe is that the cultural significance of the work in both reflecting and reinforcing changing attitudes towards nature may be overlooked.

A more fruitful line of argument is to suggest that Seurat successfully captures a new kind of mediation between society and nature in post- Haussmann Paris: we are presented with a

The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space 33

regularized, stylized and commodified imagery based around leisure, spectacle and the semblance of salubrity. In the place of the organic continuities of the past lies a new kind of nature for individ- ualized leisure and consumption. A pictorial genre of the ‘urban pastoral’ presented the outskirts of Paris as a harmonious interplay between nature and industry, within which real labour was left invisible.64 In Seurat’s Bathers, we find a unique representation of urban nature in transition, where the established pleasures of bathing in the outskirts of Paris were simultaneously being dispelled by both declining water quality and the development of new transport links which provided greater accessibility to more salubrious places further afield from the metropolis. Although the Bathers depicts a scene just upstream of the newly con- structed sewer outflow, the figures in the water seem curiously detached, as if drawn from a pre- microbiological world in which water retains its elemental and symbolic purity in the face of rapid industrialization. Bathing is used here to denote an ironic continuity with the aesthetic traditions of the past, yet these figures are framed by an industrial

skyline of smoke and steam rather than the sylvan glades used by popular nineteenth-century artists such as Raphaël Collin and Jean-Charles Cazin.65

The changing place of water emerges as a central element in the shifting boundary between pre- modern and modern conceptions of nature. Yet the rationalizing impulse of modernity could never completely erase the surviving elements of a mythic urban space within which metaphors of bodily and social disorder could powerfully resur- face to haunt the newly regulated urban society. Just as the water in Seurat’s Bathers swirled with unseen bacteria, the underground city continued to provide a source of anxiety and fascination for metropolitan society.

Figure 5 ‘Bathers at Asnières’ Georges-Pierre Seurat (1884) (Courtesy of the National Gallery, London)

Sewers and the urban uncanny

In one of earliest surveys of the Paris sewers, in 1824, the public health activist Parent-Duchâtelet (1790–1835) prepared a detailed olfactory topogra- phy of underground Paris, based on a series of specific smells such as ‘insipid’ (l’odeur fade) and

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‘putrid’ (l’odeur putride).66 For Parent-Duchâtelet, sewers afforded the opportunity to combine aes- thetic, moral and scientific discourses, and formed an integral element in the meticulous documenta- tion of the realms of urban life beyond the reaches of everyday bourgeois experience. In particular, the hygienist doctrine promulgated by Parent- Duchâtelet and his successors emphasized an explicitly gendered conception of the interrelation- ship between sexuality and urban disorder:

Prostitutes are as inevitable in an agglomeration of man as sewers, cesspits and garbage dumps; civil authority should conduct itself in the same manner in regard to the one as to the other: its duty is to survey them, to attenuate by every possible means the detriments inherent to them, and for that purpose to hide them, to relegate them to the most obscure corners, in a word to render their presence as inconspicuous as possible.67

The taming of nature through the new technologies of modernity carried with it an implicit echo in the social sphere.68 In bourgeois French society, women were relegated to a dichotomous olfactory universe of the ‘foul’ and the ‘fragrant’, which became manifest in the cultural and aesthetic dis- courses of urban design above and below ground. The relegation of women to an opposite world of nature and unreason had an increasingly powerful hold over the prevailing political and intellectual outlooks of nineteenth-century Paris, where the dichotomous cultural representation of women reached its apotheosis with the flow of water through urban space. The public face of water in the lakes and fountains of imperial Paris was to be a celebration of the female form for the pleasure of the male citizen. Water-based sculptures and architectural forms allowed a symbolic continuity with classical themes based around water, nudity and human physical perfection. By the 1870s, the Renaissance emphasis on the male nude as ideal human form was increasingly supplanted by the female nude and the imposition of a new body aesthetic.69 The ornamental public fountains of Haussmann’s Paris exemplified the combination of water with the control of women’s sexuality in the most expensive Belle-Epoque neo-Fontainebleau style favoured by Napoleon III.70

Yet, if these fountains, lakes and other ornamen- tal features represented the charm of virginal inno- cence, then the sewers continued to represent the dangerous obverse of female sexuality. The associ- ation of women with impurity is not, of course, an

invention of modernity, yet it is the reworking of pre-modern beliefs in the context of capitalist urbanization that is of interest here. In Second Empire Paris, the repression of bodily functions in bourgeois society became increasingly manifested in a fear of women and the poor. Ideological readings of nature, which drew liberally on mod- ern science, contributed towards sharpening gen- der differences, with a new-found emphasis on the domestic ideal and the promotion of complemen- tary gender roles. In reinforcing innate conceptions of ‘gender as nature’, we find a convergence between the ideas and writings of Jules Michelet, Auguste Comte, Ernest Legouvé and a panoply of other leading nineteenth-century scientists, writers and intellectuals.71 Underground urban infra- structure became a kind of repository for untamed nature, within which the innate tensions behind capitalist urbanization became magnified and distorted through the lens of middle-class anxiety.

The sewer has consistently been associated with what we might term the ‘urban uncanny’: a spa- tially defined sense of dread in modern urban societies. In order to understand the peculiar com- plexity of the ‘sewer’ as a recurring spatial locus of the uncanny, we need to unravel how bodily metaphors have become transposed in urban space. Within Western intellectual traditions, it is Sigmund Freud’s essay on ‘the uncanny’, pub- lished in 1919, which has served as a focal point for a myriad of debates concerning the interconnection between the psychological and spatial domains of modern societies.72 The uncanny is best conceived as a boundary aesthetic with its spatiality rooted in anxieties of displacement and disorientation. Con- ventional accounts of the uncanny suggest that, in passing from the world above ground into that below, we are entering a new intensity of zones between the rational and irrational, nature and culture, male and female, the visible and invis- ible.73 Yet these dichotomous metaphors tend to conceal more than they actually reveal, obscuring the flows and interconnections that constitute material reality behind an illusion of stasis and symmetry.

Recent feminist scholarship has reinterpreted the Freudian reading of the uncanny in order to dispense with more simplistic gender-based con- ceptions of spatial disorientation and anxiety.74

Rather than conceiving of the uncanny as a kind of urban gothicism in the Burkean aesthetic tradition, we are better served by re-interpreting the uncanny

The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space 35

as an outcome of the complex intersection between the human body and the built environment. Within this schema, sewers represent a metaphorical space of defilement and confinement, their poignancy stemming from the interconnection between the private space of the home and the public mélange of urban infrastructure. The metaphorical grid surrounding the experience of the uncanny is ultimately a mystification of material reality in its implication that urban origins lie concealed beneath the surface of the city rather than being constituted through the more distant sets of social relations and spatial interconnections that sustain capitalist urbanization. The urban uncanny is a spatial fetishism of absence, a mythological response to the unseen and the unknown, which weaves together popular misconceptions of how cities function with dominant ideological responses to urban disorder.

The new urban infrastructures of nineteenth- century Paris unsettled existing metaphors of urban space: with the breaking of the organic cycle, human excrement took on an intensely abject qual- ity as part of a multiplicity of flows that integrated the body and urban society into an uneasy whole.75

The ‘fear of touching’ and the withdrawal from intimacy or curiosity towards strangers forms part of the atomization of social life under modernity.76

In this context, the relationship between organic and social metaphors becomes problematized, since the city can no longer be meaningfully con- ceived as a holistic or autarchic entity, but emerges as a dynamic intersection of the circulatory proc- esses based around the exigencies of economic exchange. The ‘olfactory revolution’, emboldened by the new discourses of the medical sciences, set in train an irreversible shift in water usage, the cultural significance of bodily smell and the demand for private space. The urban transforma- tion created a city in which social and economic differences not only were widened, but were much more keenly felt. The separation and reorganiz- ation of space set in motion an increasing dichotomy in the olfactory experience of the urban environment between the middle classes and the labouring poor (who were considered indifferent). The old vertical separation of the classes in the apartment houses of pre-modern Paris was gradu- ally to be supplanted by a new emphasis on horizontal segregation. Under the construction boom of the Second Empire, there was a progress- ive concentration of the middle classes in the

central and western parts of the city. The quest for profit strengthened the social distribution of odours, as the cleansing of the city involved a simultaneous relocation of the working classes and industry to the urban periphery.77 Haussmann’s leading critics, such as Louis Lazare, repeatedly drew attention to the mass displacement of people from central Paris, and the emergence of the new slums and faubourgs at the city limits. The obverse to the rational city was not to be found beneath the streets, but in what T J Clark has termed the ‘melancholic banlieue’, a muddle of suburban sprawl, small holdings and displaced communities on the outskirts of Paris.78

Conclusion

The interrelationships between technology, moder- nity and capitalist urbanization are well docu- mented. The provision of light, mobility, energy and water form part of an urban palimpsest in the progressive rationalization of urban space.79 From the early nineteenth century onwards, advances in medicine, chemistry and demography began to reveal the high death rates of towns. As a conse- quence, the progress of science and the administra- tive needs of the state developed in a symbiotic fashion.80 Yet, the development of new urban infra- structures also stemmed from the demand for greater privacy under the intensified self- awareness of modernity. The increasing aversion to communal washing facilities and the smell of excrement led to the growing use of water for washing and cleaning, which then had to be drained away. This combination of different factors behind the reconstruction of nineteenth-century cities led to a contradictory response on the part of urban planners. Though much of the literature on nineteenth-century Paris portrays Haussmann as a figure who faced rather than avoided the conse- quences of modernity, the actual sequence of events presents a far more complex picture. The creation of a modern metropolis introduced new sources of disorder, which conflicted with existing conceptions of urban form and the pre-modern circulation of water in cities. We saw, for example, how Haussmann resisted the use of his new sewers for human faeces. His advocacy of a ‘partial modernity’ was rooted in a desire for a holistic and organic union of the city in all its parts, predicated on a conception of public health that owed more to

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the neo-Hippocratic doctrines of the past than to the latest advances in scientific thought.81 The eventual integration of private dwellings into the city’s sewer network in the post-Haussmann era was driven to a greater extent by changing atti- tudes towards the use of water than to any puta- tive triumph of microbiological rationality over competing conceptions of public health.

The contradictory rationale behind the recon- struction of the Paris sewer system challenges simplistic tautologies, which simply equate moder- nity with the process of Haussmannization.82

Haussmann was unable to reconcile his conception of urban order with the disengagement of urban design from explicitly organic metaphors. The ten- sions within Haussmann’s conception of water flow in urban space stemmed from an ‘uneven modernity’, which extended across the physical, engineering and medical sciences. Eighteenth- century conceptions of the elemental purity of water persisted despite the gathering pace of tech- nological and scientific advances.83 In the context of water and urban design, we need to differentiate essentially pre-modern holistic and geometric visions from the powerful exigencies of capitalist urbanization operating at successively wider spa- tial scales. Under capitalist space and time, the corporeal unity of the pre-modern city was to be irrevocably altered, exposing an innate tension between function and perfection in the design of Second Empire Paris. The reconstruction of Paris under Haussmann was founded on a peculiar political medley of state intervention, liberal defer- ence for powerful economic elites and a mix of aristocratic and imperial visions for the French metropolis. In his memoirs, Haussmann frequently compared his reconstruction of the Paris water and sewer system to that of imperial Rome. In Pliny’s description of Rome, for example, the city’s sewers are singled out as ‘the most noteworthy achieve- ment of all’, and parts of the original Roman aqueducts were actually incorporated into the city of Paris’s new water supply system from the Dhuys, the Vanne and the Marne in the eastern Paris basin.84 Yet the imperial pretensions behind the rebuilding of Paris were shattered by a succes- sion of foreign policy failures in Crimea, Italy and Mexico, culminating in the defeat of the Second Empire in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Whilst these episodes have been condemned by posterity, the legacy of urban and infrastructural reconstruc- tion has met with admiration by a succession of

twentieth-century historians such as Richard de Kaufmann, Wladimir d’Ormesson, Raoul Busquet and André Monzet.85

Despite the physical transformation of sewers over the modern period, they have never entirely lost their earlier associations with danger, disorder and threatening infestations. Through their various gender-laden, seditious and mutagenic permuta- tions, sewers have come to symbolize the particu- lar fears of each successive phase of bourgeois society. Sewers have consistently been portrayed as a focal point for political threats to social and political stability, both real and imagined: during the 1870 siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian war, there was apprehension that the Germans might secretly enter the city through the sewers, and the city authorities actually sealed the Collecteur Général d’Asnières in order to assuage public fears.86 The sewer has consistently been portrayed as a symbol of the unclean city, a metonym for what Godwin termed the ‘entire excrementation of the Metropolis’.87 The ‘cesspool’ city of the nine- teenth century was a place where metaphors of disease and moral degeneration mingled with the threat of women and the labouring classes to middle-class society. Even the most progressive and perceptive of nineteenth-century commenta- tors on urban life – such as Engels, Dickens and Baudelaire – failed to look beyond their dichoto- mous urban worlds of ‘dirt and cleanliness’.88 Yet, in order to understand the enduring association of the subterranean city with the ‘urban uncanny’, we need to transcend these dualistic metaphors and develop a richer appreciation of how human bodies and urban form interact.