tmxtpeed

etle

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. Itis concluded that the flow of water in Second Empire Paris is best conceived as atransitional phase in the radical reworking of relations between the body and urbanform engendered by the process of capitalist urbanization.

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

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

revised manuscript received 21 July 1998

Introduction

. . . un enchevetrement difforme de sentines et boyaux a`defier limagination de Pirane`se. (Felix Nadar)1

Les grands egouts de Paris ont toujours preoccupelattention publique et ont ete honores des plus illustresvisites. Il nest pas un souverain etranger, pas unpersonnage important qui ait quitte Paris sans avoirvisite les collecteurs. (Euge`ne Belgrand)2

The rebuilding of Paris between 1850 and 1870 is acrucial moment in urban history. The attempt byEmperor Napoleon III and his Prefet de la Seine,Baron Georges Haussmann, to rationalize urbanspace is one of the formative legacies in the devel-opment of urban planning. For Frederick Hiorns,the Second Empire reconstruction of Paris was atime in which,

the evils of long-continued civic neglect were redeemedand Paris placed in the forefront of modern cities byimaginative reforms applied to the most onerous ofhuman problems.3

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

reversal in the direction of energy, from the outwardexplosion of avenues and palaces of the Louis Kings tothe implosion of the connecting and life-givingboulevards of Haussmann.4

For many authors, the Haussmann era has beenread as axiomatic of modernity; yet the reality is farmore complex, involving an interweaving of ideasand developments spanning both modern and pre-modern conceptions of urban form.5 In fact, as thispaper will show, the flow of water in Paris did not

Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 24 2344 1999The Paris sewers andurban space

Matthew Gandy

Sewers are perhaps the most enigmodern cities are aware of their elayout or appearance. This papercultural representation of urban sFelix Nadar in the early 1860s. Thsubterranean Paris, initiated in thhis chief engineer Euge`ne Belgranthe citys infrastructure during thargues, however, that with respecHaussmann era to be the unprobISSN 0020-2754 Royal Geographical Society (with The Institutehe rationalization of

atic of urban infrastructures. Most citizens ofistence, yet few could accurately describe theirakes as its starting point a key moment in theace: the photographs of the Paris sewers taken byse images capture a dramatic transformation inearly 1850s by Baron Georges Haussmann andas part of the comprehensive reconstruction of

Second Empire of Napoleon III. This paperto the underground city, we cannot consider thematic epitome of modernity. The reconstruction ofof British Geographers) 1999

become modern, in the sense that we would nowrewrethetithimdaedn

oinupycomaoafaVapagpeathgVlidmbnWraasotemaathsi

only a technological construct, but also a mentallam

enctrothcbsw

Ttheosthtorethdreidbm

thsTsrethaloimoushte

Matthew Gandy24cognize, until after the fall of the Second Empire,ith new legislative developments in the 1890s insponse to rising water usage and the continuingreat of cholera. One of the least studied of these

xtensive public works projects is the reconstruc-on of the Paris sewers.6 This paper describes howe reorganization of subterranean Paris heldplications far beyond the modernization of

rainage and sanitation. Metaphors of progressnd the application of scientific knowledge becamentangled with wider cultural and politicalevelopments surrounding the transformation ofineteenth-century Paris.

Sewers enjoy a special place in the pantheonf urban mythology. They are one of the mosttricate and multi-layered symbols and structures

nderlying the modern metropolis, and form aoignant point of reference for the complex lab-rinth of connections that bind urban space into aherent whole. Sewers have long been used asetaphors for the hidden worlds of crime, poverty

nd political insurrection, and there is a rich legacyf representations ranging across literature, cinemand music.7 In Les miserables, perhaps the mostmous literary evocation of the underground city,ictor Hugo depicted the Paris sewers of the 1830ss the evil in the citys blood, a place where theoor and the outcasts of society lurked together as

threatening formation for the world aboveround.8 This paper develops a rather differenterspective from the genre of urban horror, bymphasizing how sewers have also been portrayeds symbols of progress. Sewers are considered inis context as an integral element in the emer-

ence of what the architectural historian Anthonyidler terms the technical ideology of metropo-s.9 Just as sewers are repeatedly associated withirt, danger and the unseen, they are also physicalanifestations of new patterns of water usage,

odily hygiene and the progressive application ofew advances in science and technology. Rosalindilliams traces a similar theme through her explo-tion of the symbolic and metaphorical meanings

ttached to underground technologies in moderncieties. For Williams, the growing scientific andchnological sophistication of the built environ-ent necessarily alters our relation with nature

nd the organic world. She emphasizes the poign-ncy of the vertical axis to our understanding ofe cultural appropriation of urban technologies,nce the subterranean environment is notndscape, a social terrain, and an ideologicalap.10

The search for spatial order has been an integrallement in the contradictory experience of moder-ity, yet, hidden within the more progressive con-eptions of urban transformation lie the ideologicalappings of imperial and pre-modern conceptionsf social and elemental harmony. This paper arguesat the process of Haussmannization was predi-

ated on a holistic conception of the relationshipetween the body and the city, which drew on aeries of organic analogies to compare the new cityith a healthy human body:

These underground galleries would be the organs ofthe metropolis and function like those of the humanbody without ever seeing the light of day. Pure andfresh water, along with light and heat, would circulatelike the diverse fluids whose movement and replenish-ment sustain life itself. These liquids would workunseen and maintain public health without disruptingthe smooth running of the city and without spoiling itsexterior beauty.11

he material presented here, however, suggestsat the circulatory dynamics of economic

xchange were to overwhelm organic conceptionsf urban order and institute a new set of relation-hips between nature and urban society. By tracinge history of water in urban space, we can begin

develop a fuller understanding of changinglations between the body and urban form undere impetus of capitalist urbanization. This inter-

isciplinary task involves exploring changinglationships between the body, architecture andeological conceptions of nature as part of a

roader project to expand our understanding ofodern cities and their cultural meaning.12

The paper begins with an examination ofe photographs of the newly modernized Paris

ewers, taken by Felix Nadar in the early 1860s.hese images are used to introduce a series of ideasurrounding progress, modernity and the aestheticpresentation of the modern city. It is suggestedat Nadars photography, and his passionate

dvocacy of the progressive potential of techno-gical innovation in society, hold importantplications for our understanding of the

ften-contradictory dynamics behind capitalistrbanization. Secondly, the reconstruction of theubterranean city is set in its broader political andistorical context, in order to draw out some of thensions inherent in the drive to modernize urban

space. It is argued that these contradictory dimen-

nineteenth-century Paris are the undergroundphotographs of Felix Nadar (18201910). The

embraced technological change.14 Nadar looked

The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space 25photographic legacy of Nadar provides a remark-able record of the complex and often contradictoryinterweaving of political, technological and scien-tific developments underlying the rebuilding ofSecond Empire Paris. Nadar was born Gaspard-Felix Tournachon in Paris in 1820, just two yearsbefore Nicephore Niepce (17651833) began thefirst experimentation with photography (using abitumen ground technique on pewter and glass).Following a brief spell as a medical student in thelate 1830s, Nadar began to devote increasingenergy to literary and political pursuits. In the1840s, Nadar worked on the republican daily LeCommerce and also as a cartoonist for the satiricaljournals Le Corsaire-Satan and La Silhouette.13 Thepolitical turmoil of 1848, and the subsequent coupthat brought Napoleon III to power, were to have adecisive impact on Nadar, along with many of hiscontemporaries. With the utopian and revolution-ary Left greatly weakened, there was now a grow-ing divide between the romantic attachment toartisan labour and newer political ideas thatsions to the control of water were only satisfac-torily resolved in the post-Haussmann era. Suchcomplexities are traced to the rapid growth of Parisand the growing consumption of water for wash-ing and bathing in private dwellings, which led toa breakdown in pre-modern conceptions of theorganic cycle linking the body and the city. Therepresentation of riparian urban leisure in the art ofSeurat is used to delineate the emergence of adistinctively metropolitan experience of nature.Finally, the paper considers how the reconstructionof subterranean Paris involved the reworking ofcorporeal metaphors in the development of aes-thetic sensibilities towards urban infrastructure.These changes are related to wider developmentsin French society, including the sharpening sense ofself-identity under modernity in the context ofwidening social and economic polarities across thecity. It is suggested that the sewers form an endur-ing element of the urban uncanny, throughtheir integral interrelationship with changingconceptions of bodily abjection and urban order.

Photographing the Paris sewers

Among the strangest images we have ofincreasingly to a dynamic and progressive combi-nation of science and politics as the most realisticmeans to transform society. In 1856, for example,he published a collection of stories, Quand jetaisetudiant, dedicated to the socialist writer GeorgeSand. In these stories, he brought together anumber of his main concerns: the power of scienceand medicine to dispel death, disease and ignor-ance; a sense of society in a state of rapid andchaotic change; and the power of reason to bringabout both individual and collective advance-ment.15 Under the repressive regime of NapoleonIII, Nadar turned increasingly to the use of satireand allegory as a vital means of expression underthe tight censorship and surveillance of the time.He soon established his reputation as a novelist,journalist and caricaturist, and worked closelywith the radical publisher Charles Philipon onhis satirical papers La Caricature, Le Charivari andLe Petit Journal pour Rire.16

From the late 1840s onwards, Nadar began totake an increasing interest in photography. In 1854,he set up his own studio under the direction ofAdolphe Bertsch and Camille dArnuad. The poorsales of his last major lithographic venture, thePantheon, must also have encouraged Nadar tofocus his energies on the new medium of pho-tography. Nadars reputation for portrait pho-tography developed rapidly, and he was soonable to charge some 100 francs a sitting: CharlesBaudelaire, Claude Debussy, Gustave Dore, HectorBerlioz and many other leading cultural and politi-cal figures of the time had their portraits taken athis Paris studios.17 Nadar became convinced of thestatus of photography as a new art form equal tothat of painting, which was, moreover, uniquelycapable of capturing the ephemeral and fragmen-tary qualities of modern life. With photography, hewas able to convey images with unprecedentedspeed and accuracy, introducing an extraordinarilyintense kind of realism into the aesthetic represen-tation of Paris and its people.18 By the late 1850s, hehad begun to gain international critical acclaim forhis work, and, in 1858, filed a patent for the firstaerial photography based on a series of urbanpanoramas taken from a hot air balloon.19

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

experimentation was 73 views of the Paris cata-coNpuebthecithuainsithwchaco

inpstinwespaFealeinmhinbH

TvVthsethaaN

With the introduction of electric light into thesensTcdoraosaggmspPsd

F

InimtrRbmsFre1nayTintitooaefau

Matthew Gandy26mbs, taken in 186162. In the winter of 186465,adar extended his underground work further byroducing 23 photographs of the Paris sewersnder the invitation of the citys chief waterngineer, Euge`ne Belgrand (181078), who hadeen appointed by Haussmann in 1853 to overseee reconstruction of the citys sewer system. The

xtension of photography into the undergroundty not only radically extended the possibilities fore meticulous visual documentation of hitherto

nknown places and spaces, but reinforced thembiguous role of modern technologies in provid-g an illusion of complete control and comprehen-on of complex urban societies. In photographinge sewers, Nadar contributed powerfully to neways of seeing and understanding the city, byallenging a series of metaphorical axes ranging

cross light, cleanliness, verticality, knowledge andntrol.When first shown, these unfamiliar images

trigued and astounded the French public. A com-letely new and strange world lying beneath thereets of Paris had been revealed: not a threaten-g and chaotic mass of tunnels, but a clean,ell-lit network of structures at the leading edge of

ngineering science. In Figure 1, we can observe aacious, symmetrical and well-lit tunnel amen-

ble to easy movement, observation and control. Inigure 2, a mannequin is shown seated next to anxample of the new sewer technologies introduceds part of the modernization programme (thengthy 18-minute exposure time precluded theclusion of a real worker). Before their improve-ent, the dominant imagery of the Paris sewers

ad been of an unexplored urban realm shroudeddarkness and mystery, a threatening maze

eneath the streets of the city. Yet, as Mariaambourg suggests,

in the photographs of the vaulted sewers, which mighthave conveyed the horrors of Piranesis prisons, onesees rational structure and channelled cleanliness.20

he sewers were no longer to be feared, but ratherenerated and enjoyed as symbols of progress.ictor Hugo, for example, was quick to recognizeat his imaginary representation of the 1830swers bore little resemblance to the new reality ofe 1860s: The sewer today has a certain official

spect, he reflected, Words referring to it indministrative language are lofty and dignified . . .othing is left of the cloacas primitive ferocity.21rom city of mud to city of light

order to understand the significance of Nadarsages, we need to explore the background to the

ansformation of the Paris sewer system. If, asaymond Williams has suggested, the modern cityecomes the physical embodiment of a decisiveodern consciousness, then what do the Paris

ewers tell us about changes in nineteenth-centuryrench society?26 The historical context to theconstruction of Paris is well known. As early as

827, an official report on the citys health hadoted how the sense of smell gives notice that youre approaching the first city in the world, beforeour eyes could see the tips of its monuments.27

he population of Paris had increased from 786 0001831 to over 1 000 000 by 1846. Growing conges-

on threatened to bring social and economic lifea standstill. The devastating cholera epidemics

f 183235 and 184849 had spread panic in richnd poor quarters alike. And, by 1848, the Parisconomy was also facing a deep downturn, a majorctor behind the political turmoil that was tosher in the new regime of Napoleon III.28ewers, the spectacle of enlightenment nowxtended both above and below ground,22 as theew boulevards and shopping arcades had theirubterranean counterpart beneath the city streets.he transformation of Paris made urban spaceomprehensible and visible to the public, therebyispelling much of the opacity and heterogeneityf the pre-modern city. The Paris sewers werepidly acknowledged to be unequalled in any

ther city in the world, and attracted a steadytream of international delegations of engineersnd urban planners.23 The subterranean photo-raphs of Nadar played a key role in fostering therowing popularity of sewers and catacombs withiddle-class Parisians, and, from the 1867 Expo-

ition onwards, the city authorities began offeringublic tours of underground Paris.24 Yet, as Davidinkney wryly notes, most visitors to the Parisewers over the years have probably beenisappointed to find,

not the dark and dangerous caverns through whichJean Valjean made his perilous escape in 1832 but thespacious, clean and well-lighted galleries of the SecondEmpire.25

The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space 27In June 1853, less than a year after his successfulcoup detat, Emperor Napoleon III appointed BaronGeorges-Euge`ne Haussmann as Prefet de la Seine,with responsibility for the reconstruction of Paris.Before his appointment, Haussmann had alreadyacquired extensive public service in Vienne, theGironde and the Var. More critically, though, hehad lent vociferous political support to NapoleonIII and closely shared his republican ideals, rootedin a powerful role for the French state.29 Since noaccurate map of Paris existed, one of Haussmannsfirst tasks was to undertake a detailed survey and

triangulation of the whole city. Napoleon III envis-aged that the new Paris would be an imposing cityof marble, worthy of comparison with AugustanRome, and a lasting symbol of French internationalpower and imperial ambition.30 Haussmann wascharged with the responsibility for transforming acongested medieval city into a dynamic modernmetropolis. The changing role of Paris within thenewly integrated national economy demanded anurgent transformation in the physical structure ofthe city. Central to the modernization of Paris lay acombination of faith in the application of scientific

Figure 1 The sewers Felix Nadar (186465)(Courtesy of the Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques et des Sites, Paris)

pplacareaS

bv41

Matthew Gandy28rinciples with a programme of centrally directedublic investment. The underused capital andbour behind the economic depression and politi-l violence of 1848 were to be channelled into theconstruction of the built environment throughdeficit-financed economic strategy, rooted in

aint-Simonian ideas.31

By 1870, Haussmann had carried out some 25illion francs-worth of public works through inno-ative debt financing equivalent to approximately4 times the total city expenditure on all services in851.32 At the time of peak reconstruction, one in

five Parisian workers were employed in construc-tion activity, and one-fifth of the Paris streetswere rebuilt.33 The programme of reconstructionrequired not only financial innovation but also aradical reorganization in the balance of politicaland economic forces in the city. Second EmpireParis was to grow out of the articulation of ageneral interest resting on the imposition of a newform of capitalist rationality, which was alien tothe privatism of traditional property owners.34

For Anthony Saalman, the reconstruction ofSecond Empire Paris was the most influential

Figure 2 The sewers (sluice system) Felix Nadar (186465)(Courtesy of the Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques et des Sites, Paris)

bourgeois revolution its most radical architectural In 1857, the sewer reconstruction programme

we

The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space 29expression of any European city. The reconstructionreflected the needs of an urban mercantile classwho faced the consequences of modernity not byan escape into romantic anti-urbanism, but througha celebration of the possibilities for the techno-logical mastery of urban space and the search forprogressively greater degrees of social and spatialorder.35 Yet, as we shall see, these new discourses oforder and control both reflected and constitutedemerging tensions and inequalities, driven by theprocesses of capitalist urbanization.

When Haussmann and Belgrand began theirwork in the early 1850s, the city was still served bya medieval network of sewers clustered around thecity centre (Figure 3).36 The preliminary investiga-tions of Haussmann and his chief engineer Euge`neBelgrand soon revealed a series of design faults inthe existing sewer system. The size of the sewershad 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 toprevent water from periodically flooding onto the

began in earnest. The first major project was theconstruction of the Collecteur General dAsnie`res,a new elliptical structure approximately 14 feethigh and 18 feet wide. The purpose of this complexchannel, far bigger then the existing Collecteur dela Rue de Rivoli, was to ensure that waste waterswould be diverted into the River Seine down-stream of the city.38 Both Haussmann and Belgrandbelieved that a modern sewer system should, as faras possible, be mechanically cleaned, in order toeliminate the need for dangerous and degradinghuman labour (the sewers had hitherto beencleaned by hand using the most rudimentary oftools). Their conception of spatial rationalizationthus extended to the application of new labourpractices, as well as to the use of the latestadvances in the engineering and empirical sci-ences. The most significant technological achieve-ment of all, however, which effectively completedthe major part of the new sewer system, was theconstruction of a vast siphon under the Seine in1868, in order to connect the two sections of theCollecteur de la Bie`vre.39 By 1870, the city wasnineteenth-century solution to the problem of rapidurbanization. The transformation of Paris gave the

Figure 3 The Paris seSource: Belgrand E 1887 Les travaux souterrains dstreets, and much of the growing city was not evenintegrated into the existing drainage system.37

er network in 1837Paris V: les egouts et les vidanges Dunod, Paris

sev(Figure 4).

W1oedthnrethinthrehchuawHwhng

wlithe city.42 Human faeces, collected as night-soil,

bou

Matthew Gandy30But what were these new sewers actually for?hen the reconstruction of the sewers began in the

850s, it was assumed that only limited quantitiesf human faeces from individual homes wouldnter the sewer system (only a fifth of privatewellings were connected at this time), and thatere would be a continuation in the work of

ight-soil collectors.40 The initial scope of theconstruction was thus concerned primarily withe drainage of storm waters; however, the steadycrease in personal water consumption unsettledis conception of the public works that would bequired. Haussmann was reluctant to allow any

uman faeces to enter the magnificent collectingannels of the new sewer system, and only did so

nder intense pressure from the citys municipaluthorities.41 The desire to separate clean stormater from dirty human waste was integral toaussmanns conception of an orderly flow ofater through urban space. His objections to

uman excrement entering the sewer system wereot only related to the contamination of the under-round city; he feared that the dilution of human

had long been used profitably in northern Franceas a fertilizer for agriculture, and in the manufac-ture of saltpetre for gunpowder, thereby allowing acyclical integration of bodily functions into theregional 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 the1850s, opposition to the connection of sewers toindividual homes came from various quarters. Avociferous source of hostility were the cesspoolcleaning companies, who feared that they wouldbe ruined by alternative means of treating wastewater. The city itself also made money out ofnight-soil collection and the processing operationsat Montfaucon and Boncy, and therefore favoured acontinuation in existing arrangements.44 The usersof night soil in agriculture also drew attention tothe declining nitrogen content caused by thegreater mixing of faeces with water. Consequently,the lowest-value material was being collectedfrom the richer parts of the city where the use ofwater closets was gaining popularity. Before therved by a network of 348 miles of sewers airtual fourfold increase on twenty years earlier

Figure 4 Paris sewers builtSource: Belgrand Les travaux saste in water would reduce its value as a ferti-zer, and thereby disrupt the organic economy of

etween 1856 and 1878terrains de Paris V op cit

extensive application of deficit-financing for public the traditional reliance on cesspools.49 The fact that

and was often therapeutic or recreational.53 Evi-dence suggests that group bathing in Europe began

The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space 31works, there was also concern as to how the costsof sewer construction would be spread, since onlya third of dwellings were directly supplied withrunning water.45

In the 1860s, an apparent compromise wasreached by allowing human faeces to enter parts ofthe sewer system and diverting this water foragricultural use. The leading city engineer, A AMille, successfully used sewer water for the irri-gation and fertilization of vegetables in the fieldsof Clichy and Gennevilliers near the citys mainsewage outlets. He advocated the use of the samesewers for the handling of storm water and humanwaste, based on his knowledge of sanitaryimprovements carried out in England. However,this solution met with official resistance in Paris,where most engineers continued to insist on justtwo options: either a separate sewer system forhuman waste or an improvement in night-soilcollection.46 In nineteenth-century Amsterdam, forexample, the Lieurnur sewer system had beenadopted, with separate networks for storm waterand human waste, but this was to be rejected inParis on the grounds of cost.47 Property ownersfiercely resisted higher taxes for sewer construc-tion, as well as the construction of impermeablecesspools to replace the fosses a` fond perdu thatseeped their contents into the subsoil. Landlordscontinued to eschew any connection to pipedwater supplies, despite the free installation ofrising mains from 1881, because increased waterusage would necessitate the reconstruction andmore frequent emptying of cesspools if their prop-erties remained separate from the sewer system.Powerful resistance to draining human waste intothe Seine also came from the fanatics of Seinewater, who advocated the continuing use of theriver for drinking water, along with Pasteur andother influential microbiologists, who feared thepublic health effects of contaminating the Seinewith cholera and typhoid.48 What was distinctive,however, about the immediate post-Haussmannera was the co-existence of a number of competingconceptions of the most appropriate means toregulate the flow of water in the city.

It was not until 1894 that the link betweenprivate dwellings and the sewer system was finallymade obligatory, as rising water usage (whichdoubled between 1870 and 1890, despite the recal-citrance of private landlords) and the cholera epi-demics of 1884 and 1892 eventually overwhelmedto decline from the fifteenth century onwards inthe wake of the Counter-Reformation and chang-ing moral codes towards public nudity. In theeighteenth century, however, we find a rediscoveryof bathing that undermined existing conceptions ofthe relationship between water and the body.54 Thesensuous flow of water (and even the advocacy ofcleanliness in readiness for sexual pleasure) struckat the heart of conflicting concerns with moralpurity, hygiene and social order. Washing had longbeen associated with pagan sensuality in earlyChristian belief, and, for most of the nineteenthcentury, the bathroom was restricted to the homesof the rich, tourist hotels and luxury brothels.Consequently, the associations of water with opu-lence, debauchery and pre-revolutionary courtsociety persisted into the modern period.55tenants themselves were, in increasing numbers,seeking out properties that were connected to thecitys water and sewer system must also haveincreased the pressure to complete the moderniz-ation of urban infrastructure.50 Furthermore, tech-nical and scientific opinion was beginning to shiftdecisively towards the tout a` legout solution, inrecognition that combined sewers for storm waterand human waste were increasingly being adoptedby other European cities.51 By the end of thenineteenth century, the dual pressures of diseaseand growing water usage, along with the advent ofinorganic fertilizers and growing public aversionto human waste, eventually overwhelmed the rem-nants of pre-modern conceptions of urban orderand introduced a new set of relationships betweenwater and urban society.52

Water, modernity and the bashful civicbody

The eventual cross-connection of Haussmannsstorm sewers to accomodate human faeces, the touta` legout 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 personalhygiene, and hence little need for sewers to drainwater away from private dwellings. In the pre-modern period, the use of water for washingremained predominantly a collective endeavour,

A decisive change occurred with what the cul-turebinnchueinsmnthbcuobpb

tuEwauwtowore1sethstufobainhbinapthtosha

ona

contemporary integrated sewage treatment sys-tescathcdGodlonthatoPinoinieBfiimaensFeoidepthwteaathlywmhhnsreb

thmH

Matthew Gandy32ral historian Alain Corbin terms the olfactoryvolution, whereby the bourgeois sense of smell

ecame newly sensitized to body odour, thus lead-g to an increasing desire for private space. It was

ot so much that conditions had suddenlyanged, but that there was a new intolerance

nder the sensory realignment of modernity.56 Themergence of new standards of cleanliness broughtdividuals into contact with their own bodilyells and contributed to the emergence of a new

arcissism. By the end of the nineteenth century,ere were firmly barred doors to washrooms and

athrooms and an elimination of the old promis-ity in defecation and the jumble of excremental

dors.57 As the places for washing and defecationecame separated, this led to the increasingly com-lex design of private space and the interior ofuildings.

During the later decades of the nineteenth cen-ry, more and more towns and cities across

urope became integrated into comprehensiveater supply and sewerage systems, in order to

ccommodate the increasing demand for personalse of water.58 With the growing use of privateashrooms, the smell of human excrement beganlose the last semblance of its rural associations

ith fertility: from now on it was to be indicativef disorder, decay and physical repulsion. This isflected in a survey of Parisian smells published in

881, which recorded that cesspits, refuse andwers were the three most unpleasant odours, andat the proliferation of regulations for the con-ruction and operation of cesspits had provedtterly futile in solving this problem.59 The new-und bashfulness towards bodily functions in

ourgeois French society emphasized the associ-tion of sewers with excrement. With the growingvolvement of the state, under the guise of public

ealth reform, the management of excrementecame an increasingly rationalized activity, result-g in a steady decline in the use of cesspits, the

ctivities of night-soil collectors and communallaces for defecation. Henceforth, the regimes ofe alimentary were to be confined increasingly

domestic space under a new set of relation-ips between the body, technology and urban

rchitecture.60

One of the consequences of the reconstructionf the sewer system was that all waste water wasow discharged into the Seine at just two pointslong the river, Asnie`res and Saint-Denis. Unlikems, Haussmanns sewers were only intended fortorm water and lacked any means for pollutionontrol. With the increasing quantities of humannd industrial wastes entering the sewer system,ese two outlets left stretches of the river a

auldron of bacteria, infection and disease.61 Witheclining water quality, the irrigation systems atennevilliers were abandoned and the pre-modernrganic economy was gradually lost to theemands of modern pollution control. With thess of the organic continuities of pre-modern

ature, a modern nature was being constructedrough the planting of trees, the building of parks

nd new transport links, which enabled excursionsthe citys hinterland. The Haussmanization of

aris was, above all, a process of redefining naturemetropolitan terms, of inscribing new patterns

f social and spatial order within which nature wascreasingly to be a focus of leisure and conven-nce rather than of material necessity. In Seuratsathers at Asnie`res, for example, we find a set ofgures relaxing by the Seine (Figure 5). This post-

pressionist scene has for many observers serveds a poignant critique of the emerging isolation andnui of late nineteenth-century urban life. A

uccession of art historians and critics from Felixeneon onwards have seen this type of work as thepitome of a kind of scientific realism which grewut of the prevailing rationalist and positivisteologies of the time. Meyer Schapiro, for

xample, conceived of Seurats vision as a counter-art to the technical and engineering outlooks ofe Parisian lower-middle classes. Schapiro evenent so far as to suggest that Seurats pointillistchnique represented a combination of rationalist

esthetics with existential social critique.62 Rangedgainst these materialist readings of the work areose critics who have conceived of the Bathers asing closer to idealist and symbolist traditionsherein art is not predicated on the faithful mi-esis of social reality, but is a means of accessing a

igher order of creative perfection.63 The problem,owever, with relegating Seurat to some form ofeoplatonic aesthetic universe is that the culturalignificance of the work in both reflecting andinforcing changing attitudes towards nature may

e overlooked.A more fruitful line of argument is to suggestat Seurat successfully captures a new kind ofediation between society and nature in post-aussmann Paris: we are presented with a

o

The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space 33Figure 5 Bathers at Asnie`res(Courtesy of the NatiGeorges-Pierre Seurat (1884)nal Gallery, London)regularized, stylized and commodified imagerybased around leisure, spectacle and the semblanceof salubrity. In the place of the organic continuitiesof the past lies a new kind of nature for individ-ualized leisure and consumption. A pictorial genreof the urban pastoral presented the outskirts ofParis as a harmonious interplay between natureand industry, within which real labour was leftinvisible.64 In Seurats Bathers, we find a uniquerepresentation of urban nature in transition, wherethe established pleasures of bathing in the outskirtsof Paris were simultaneously being dispelled byboth declining water quality and the developmentof new transport links which provided greateraccessibility to more salubrious places furtherafield from the metropolis. Although the Bathersdepicts a scene just upstream of the newly con-structed sewer outflow, the figures in the waterseem curiously detached, as if drawn from a pre-microbiological world in which water retains itselemental and symbolic purity in the face of rapidindustrialization. Bathing is used here to denote anironic continuity with the aesthetic traditions of thepast, yet these figures are framed by an industrial

skyline of smoke and steam rather than the sylvanglades used by popular nineteenth-century artistssuch as Raphael Collin and Jean-Charles Cazin.65

The changing place of water emerges as a centralelement in the shifting boundary between pre-modern and modern conceptions of nature. Yet therationalizing impulse of modernity could nevercompletely erase the surviving elements of amythic urban space within which metaphors ofbodily and social disorder could powerfully resur-face to haunt the newly regulated urban society.Just as the water in Seurats Bathers swirled withunseen bacteria, the underground city continued toprovide a source of anxiety and fascination formetropolitan society.

Sewers and the urban uncanny

In one of earliest surveys of the Paris sewers, in1824, the public health activist Parent-Duchatelet(17901835) prepared a detailed olfactory topogra-phy of underground Paris, based on a series ofspecific smells such as insipid (lodeur fade) and

putrid (lodeur putride).66 For Parent-Duchatelet,sethatiothDesh

TothwubcoTnhodreththaoawaRhfeaHwmst

taceda

invention of modernity, yet it is the reworking ofpuEbinreeddtaobAoasncd

wtispomsSliabmaavpbbcibcthms

thdcRuw

Matthew Gandy34wers afforded the opportunity to combine aes-etic, moral and scientific discourses, and formed

n integral element in the meticulous documenta-on of the realms of urban life beyond the reachesf everyday bourgeois experience. In particular,e hygienist doctrine promulgated by Parent-uchatelet and his successors emphasized an

xplicitly gendered conception of the interrelation-ip between sexuality and urban disorder:

Prostitutes are as inevitable in an agglomeration of manas sewers, cesspits and garbage dumps; civil authorityshould conduct itself in the same manner in regard tothe one as to the other: its duty is to survey them, toattenuate by every possible means the detrimentsinherent to them, and for that purpose to hide them, torelegate them to the most obscure corners, in a word torender their presence as inconspicuous as possible.67

he taming of nature through the new technologiesf modernity carried with it an implicit echo ine social sphere.68 In bourgeois French society,omen were relegated to a dichotomous olfactoryniverse of the foul and the fragrant, whichecame manifest in the cultural and aesthetic dis-urses of urban design above and below ground.

he relegation of women to an opposite world ofature and unreason had an increasingly powerfulold over the prevailing political and intellectualutlooks of nineteenth-century Paris, where theichotomous cultural representation of womenached its apotheosis with the flow of waterrough urban space. The public face of water ine lakes and fountains of imperial Paris was to becelebration of the female form for the pleasure

f the male citizen. Water-based sculptures andrchitectural forms allowed a symbolic continuityith classical themes based around water, nudity

nd human physical perfection. By the 1870s, theenaissance emphasis on the male nude as idealuman form was increasingly supplanted by themale nude and the imposition of a new body

esthetic.69 The ornamental public fountains ofaussmanns Paris exemplified the combination ofater with the control of womens sexuality in theost expensive Belle-Epoque neo-Fontainebleauyle favoured by Napoleon III.70

Yet, if these fountains, lakes and other ornamen-l features represented the charm of virginal inno-nce, then the sewers continued to represent the

angerous obverse of female sexuality. The associ-tion of women with impurity is not, of course, anre-modern beliefs in the context of capitalistrbanization that is of interest here. In Secondmpire Paris, the repression of bodily functions inourgeois society became increasingly manifested

a fear of women and the poor. Ideologicaladings of nature, which drew liberally on mod-

rn science, contributed towards sharpening gen-er differences, with a new-found emphasis on theomestic ideal and the promotion of complemen-ry gender roles. In reinforcing innate conceptions

f gender as nature, we find a convergenceetween the ideas and writings of Jules Michelet,uguste Comte, Ernest Legouve and a panoply ofther leading nineteenth-century scientists, writersnd intellectuals.71 Underground urban infra-tructure became a kind of repository for untamedature, within which the innate tensions behindapitalist urbanization became magnified andistorted through the lens of middle-class anxiety.

The sewer has consistently been associated withhat we might term the urban uncanny: a spa-ally defined sense of dread in modern urbanocieties. In order to understand the peculiar com-lexity of the sewer as a recurring spatial locusf the uncanny, we need to unravel how bodilyetaphors have become transposed in urban

pace. Within Western intellectual traditions, it isigmund Freuds essay on the uncanny, pub-shed in 1919, which has served as a focal point formyriad of debates concerning the interconnectionetween the psychological and spatial domains ofodern societies.72 The uncanny is best conceived

s a boundary aesthetic with its spatiality rooted innxieties of displacement and disorientation. Con-entional accounts of the uncanny suggest that, inassing from the world above ground into thatelow, we are entering a new intensity of zonesetween the rational and irrational, nature andulture, male and female, the visible and invis-le.73 Yet these dichotomous metaphors tend to

onceal more than they actually reveal, obscuringe flows and interconnections that constituteaterial reality behind an illusion of stasis and

ymmetry.Recent feminist scholarship has reinterpretede Freudian reading of the uncanny in order to

ispense with more simplistic gender-based con-eptions of spatial disorientation and anxiety.74

ather than conceiving of the uncanny as a kind ofrban gothicism in the Burkean aesthetic tradition,e are better served by re-interpreting the uncanny

as an outcome of the complex intersection between central and western parts of the city. The quest

cities led to a contradictory response on the part ofurban planners. Though much of the literature on

The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space 35the human body and the built environment. Withinthis schema, sewers represent a metaphorical spaceof defilement and confinement, their poignancystemming from the interconnection between theprivate space of the home and the public melangeof urban infrastructure. The metaphorical gridsurrounding the experience of the uncanny isultimately a mystification of material reality in itsimplication that urban origins lie concealedbeneath the surface of the city rather than beingconstituted through the more distant sets of socialrelations and spatial interconnections that sustaincapitalist urbanization. The urban uncanny is aspatial fetishism of absence, a mythologicalresponse to the unseen and the unknown, whichweaves together popular misconceptions of howcities function with dominant ideologicalresponses to urban disorder.

The new urban infrastructures of nineteenth-century Paris unsettled existing metaphors ofurban 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 integratedthe body and urban society into an uneasy whole.75

The fear of touching and the withdrawal fromintimacy or curiosity towards strangers forms partof the atomization of social life under modernity.76

In this context, the relationship between organicand social metaphors becomes problematized,since the city can no longer be meaningfully con-ceived as a holistic or autarchic entity, but emergesas a dynamic intersection of the circulatory proc-esses based around the exigencies of economicexchange. The olfactory revolution, emboldenedby the new discourses of the medical sciences, setin train an irreversible shift in water usage, thecultural significance of bodily smell and thedemand for private space. The urban transforma-tion created a city in which social and economicdifferences not only were widened, but were muchmore keenly felt. The separation and reorganiz-ation of space set in motion an increasingdichotomy in the olfactory experience of the urbanenvironment between the middle classes and thelabouring poor (who were considered indifferent).The old vertical separation of the classes in theapartment houses of pre-modern Paris was gradu-ally to be supplanted by a new emphasis onhorizontal segregation. Under the constructionboom of the Second Empire, there was a progress-ive concentration of the middle classes in thenineteenth-century Paris portrays Haussmann as afigure who faced rather than avoided the conse-quences of modernity, the actual sequence ofevents presents a far more complex picture. Thecreation of a modern metropolis introduced newsources of disorder, which conflicted with existingconceptions of urban form and the pre-moderncirculation of water in cities. We saw, for example,how Haussmann resisted the use of his new sewersfor human faeces. His advocacy of a partialmodernity was rooted in a desire for a holistic andorganic union of the city in all its parts, predicatedon a conception of public health that owed more tofor profit strengthened the social distribution ofodours, as the cleansing of the city involved asimultaneous relocation of the working classes andindustry to the urban periphery.77 Haussmannsleading critics, such as Louis Lazare, repeatedlydrew attention to the mass displacement of peoplefrom central Paris, and the emergence of the newslums and faubourgs at the city limits. The obverseto the rational city was not to be found beneath thestreets, but in what T J Clark has termed themelancholic banlieue, a muddle of suburbansprawl, small holdings and displaced communitieson the outskirts of Paris.78

Conclusion

The interrelationships between technology, moder-nity and capitalist urbanization are well docu-mented. The provision of light, mobility, energyand water form part of an urban palimpsest in theprogressive rationalization of urban space.79 Fromthe early nineteenth century onwards, advances inmedicine, chemistry and demography began toreveal 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 symbioticfashion.80 Yet, the development of new urban infra-structures also stemmed from the demand forgreater privacy under the intensified self-awareness of modernity. The increasing aversion tocommunal washing facilities and the smell ofexcrement led to the growing use of water forwashing and cleaning, which then had to bedrained away. This combination of different factorsbehind the reconstruction of nineteenth-century

the neo-Hippocratic doctrines of the past than totheciwtutico

stsinHodsiflmecewnoevuticoirbSupeamcosedamaoDPthsiMEththti

twentieth-century historians such as Richard deKa

oloagtilasapththscGfeawthtedthmatoBminthndb

atedpeoebacwuusan

Matthew Gandy36e latest advances in scientific thought.81 Theventual integration of private dwellings into thetys sewer network in the post-Haussmann eraas driven to a greater extent by changing atti-des towards the use of water than to any puta-

ve triumph of microbiological rationality overmpeting conceptions of public health.The contradictory rationale behind the recon-

ruction of the Paris sewer system challengesmplistic tautologies, which simply equate moder-ity with the process of Haussmannization.82

aussmann was unable to reconcile his conceptionf urban order with the disengagement of urbanesign from explicitly organic metaphors. The ten-ons within Haussmanns conception of waterow in urban space stemmed from an unevenodernity, which extended across the physical,

ngineering and medical sciences. Eighteenth-ntury conceptions of the elemental purity ofater persisted despite the gathering pace of tech-

ological and scientific advances.83 In the contextf water and urban design, we need to differentiatessentially pre-modern holistic and geometricisions from the powerful exigencies of capitalistrbanization operating at successively wider spa-al scales. Under capitalist space and time, therporeal unity of the pre-modern city was to be

revocably altered, exposing an innate tensionetween function and perfection in the design ofecond Empire Paris. The reconstruction of Parisnder Haussmann was founded on a peculiarolitical medley of state intervention, liberal defer-nce for powerful economic elites and a mix ofristocratic and imperial visions for the Frenchetropolis. In his memoirs, Haussmann frequentlympared his reconstruction of the Paris water andwer system to that of imperial Rome. In Plinys

escription of Rome, for example, the citys sewersre singled out as the most noteworthy achieve-ent of all, and parts of the original Roman

queducts were actually incorporated into the cityf Pariss new water supply system from thehuys, the Vanne and the Marne in the easternaris basin.84 Yet the imperial pretensions behinde rebuilding of Paris were shattered by a succes-on of foreign policy failures in Crimea, Italy andexico, culminating in the defeat of the Second

mpire in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Whilstese episodes have been condemned by posterity,e legacy of urban and infrastructural reconstruc-

on has met with admiration by a succession ofaufmann, Wladimir dOrmesson, Raoul Busquetnd Andre Monzet.85

Despite the physical transformation of sewersver the modern period, they have never entirelyst their earlier associations with danger, disorder

nd threatening infestations. Through their variousender-laden, seditious and mutagenic permuta-ons, sewers have come to symbolize the particu-r fears of each successive phase of bourgeois

ociety. Sewers have consistently been portrayed asfocal point for political threats to social and

olitical stability, both real and imagined: duringe 1870 siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian war,ere was apprehension that the Germans might

ecretly enter the city through the sewers, and theity authorities actually sealed the Collecteureneral dAsnie`res in order to assuage publicars.86 The sewer has consistently been portrayed

s a symbol of the unclean city, a metonym forhat Godwin termed the entire excrementation ofe Metropolis.87 The cesspool city of the nine-enth century was a place where metaphors ofisease and moral degeneration mingled with thereat of women and the labouring classes toiddle-class society. Even the most progressive

nd perceptive of nineteenth-century commenta-rs on urban life such as Engels, Dickens and

audelaire failed to look beyond their dichoto-ous urban worlds of dirt and cleanliness.88 Yet,order to understand the enduring association of

e subterranean city with the urban uncanny, weeed to transcend these dualistic metaphors andevelop a richer appreciation of how humanodies and urban form interact.

By tracing the flow of water through the urbanlimentary system, we can discern a series ofnsions and contradictions that underlie theevelopment of the modern city. Water provides aowerful link between the body and the builtnvironment, within which competing conceptionsf public health and spatial order have becomentwined. The very fluidity of water as both aiophysical and a symbolic realm serves to disruptnd challenge simplistic understandings of howomplex urban societies function and the degree tohich social and spatial order can ever be achievednder the contradictory dynamics of capitalistrbanization. The Haussmann era, as we haveeen, was both contradictory in its inception andlso highly uneven in its practical impact. It wasot until the 1930s, after all, that the whole of Paris

was finally integrated into the citys water and

or distinguished person has left Paris without visitingthe sewers. (Belgrand E 1887 Les travaux souterrains

ses predecesseurs Hachette, Paris; Pinol J-L ed 1996Atlas historiques de villes de France Centre de Cultura

M and Bergeron L 1989 DHaussmann a` nos jours in

The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space 37Contempora`nia de Barcelona, Barcelona; Olsen D J1986 The city as a work of art: London, Paris, Vienna YaleUniversity Press, New Haven CT 3557; Roncayolode Paris V: les egouts et les vidanges Dunod, Paris 174,authors translation)

3 Hiorns F R 1956 Town-building in history: an outlinereview of conditions, influences, ideas, and methods affect-ing planned towns through five thousand years GeorgeG Harrap, London 247.

4 Bacon E N 1967 Design of cities Thames and Hudson,London 179. See also Berman M 1982 All that is solidmelts into air: the experience of modernity Verso, London13172; Clark T J 1985 The painting of modern life: Parisin the art of Manet and his followers Thames andHudson, London; Gaillard J 1977 Paris la ville, 18521870 Champion, Paris; Harvey D 1985 Consciousnessand the urban experience: studies in the history and theoryof capitalist urbanization 1 Blackwell, Oxford; MorizetA 1932 Du vieux Paris au Paris moderne, Haussmann etsewer system as a public service, as distinct fromthe more differentiated and private approaches ofthe past.89

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Hugh Clout, Hillary Cottom,Richard Dennis, Rebecca Spang and the referees fortheir comments on an earlier draft. The mainarchival sources used were the Bibliothe`que His-torique de la Ville de Paris and the Institution ofCivil Engineers, London. Some financial assistancefor the research was provided by the BritishAcademy and University College London. Earlierversions of the paper were presented toseminars held at Cambridge University, LampeterUniversity, the London School of Economics andthe Annual Meeting of the Association of AmericanGeographers in Boston.

Notes

1 A deformed tangle of filth and entrails beyond theimagination of Piranesi (authors translation) inNadar F 1861 (reprinted 1982) Le Paris souterrain deFelix Nadar 1861: des os et des eaux Caisse Nationaledes Monuments Historiques et des Sites, Paris 41.

2 The magnificent sewers of Paris have always been asource of public fascination and have been honouredwith illustrious visits. Not a single foreign monarchBergeron L ed Paris: gene`se dun paysage Picard, Paris21798; Rossi A 1982 The architecture of the city (origi-nal 1966; translated by D Ghirardo and J Ockman)MIT Press, Cambridge MA; Saalman H 1971Haussmann: Paris transformed George Braziller, NewYork; Sutcliffe A 1970 The autumn of central ParisArnold, London; 1981 Towards the planned city:Germany, Britain, the United States and France 17801914 Blackwell, Oxford; 1993 Paris: an architecturalhistory Yale University Press, New Haven CT.

5 An exaggerated emphasis on the significance of theHaussmann era is to be found in Benevolo L 1993 TheEuropean city (translated by C Ipsen) Blackwell,Oxford; Chapman J M and Chapman B 1957 The lifeand times of Baron Haussmann: Paris in the second empireWeidenfeld and Nicholson, London; Jordan D P1995 Transforming Paris: the life and labors of BaronHaussmann Free Press, New York. Benevolo suggeststhat in Second Empire Paris, there was a decisive shiftfrom private to public interests, yet, as this papershows in the case of sewers and urban sanitation,public interests only began to prevail in the 1890s.

6 The most comprehensive piece of recent scholarshipon the Paris sewers is provided by the historianDonald Reid, but his study does not explore theinterrelationships between modernity and urbanspace or the cultural ramifications of new urbaninfrastructures in any detail. Reids primary interestis in labour history over a very long time frame, fromthe pre-modern era until the late twentieth century.See Reid D 1991 Paris sewers and sewermen: realitiesand representations Harvard University Press,Cambridge MA. Barrie Ratcliffe, in a paper devotedto the citys nineteenth-century sanitation arrange-ments, explores the sewage system pre-Haussmann,and emphasizes how urban historians have tended tooverlook the significance of this earlier era. SeeRatcliffe B M 1990 Cities and environmental decline:elites and the sewage problem in Paris from the mid18th to the mid 19th century Planning Perspectives 5189222. In contrast, this paper suggests that it is thelast decade of the nineteenth century that presents acrucial transformation in the continuity between theHaussmann period and earlier times.

7 In cinema alone, we can draw on many examples,such as Carol Reeds The third man (1948), AndrzejWajdas Kanal (1956) and Stephen Kings It (1987). Asfor literature, examples include Emile Zolas Germinal(1885), Gaston Lerouxs The phantom of the opera (1911)and Victor Hugos Les miserables (1862). More recently,the theme of the urban labyrinth has been developedin Thomas Pynchons V: a novel (1963) and HarlanEllisons Strange wine (1978); in music, sewers havefeatured in 1970s new wave, with The StranglersDown in the sewer (1977), and in contemporary rap,with DAS EFXs Straight from the sewer (1995).

8 Hugo V 1982 Les miserables (original 1862; translated

9

1011

12

13

14 Harvey 1985 Consciousness and the urban experience op

1

1

1

1

1

22

2

2

2

2

2

2

Matthew Gandy38by N Denny) Penguin, Harmondsworth 1075. Hugobased his vivid description of the pre-HaussmannParis sewers largely on the accounts given by theearly nineteenth-century public health activist Parent-Duchatelet. For an interesting analysis of Hugosconception of the subterranean city, see Chevalier L1973 Laboring classes and dangerous classes in Parisduring the first half of the nineteenth century (original1958; translated by F Jellinek) Princeton UniversityPress, Princeton NJ. See also Lesser W 1987 The lifebelow the ground: a study of the subterranean in literatureFaber and Faber, Boston; Williams R H 1990 Notes onthe underground: an essay on technology, society and theimagination MIT Press, Cambridge MA.Vidler A 1992 The architectural uncanny: essays in themodern unhomely MIT Press, Cambridge MA 192. Seealso Florman S C 1976 The existential pleasures ofengineering St Martins Press, New York.Williams Notes on the underground op cit 21.Les galeries souterraines, organes de la grande cite,fonctionneraient comme ceux du corps humain, sansse montrer au jour; leau pure et frache, la lumie`re etla chaleur y circuleraient comme les fluides diversdont le mouvement et lentretien servent a` la vie. Lessecretions sy executeraient mysterieusement, etmaintiendraient la sante publique sans troubler labonne ordonnance de la ville et sans gater sa beauteexterieure. (Haussmann B 1854 Memoire sur les eauxde Paris, presente a la commission municipale par m leprefet de la Seine Vinchon, Paris 53)A variety of interdisciplinary approaches to theunderstanding of water, modernity and architecturalform are to be found in Lahiji N and Friedman D Seds 1997 Plumbing: sounding modern architecturePrinceton Architectural Press, New York. See alsoSwyngedouw E 1996 The city as a hybrid: on nature,society and cyborg urbanization Capitalism, Nature,Socialism 7 6580.Hambourg M 1995 A portrait of Nadar in HambourgM Heilbrun F and Neagu P eds 1995 Nadar Museumof Modern Art, New York 235. Nadars family hadstrong republican and internationalist sentiments: hisfather had taken part in the Lyonnais uprising duringthe French revolution and had also published Felicitede Lamennaiss radical tract entitled Essai surlindifference en matie`re de religion in 1817. On thehistory of photography, see Gernsheim A andGernsheim H 1965 L J M Daguerre: the history of thediorama and the daguerreotype Secker and Warburg,London; 1969 The history of photography from the cameraobscura to the beginning of the modern era McGraw-Hill,New York; Newhall B 1982 The history of photographyMuseum of Modern Art, New York; Scharf A 1968Art and photography Allen Lane, London; SzarkowskiJ 1989 Photography until now Museum of Modern Art,New York.cit 65.5 See Eugny A 1945 Au temps de Baudelaire, Guys und

Nadar Editions du Chene, Paris; Gosling N 1976Nadar Secker and Warburg, London; Prinet J andDilasser A 1966 Nadar Colin, Paris; Rice S 1997Parisian views MIT Press, Cambridge MA.

6 Aubenas S 1995 Beyond the portrait, beyond theartist in Hambourg et al Nadar op cit 95107.

7 Hambourg A portrait of Nadar op cit; Heilbrun F1995 Nadar and the art of portrait photography inHambourg et al Nadar op cit 3559; Krauss R 1978Tracing Nadar October 5 2947; Neagu P 1995 Nadarand the artistic life of his time in Hambourg et alNadar op cit 5977; Rouille A 1995 When I was aphotographer: the anatomy of a myth in Hambourget al Nadar op cit 10714.

8 The debate surrounding modernity and aestheticrealism is a pivotal theme in relation to criticalreceptions of the emergence of impressionist andpost-impressionist art. See Sutcliffe A 1995 Theimpressionists and Haussmanns Paris French CulturalStudies 6 2 197219.

9 Nadar F 1900 (reprinted 1994) Quand jetais photogra-phe Seuil, Paris; Nadar Le Paris souterrain de FelixNadar 1861 op cit. See also Dollfus C 1962 Balloons(original 1960; translated by C Mason) Prentice-Hall,London; Rey P 1970 Du ballon de Nadar a` ApolloXIII: la detection a` distance des ressources naturellesMemoires de lAcademie des Sciences, Inscriptions etBelles-Lettres de Toulouse 132 97103.

0 Hambourg A portrait of Nadar op cit 28.1 Hugo Les miserables op cit 1072. The word cloaca is

described in the Oxford English Dictionary as mean-ing Sewer; excrementory cavity in birds, reptiles, etc;gathering place of moral evil. The word is derivedfrom the Latin Cloacina, the Roman goddess of thesewer. See Reid Paris sewers and sewermen op cit 15.

2 See Schivelbusch W 1988 Disenchanted night: theindustrialization of light in the nineteenth century (origi-nal 1983; translated by A Davies) Berg Publishers,Oxford.

3 Pinkney D 1958 Napoleon III and the rebuilding of ParisPrinceton University Press, Princeton NJ.

4 See Reid Paris sewers and sewermen op cit. Demandeasily outstripped available places on allocated visit-ing days and the sewers were listed as a majorattraction in popular tourist guides of the late nine-teenth century. See, for example, Baedeker K 1876Paris and its environs Karl Baedeker, Leipzig.

5 Pinkney Napoleon III and the rebuilding of Paris op cit143.

6 Williams R 1973 The country and the city OxfordUniversity Press, Oxford.

7 Quoted in Corbin A 1986 The foul and the fragrant: odorand the French social imagination (original 1982; trans-lated by M L Kochan R Porter and C Prendergast)

Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 115. Paris actuelle, pour servir a` lhistoire de la salubrite et de

The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space 39had been known as the city of mud (ville de boue)since Roman times. See Reid Paris sewers and sewer-men op cit 1011.

28 On the consequences of rapid urban growth, see alsoChevalier Laboring classes and dangerous classes in Parisop cit; Delaporte F 1986 Disease and civilization: thecholera in Paris, 1832 MIT Press, Cambridge MA;Harvey Consciousness and the urban experience op cit 63;Kearns G 1991 Biology, class and the urban penalty inKearns G and Withers W J eds Urbanising Britain:essays on class and community in the nineteenth centuryCambridge University Press, Cambridge 1230;Bourdelais P 1987 Histoire du cholera en France 18321854 Payot, Paris; Kudlick C J 1996 Cholera in post-revolutionary Paris: a cultural history University ofCalifornia Press, Berkeley.

29 Chapman and Chapman The life and times of BaronHaussmann op cit; Jordan Transforming Paris op cit;Malet H 1973 Le Baron Haussmann et la renovation deParis Editions Municipales, Paris; Peets E 1926Famous town planners: Baron Haussmann TownPlanning Review 12 18190.

30 Pinkney Napoleon III and the rebuilding of Paris op cit.31 Saint-Simon (17601825) played a significant role in

the development of new political and economic ideas,which reflected the growing influence of industrial-ists and scientists in nineteenth-century France. LikeComte, he was an early advocate of technologicallybased positivist solutions to political problems, andproved highly influential within the French engineer-ing profession. See Harvey Consciousness and the urbanexperience op cit.

32 Pinkney Napoleon III and the rebuilding of Paris op cit.33 Clark The painting of modern life op cit 37.34 Harvey Consciousness and the urban experience op cit 87.35 Saalman Haussmann: Paris transformed op cit.36 The first covered sewer in Paris was the egout de

ceinture (the beltway sewer), built by the prevot (cityfather) Hughes Aubriot in 1370. By 1636, a reportrevealed that the city had built a network of only 24sewers, yet most of these were either seriously dilapi-dated or choked with rotting refuse. No more than aquarter of these sewers were covered and the inabil-ity of city authorities to improve the sanitary condi-tions of the city became symbolic of the ineptitudeand iniquity of pre-revolutionary France. By 1826, themajor Amelot, La Roquette and Chemin Vert sewershad become completely blocked with refuse, and,with the obstruction of the sewers, the city faced agrowing crisis of undrained stagnant water and over-flowing refuse dumps. See Beaumont-Maillet L 1991Leau a` Paris Hazan, Paris; Cebron de Lisle P 1991Leau a Paris au dix-neuvie`me sie`cle UnpublishedPhD dissertation, Universite de Lille III; Chevallier A1851 Notice historique sur la police et la distributiondes eaux dans Paris depuis 360 jusqua` lepoquelhygie`ne publique des grandes villes AnnalesdHygie`ne Publique et de Medecine Legale 45 571; DiffreP 1967 Historique de lalimentation en eau de ParisBulletin de Bureau de Recherches Geologiques et Minie`res4 322; Dupuit J 1865 Traite theorique et pratique de laconduite et de la distribution des eaux 2nd editionDunod, Paris; Emmery M 1837 Statistique des egoutsde la ville de Paris Chez Carillan-Goeury, Paris;Haussmann Memoire sur les eaux de Paris op cit;Haussmann G-E 1854 (reprinted 1861) De legout deseaux in Documents relatifs aux eaux de Paris PaulDupont, Paris 5483; Reid Paris sewers and sewermenop cit 1215; Roche D 1984 Le temps de leau rare, dumoyen age a` lepoque moderne Annales: Economies,Societes, Civilisations 39 38399; Vautel C 1904 LeSeine des eaux a` Paris Monde Moderne XX 43744.

37 Belgrand E 1854 Recherches statistiques sur les sourcesdu bassin de la Seine quil est possible de conduire a` ParisVinchon, Paris; Belgrand Les travaux souterrains deParis V op cit; Chevalier Laboring classes and dangerousclasses in Paris op cit; Figuier L 1862 Les eaux de ParisMichel Levy Fre`res, Paris; Haussmann B 1858 Secondmemoire sur les eaux de Paris presente par le prefet de laSeine au conseil municipal Typographie de Charles deMourgues Fre`res, Paris.

38 Haussmann Second memoire sur les eaux op cit. See alsoPinkney Napoleon III and the rebuilding of Paris op cit.

39 Belgrand E 1875 Historique du service des eaux, depuislannee 1854 jusqua` lannee 1874 Dunod, Paris;Belgrand Les travaux souterrains de Paris V op cit.Belgrand stressed the importance of better tools andventilation for sewer workers as part of his moderni-zation programme; Dumont A 1862 Les eaux de Lyonet de Paris Dunod, Paris; LOlivier V Maxwell Lyte Fand Stoffel L M 1873 Utilisation des eaux des egouts dela ville de Paris et assainissement du cours de la SeineImprimerie Polyglotte de L Hugonis, Paris. See alsoCaron F 1990 Paris et ses reseaux: naissance dun mode devie urbain XIXXXe sie`cles Bibliothe`que historique dela ville de Paris, Paris; Pinkney Napoleon III and therebuilding of Paris op cit 35.

40 The term night-soil refers to the contents of varioustypes of cesspools and cesspits and the fact that theunpleasant (and often dangerous) activity of empty-ing these structures was usually carried out at night.Some of the earliest public health ordinances inFrance were directed at the problem of human waste:in 1533, for example, a royal decree ordered thatevery new property must have a cesspool con-structed, yet there were no attempts to impose designspecifications on these underground structures untilthe early nineteenth century. See Deligny M 1883 Lesprojets de loi et de re`glement relatifs a` lenvoi direct desvidanges a` legout Chaix, Paris.

41 Haussmann Memoire sur les eaux de Paris op cit. Theonly vestige of a combined sewer system that

Haussmann permitted was the construction of public

42

43

44

45

46

des egouts et emploi de leurs eaux dans lagriculture

4

4

Matthew Gandy40urinals (pissoirs) along the new boulevards. See alsoPinkney Napoleon III and the rebuilding of Paris op cit136.In 1854, Haussmann wrote disparagingly of theEnglish emphasis on the use of combined sewers forstorm water and human excrement:

Meme, ainsi corrige, ce syste`me aurait encore pourresultat inevitable linfection des galeries degout,dont la pente ne peut etre que tre`s-faible, dapre`s lerelief du sol de Paris, et quaucune chasse deau, siforte quelle soit, ne lave et nassainit jamais com-pletement. (Haussmann Memoire sur les eaux deParis op cit 48)

See also Dumont A and Dumont G 1874 Les eaux deNmes, de Paris et de Londres Dunod, Paris; HederstedtH-B 1865 An account of the drainage of Paris Minutesof the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers 2425779; Pinkney Napoleon III and the rebuilding of Parisop cit 144.Chevallier A 1860 Essai sur la possibilite de recueillir lesmatie`res fecales, les eaux vannes, les urines de Paris, avecutilite pour la salubrite, et advantage pour la ville et pourlagriculture Baillie`re, Paris; Paulet M 1858 Les vidan-ges, engrais de Paris Smith, Paris; Prefet de la Seine1885 Les vidanges de Paris et lagriculture Adolphe Reiff,Paris. See also Guillerme A E 1983 (reprinted 1988)The age of water: the urban environment of the north ofFrance AD 3001800 Texas A&M University Press,College Station; Teich M 1982 Circulation, transfor-mation, conservation of matter and the balancing ofthe biological world in the eighteenth century Ambix29 1728.Ducuing F 1875 Des eaux degout et des vidanges: leurutilisation par irrigation dans leur parcours jusqua` la merSociete des Etudes, Paris. See also Ratcliffe Cities andenvironmental decline op cit.At the close of the Haussmann era, there were stillwide disparities in the number of homes connected tothe new water distribution system: some 82 per centof homes in the affluent inner-city arrondissements andonly 48 per cent in the predominantly working-classouter arrondissements. No legal sanctions existed toforce existing property-owners to link up to the newsystem, and new buildings were only required todrain storm water. See Chatzis K and Coutard O 1998Eau et gaz a` tous les etages: compared patterns ofnetwork development in Paris Paper presented at theUrban Futures Technological Futures Conference,Durham, 2325 April.In the post-Haussmann era, the advocacy of sewerwater for irrigation emerged as a temporary solutionto the desire for organic continuity in the circulationof urban water. Examples include Aubrey-Vitet M1880 Lepuration et lutilisation des eaux degoutsQuantin, Paris; Belgrand E 1871 Transformation de lavidange et suppression de la voirie de Bondy: ache`vementMourgues, Paris; Chatel V 1876 Assainissement de laSeine: epuration des eaux degouts avant leur jet dans lefleuve Trouttet, Asnie`res; Durand-Claye M A 1882Reponse a` larticle dans la revue des deux-mondes, parAubrey-Vitet sur la question des egouts de Paris Choix,Paris; Haussmann G-E 1893 Memoires du BaronHaussmann: volume 3 2nd edition Victor-Havard, Paris319; Joly C 1877 La question des eaux degouts en Franceet en Angleterre Michels, Paris; 1885 Les eaux degout aParis Chaix, Paris; la Berge A F 1988 Edwin Chadwickand the French connection Bulletin of the History ofMedicine 62 2342; Memoire de linspecteur generaldes ponts et chaussees 1875 Transformation de lavidange et suppression de la voirie de Bondy: ache`vementdes egouts et emploi de leurs eaux dans lagricultureMourgues, Paris; Miotat E 1881 Supression comple`te dela vidange: assainissement des egouts et des habitationsDucher, Paris. Jolys writings are particularly interest-ing for their explicit recognition that the moderniza-tion of the Paris sewers remained incomplete:

Il est triste de penser, quen 1877, on en est encore a`hesiter pour envoyer aux egouts la totalite desvidanges solides et liquides, et que les maisons lesplus favorisees nont encore que le syste`me divi-seur propose par Gourlier en 1788. Sur 300 000me`tres cubes deaux vannes quon envoie quotidi-ennement a` la Seine, que peuvent faire 1000 me`trescubes de matie`res solides a` letat frais? (Joly 1877, 2)

7 Durand-Claye M A 1880 Le syste`me de Liernur GMasson, Paris. See also Ratcliffe Cities and environ-mental decline op cit. Some commentators empha-sized ever more elaborate technical modifications tothe design and operation of cesspits, including theimplementation of ideas developed by Gourlier,Giraud and others in the late eighteenth century forthe separation of urine and faeces within the home.See Berlier J-B 1883 Projet de vidange pneumatique pourla ville de Paris Grande Imprimerie, Paris; Liger F 1875Fosses daisances: latrines, urinoirs et vidanges Baudry,Paris. For Suilliot, the problem of what to do withhuman waste was la question eternelle des vidan-ges, leaving only two real options: assainissement(disposal) or utilisation (use) (Suilliot H 1880 Laquestion des vidanges Vauthrin, Paris 3). Interestingly,Haussmann had also reflected on the technical possi-bilities for a dual sewer system in his submission tothe citys municipal council in 1854 as part of thecanalisation comple`te de Paris; see HaussmannMemoire sur les eaux de Paris op cit 4951.

8 Jordan Paris transformed op cit 271. It would be diffi-cult to argue that existing sanitation arrangementswere clearly backward in public health terms, sinceParisian mortality rates compared favourably withother European cities at the turn of the century. SeeKearns G 1989 Zivilis or Hygaeia: urban publichealth and the epidemiological transition in Lawton

R ed The rise and fall of great cities: aspects of urbaniz- liquors watery part to penetrate the body. See

The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space 41ation in the western world Belhaven, London 96124.49 As early as 1883, the city council urged that the

connection and subscription to water and sewerservices should be compulsory, in order to extendadequate sanitation to poorer parts of city, but thisinitial attempt to ensure integration into the citysnew water and sewer system was to be subjected to asuccessful legal challenge by private property inter-ests. See Chatzis and Coutard Eau et gaz a` tous lesetages op cit.

50 See Chatzis and Coutard Eau et gaz a` tous les etagesop cit.

51 Bourneville D 1892 Le tout-a`-legout et lassainissementde la Seine Bureaux du Progre`s Medical, Paris.Bourneville scorned opposition to the tout-a`-legoutsolution, pointing out that human faeces had alreadybeen entering the sewer system throughout the nine-teenth century at La Place Maubert, Rue Saint-Jacquesand a number of other locations across the city.

52 Amondruz V 1883 Assainissement de Paris: le tout a`legout rationnel obtenu par la vidange hydrauliqueDucher, Paris; Bert E no date Loi du fevrier 1888concernant la repression des fraudes dans la commerce desengrais Chevalier-Maresq, Paris; Bourneville Le tout-a`-legout et lassainissement de la Seine op cit; Gauthier L1888 Le tout a` legout, considerations sur les differentssyste`mes de vidange a` Paris Chamerot, Paris; Gerards E1908 Paris souterrain Garnier Fre`res, Paris; Poulet-Allamagny J-J 1982 Note historique in Nadar Le Parissouterrain de Felix Nadar 1861 op cit 612; Ville G nodate Etat de lopinion du monde agricole en 1890 sur ladoctrine des engrais chimiques Libraire Agricole, Paris.

53 Corbin The foul and the fragrant op cit 723; VigarelloG 1988 Concepts of cleanliness: changing attitudes inFrance since the middle ages (original 1985; translatedby J Birrell) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

54 Braham W W 1997 Siegried Giedion and the fascina-tion of the tub in Lahiji and Friedman Plumbing op cit200224; Giedion S 1948 Mechanization takes command:a contribution to anonymous history W W Norton andCo, New York; Illich I 1985 H2O and the waters offorgetfulness: reflections on the historicity of stuff MarionBoyars, London. Georges Vigarello details the declineof group bathing in sixteenth-century France andstresses the role played by seigneurial courts andother edicts against public nudity. See The disap-pearance of certain practices and The old pleasuresof water in Vigarello Concepts of cleanliness op cit1237.

55 Corbin The foul and the fragrant op cit 175. In theseventeenth century, bathing had been considereddoubly dangerous: the rendering of skin moist andsoft was considered feminine, whilst simultaneouslyexposing the body to the threat of unhealthy air anddisease. Even Francis Bacon, the pioneer of theempirical sciences, cautioned against allowing theClassen C Howes D and Synnott A 1994 Aroma: thecultural history of smell Routledge, London 70.

56 The late eighteenth century and early decades of thenineteenth century saw increasing attempts to regu-late the use of cesspits more effectively. See, forexample, Dubois M Huzard M and Hericart deThury M 1819 Rapport sur les fosses mobiles inodoresBureau de lEntreprise Generale, Paris; Giraud P 1786Fosses daisances et leurs inconvenients Cailleau, Paris;Goulet M 1787 Inconvenients des fosses daisance, possi-bilite de les supprimer Auteur, Paris; Labarraque MChevallier A and Parent-Duchatelet A J B 1840Rapport sur les ameliorations a introduire dans les fossedaisances, leur mode de vidange, et les voiries de la ville deParis Renouard, Paris (reprinted in Annales dHygie`nePublique 14 2 176); Laborie M 1778 Observations surles fosses daisances et moyens de prevenir les inconven-ients de leur vidange College de Pharmacie, Paris;Lucquel J P 1840 De lassainissement de la vidange et dela supression des voiries de la ville de Paris Lacquin,Paris; Municipalite de Paris 1792 Arrete concernant lasalubrite et la vidange des fosses daisance, puits etpuisards Lottin, Paris; Prefecture de police, conseil desalubrite 1835 Rapport sur les ameliorations a` introduiredans les voiries, les modes a` vidange et les fosses daisancesde la ville de Paris Lottin, Paris; Sucquet J P and KrafftL 1840 Lassainissement de la vidange et de la supressiondes voieries de la ville de Paris Felix Locquin, Paris.Sucquet and Krafft (1840, 6) provide a vivid depictionof the stench and inconvenience of night-soil collec-tion in the early decades of the nineteenth century:

Comme par le passe, chaque maison deviendratour a` tour un foyer demanations infectes, et laville sera sillonnee tous les soirs par ces charettesquon devine a` leur odeur et quon ne peut eviter a`une certaine heure dans Paris.

57 Corbin The foul and the fragrant op cit. Norbert Eliasdevelops a similar theme in his exploration of thechanging frontier of embarrassment, in Elias N 1978The civilizing process. Volume 1: the history of manners(original 1939; translated by E Jephcott) Blackwell,Oxford 203, 130. See also Corbin A 1995 Time, desireand horror: towards a history of the senses (original 1991;translated by J Birrell) Polity Press, Cambridge.

58 Reid Paris sewers and sewermen op cit 27; Corbin Thefoul and the fragrant op cit 1723; Goubert J-P 1989 Theconquest of water: the advent of health in the industrial age(original 1986; translated by A Wilson) Polity Press,Cambridge; Magraw R 1993 Producing, retailing,consuming: France 183070 in Rigby B ed 1993 Frenchliterature, thought and culture in the nineteenth century: amaterial world Macmillan, London 5985. For the latenineteenth-century architect and essayist Adolf Loos,for example, the increasing use of water and thetechnological sophistication of plumbing was a vitalindicator of cultural advancement. Innovative

changes in the design of housing were particularly

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Matthew Gandy42advanced in England, where pressurized waterfaucets in kitchens and water closets were combinedwith the disposal of sewage through drains; but theiradoption in France proved much slower. See Loos A1997 Plumbers (original 1898; translated by H FMallgrave) in Lahiji and Friedman Plumbing op cit1519.Chretien J 1881 Les odeurs de Paris: etude analytique descauses qui concourent a linsalubrite de la ville et desmoyens de les combattre Baudry, Paris.See Molesworth H 1997 Bathrooms and kitchens:cleaning house with Duchamp in Lahiji andFriedman Plumbing op cit 7492Tucker P 1982 Monet at Argenteuil Yale UniversityPress, New Haven CT (quoted in Frascina F Blake NFer B Garb T and Harrison C 1993 Modernity andmodernism: French painting in the nineteenth centuryYale University Press, New Haven CT 121). Historicalevidence of poor water quality at Asnie`res is pro-vided in Belgrand E 1875 Direction des eaux et desegouts: rapport presente a` m le prefet sur le projet dederivation des eaux degout, depuis lembouchure du col-lecteur general dAsnie`res, jusqua` lextremite nord-ouestde la foret de Saint-Germain Gauthier-Villars, Paris;1878 La situation du service des eaux et egouts Chaix,Paris; Bourneville Le tout-a`-legout et lassainissementde la Seine op cit; Cabanon L 1886 Depotoir et fabriquedammoniaque: linfection de la Seine LAbeille, Neuilly;Chatel Assainissement de la Seine op cit.Bloch E 1986 The principle of hope (original 1959;translated by N Plaice S Plaice and P Knight) MITPress, Cambridge MA; Collier P and Lethbridge Reds 1994 Artistic relations: literature and the visual artsin nineteenth-century France Yale University Press,New Haven CT; Crossley C 1993 Romanticism andthe material world: mind, nature and analogy inRigby French literature, thought and culture in thenineteenth century op cit 922; Halperin J U 1988 FelixFeneon: aesthete and anarchist in fin-de-sie`cle Paris YaleUniversity Press, New Haven CT; Kelly M 1993Materialism in nineteenth-century France in RigbyFrench literature, thought and culture in the nineteenthcentury op cit 2341; Nochlin L 1989 Seurats Lagrande jatte: an anti-utopian allegory in The politics ofvision: essays on nineteenth-century art and societyThames and Hudson, London 17093; Schapiro M1935 Seurat and La grande jatte Columbia Review 171415.See Smith P 1996 Seurat and the avant-garde YaleUniversity Press, New Haven CT.See Green N 1990 The spectacle of nature: landscapeand bourgeois culture in nineteenth-century FranceManchester University Press, Manchester. An impor-tant exception to the absence of work from theseriparian landscapes can be found in Monets Menunloading coal (1875), which is reproduced inNational Gallery, London 112.5 See Raphael Collins (1884) Summer and Jean-Charles

Cazins (1881) Riverbank with bathers in Leighton andThomson Seurat and the bathers op cit 1034.

6 Parent-Duchatelet A J B 1824 Essai sur les cloaques ouegouts de la ville de Paris Crevot, Paris. Other earlyexplorations of the sewers include those by Brune-seau, Inspector-General of Health between 1805 and1812; Horeau H 1831 Nouveaux egouts proposes a` la villede Paris Didot, Paris. See also Chevalier Laboringclasses and dangerous classes in Paris during the first halfof the nineteenth-century op cit; Lecuyer B P 1986Lhygie`ne en France avant Pasteur, 17591850 inSalomon-Bayet C ed Pasteur et la revolution pastori-enne Flammarion, Paris; Murard L andZylberman P 1996 Lhygie`ne dans la republique: la santepublique en France, ou lutopie contrariee 18701918Fayard, Paris.

7 Quoted in Bernheimer C 1987 Of whores and sewers:Parent-Duchatelet, engineer of abjection Raritan: aQuarterly Review 6 7290. The word putrid, so oftenused by Parent-Duchatelet and others in reference tothe Paris sewers, is derived from the Latin word putameaning whore. Parent-Duchatelet was a criticalearly figure in the emergence of what one might termmedical hygienics, and was a founder of the influ-ential periodical Annales dHygie`ne Publique et de laMedecine Legale in 1829. The term Cloaca maxima,which also has an explicitly gendered etymology, isused by Baron Haussmann in Haussmann Secondmemoire sur les eaux de Paris op cit 107.

8 A classic example is Michelet J 1859 (reprinted 1981)La femme Flammarion, Paris. See also Callen A 1993Immaterial views? Science, intransigence and thefemale spectator of modern French art in 1879 inRigby French literature, thought and culture in thenineteenth century op cit 18497; Corbin A 1990 Womenfor hire: prostitution and sexuality in France after 1850(original 1978; translated by A Sheridan) HarvardUniversity Press, Cambridge MA; Green The spectacleof nature op cit; Strumingher L S 1979 Lange de lamaison: mothers and daughters in nineteenth-centuryFrance International Journal of Womens Studies 2.

9 Leighton and Thomson Seurat and the bathers op cit;Illich H2O and the waters of forgetfulness op cit.

0 Examples of water-based statues of the female nudecompleted during the Second Empire include thereconstruction of Lescots Fountain of the Nymphs inthe Place des Innocents and the Place Louvois. Lead-ing architects in Second Empire Paris include Hitorffand Rohault de Fleury, both of whom revived earlierstyles favoured by Louis XVI in their design of publicspaces and monuments. See Chadwick G F 1966 Thepark and the town: public landscape in the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries Architectural Press, London 15262; Hitchcock H-R 1977 Architecture: nineteenth and

twentieth centuries Yale University Press, New Haven and cinema, Indiana University Press, Bloomington;

The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space 43CT 197; Loyer F 1988 Paris nineteenth century: architec-ture and urbanism (translated by C L Clark) AbbevillePress, New York; Masson F and Gaillard M 1995 Lesfontaines de Paris Martelle, Amiens; Moore C W andLidz J 1994 Water and architecture Thames andHudson, London; Morizet Du vieux Paris au Parismoderne op cit; Woolf P 1988 Symbol of the secondempire: cultural politics and the Paris Opera House inCosgrove D and Daniels S eds The iconography oflandscape: essays on the symbolic representation, designand use of past environments Cambridge UniversityPress, Cambridge 21436; Van Zanten D 1994 Build-ing Paris: architectural institutions and the transformationof the French capital 18301870 Cambridge UniversityPress, Cambridge.

71 Green The spectacle of nature op cit 147. Latenineteenth-century Europe saw a sharpening of gen-der inequalities and differentiations, within whichnature-based ideologies played an important role.See, for example, Anderson B S and Zinsser J P 1988A history of their own: women in Europe from prehistoryto the present Harper and Row, New York; Roszak Band Roszak T eds 1969 Masculine/feminine: readings inthe sexual mythology of women Harper and Row, NewYork.

72 Freud S 1919 (reprinted 1985) The uncanny in FreudS Art and literature: Jensens Gradiva, Leonardo DaVinci and other works. Volume 14 Penguin FreudLibrary, Harmondsworth 33976.

73 For useful overviews of the emergence of theuncanny, see Bresnick A 1996 Prosopoetic compul-sion: reading the uncanny in Freud and HoffmannGermanic Review 71 11432; Castle T 1995 The femalethermometer: eighteenth-century culture and the inventionof the uncanny Oxford University Press, New