The Sewers of Paris.

Monsieur Bruneseau

Let me admit right up front, so there are no misunderstandings, that I have not read Les Miserables. Or anything else by Victor Hugo. I’m sorry. Hopefully I am now sufficiently motivated to read this 1,232-page tome, but I doubt it. I didn’t even like the Broadway version. (Sorry again!) In the meantime, I’m willing to bet that many of you have read Les Mis and are therefore already familiar with this subject.

So what peaked my interest in the sewers of Paris?

I like to pay attention to street signs because Paris streets are often named after people who contributed to society or somehow left their mark. This contrasts with how we do it in the U.S. There is no Elm Street, Maple Street, or Main Street in Paris. Back in the U.S., we tend to name streets after either mundane features (maples, for example) or unmemorable people and places. Marvin Gardens, for example, is a street name used in the classic American board game Monopoly. It takes its name from, of all things, a residential tract in Margate City, New Jersey, and isn’t even spelled right. But here in Paris, they think these things through a little more carefully.

The thing I like most is that the people that Parisian streets are named after usually were really important, in the sense that I personally use the word. They were philosophers, scientists, writers, artists and architects. They contributed something lasting. Beyond politicos, if the U.S. were to start naming streets after “important” people, we would end up with Brad Pitt Boulevard and Mike Tyson Lane. Sports figures and Hollywood celebrities. Not really important to society or humanity.

I often take a morning walk after dropping my kids off at school. One morning a few years ago, I stopped to read one of the signs I walked past—rue Bruneseau in the 13^th—and the caption read “Créateur des égouts”. That last word I didn’t know. I made a mental note to look it up. I knew the word gout and wondered if it had something to do with food. When I got home to look it up, I found that égout means sewer. I got a good laugh that the street that separates Paris from my banlieue was named after the man who created the sewers. I chalked this up to weird Frenchiness—what other culture would honor a person who worked with sewage?

The Life Expectancy Connection

Then fast-forward to a few months ago and I came across an online quiz asking for, among other things, the single most important invention in the history of humanity. What single invention caused life expectancy to double? I answered penicillin. I was wrong. The correct answer? The sewer. Simultaneously my mind said “yuck!” and realized that Monsieur Bruneseau, who incidentally was a close friend of Victor Hugo, may have made the most important contribution of all—to Paris and to the rest of the world.

Now I was curious. I had to research this further. Did you know that before the sewers were built in the mid-1800s, the life expectancy of the average Parisian was only 30 years? Yep, almost all of you reading this would be dead by now. We also probably wouldn’t have decided to move here to begin with since the Parisians of the time were dumping their waste right outside their doorsteps. The old saying was tout à la rue (everything to the street). Waste eventually found its way to the Seine, where Parisians would then draw their drinking water. (Now you know why the French are so big on bottled water, huh?)

Obviously this cycle of drinking your own and your neighbors’ wastewater led to a lot of illness and death. But even just the waste in the streets led to a lot of death from the plague and major cholera outbreaks. In an effort to solve the problem, some mini-sewers were built in the middle of the roads with a collection trough just underground (but still exposed) that let the waste flow to the Seine. This didn’t exactly solve the problem.

Making the connection between wastewater and the need for clean drinking water, in about 1850 Napoleon III commissioned a massive modern sewage system. At the same time that he appointed Haussmann to make Paris beautiful, he appointed Eugene Belgrand to engineer something underground to make Paris healthy and stench-free.

What we have now is an incredibly modern, very efficient underground system that collects and cleans wastewater and storm water before it is dumped (downstream) into the Seine, where we still get our drinking water. Tout à l’égout (everything to the sewer) is now the motto (and the rule) for all water in Paris.

What makes Paris’ Sewers Special?

The most interesting feature of the Paris sewer is that it is truly a complete underground network dug under streets and boulevards. Each street in Paris, no matter how small, has its own sewer. The tunnels are named for the streets that lie directly above them. That sewer collects waste only from that street. Longer streets have more than one collection basin. It is a complex, highly organized system with over 2,100 km of tunnels.

It is exactly as Victor Hugo said—there is a mirror of Paris under herself. “Paris has beneath it another Paris; a Paris of sewers; which has its streets, its cross-roads, its squares, its blind-alleys, its arteries, and its circulation, which is of mire and minus the human form.” (Les Miserables, Vol. V, Book II, Ch. 1)

This is what makes it worth seeing.

The tunnels are large enough for people to walk through comfortably. There are pipes and tubes overhead that carry cables and such for other utilities, making it an even more efficient system than it otherwise would have been.

Waste comes down pipes from your apartment building, emptying into an initial collector basin or reservoir. All water comes down here, mostly through gravity, including water you use to brush your teeth and the water that the Paris Propriété workers use to clean the gutters every week. The water eventually makes its way to water treatment facilities in Achéres or Noisy-le-Grand.

Visiting the Sewers

Of all of the museums that I’ve ever visited, this one easily tops them all because I never, ever would have thought that those blue and green ceramic street signs that help make Paris so darn Parisian would also be used in such a macabre manner and because when else do you have an excuse to see a sewer? To top it all off, it’s not even crowded. You can stroll at a leisurely pace, reading all the signage and really gaining an understanding of how important this machinery really is. Modern technology does have a place in our society. It can help us. This exemplifies that.

It’s easy to see the sewer. The entrance is beside the Pont de l’Alma, near the Eiffel Tower in the 7^th. There’s a huge blue sign on the Quai d’Orsay. Tickets are 4.10 euros per person. Kids would love this tour, but be sure they’re old enough not to accidentally fall in. The museum also has artifacts from way back when, including old dredging boats and work boots. The tour ends with a Wallace Fountain (more on those later) and a bathroom, proving that the French have a sense of humor.

To take a virtual tour of the sewers, click on the photo below: