Lionel Kesztenbaum

Up until the nineteenth century, water in Paris came primarily from the River Seine. Water quality became a preoccupation in the first half of the century, particularly in connection with the rise of water polluting activities such as tanneries and early industrial operations. And as the city and its population grew, water became structurally scarce. At that point the Canal de l’Ourcq was built to provide greater access to water. But Paris water was becoming more and more polluted. In searching for solutions, the French hygienic physician Alexandre Parent du Châtelet began taking samples of river water to evaluate quality.

During the second half of the 1800s, aqueducts were built to bring spring water directly into the city, in some cases from over one hundred kilometers away. This required heavy financial investments and provoked dissatisfaction among inhabitants outside Paris whose water was being siphoned into the city. 

Moreover, the improved availability of water starting in the late nineteenth century hardly resolved all the difficulties, two of which were particularly pressing: how to manage the water arriving in the capital, and how to dispose of wastewater?

The idee of connecting apartment buildings directly to water sources came to seem the best solution. Up until then, inhabitants relied on public fountains, and for more the more privileged among them, water carriers. 

For wastewater, the main evacuation mechanism—sceptic tanks—was poorly adapted to water influx and the increasing water uses that exacerbated the structural issues. Septic tanks had to be emptied regularly, an unsanitary, risky, costly operation, and they often got clogged, with wastewater surging back up into the apartments. Gradually a sewer system came to seem the best solution, despite opposition from building owners and the companies in charge of emptying the septic tanks (whose contents were used as fertilizer).

Apartment buildings were not linked up to water or the sewer system at the same pace across all neighborhoods. This was in large part due to how property ownership was distributed in the city. One particularity of the French capital is that nearly everyone was a renter, because at that time you couldn’t buy a single apartment but instead had to purchase the entire apartment building. Building owners were not inclined to pay the costs of these installations. 

So in the early twentieth century, half of Paris apartment buildings were still unconnected sewer systems, with poor people were at the end of the line for access. This considerably limited the quantity of good quality water they could obtain.

The split between privileged and underprivileged inhabitants existed not only between the city’s relatively poor east and wealthy west but also within apartment buildings: there was no running water on the top floor of the building, where servants had their rooms. In the best of circumstances top-floor residents shared a faucet. 

Additional efforts to improve the situation were made during the interwar period, and by the late 1930s the vast majority of Paris apartment buildings had been connected to the sewer system. But this did not mean that everyone had water. The 1954 census indicated that 25% of Paris apartments units did not have access to water yet and residents had to get it from elsewhere in the building, while 80% of units had neither a shower nor bathtub.

The most important point here is that at each stage (drinking water in apartment buildings as a whole, later in individual units, means of evacuation, etc.), what seemed technical choices were made (water meters, sewer system) but in reality those choices were dictated by the city’s real-estate ownership structure. The organization of the Paris sanitation system was determined without regard for or consultation of over 95% of the city’s population.

I consulted quite a number of documents. City of Paris statistical yearbooks, first published in 1880, contain figures on sewer system link-ups and water consumption. I also used Paris census information, and the registers of the Compagnie Générale des Eaux kept in the city’s municial archives, which provide a street-by-street record of connecting individual apartment buildings to the water distribution system.

Reference:

Lionel Kestenbaum, Distributing a Sane Beverage? The Social Differentiation of Access to Water in Paris, Journal of Urban History, n°OnlineFirst, 2024