Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations by Donald Reid

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 617 Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities andRepresentations. By Donald Reid. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Pp. 235; illus­ trations, notes, index. $39.95. Donald Reid offers a rich and powerful analysis of the building of Paris’s sewer system. In it, he discovers the foundation for a new sort of social community dedicated to reordering French society: “ordure [human waste] and odeur [stench] gave way to ordre" (p. 179). Just as revolution, anarchy, and social disorder originated from the under­ ground in the popular and elite mentalities of the mid-19th century, so did socially depraved cesspool cleaners and their parasitic private patrons symbolize the pitfalls of a society in need of collective disci­ pline. A new coalition of republican civil engineers and a labor aristocracy of sewermen—both legitimated by association with the bold, rational sewer system—would help reorder Parisian life. Better, order would mean prosperity, for the new system was used to feed nutrient-rich wastewater to intensive truck farms north of the city. The Gennevilliers vegetables were the choice of the finest restaura­ teurs in Paris. This was the prideful product of efforts to rid Paris of its open-air cesspool dump at Montfaucon, a source of stench discernable often in even the best quarters of the city. All this, of course, at the expense of the bodies of sewermen, who suffered terribly high rates of disease in their Stygian surroundings—in return for which they were conceded certain powers and privileges. Tempted at turns to see the sewering of Paris in a Foucaultian sense as a bourgeois strategy to implement a mégalomanie agenda over the poor and disorderly (he refers at one point to the hygienist ParentDuch âtelet, a man equally preoccupied with sewers and prostitutes, essentially as a moral orifice policeman), Reid nonetheless recognizes that a large part of the shape of the sewer system came from the predilections of the emerging engineers’ subculture. We also discover that sewer systems formed a page in the history of French statist, engineering giganticism, a tradition that ran from the Canal du Midi to the projects of Hausmann aboveground, to the nuclear program, and (presumably) to the current superlibrary project. As with similar projects, the function of the sewer was as much to demonstrate the power and audacity of the statist system builders as it was to perform a necessary public service. This is indeed a rare and precious volume. One can search in any number of subdisciplines in history and not find a book of similar quality and analytic depth. Reid is at the very leading edge of historical scholarship—his footnotes reveal a deep acquaintance with semiotics (Roland Barthes), contemporary anthropology (Mary Doug­ las), postmodernist historiography (Jacques Rancière and Les révoltes logiques), and popular culture (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Madwoman of Chaillot), as well as more conventional historical 618 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE methods and sources. In this era of a historiographic Hundred Flowers movement, Paris Sewers and Sewermen stands as a model for how history should and can be done. A large portion of historical scholarship is not terribly riveting, but Reid’s volume holds the reader in rapt attention as he exposes and analyzes the complicated social forces behind the making of one of the world’s most elegant infra­ structural systems as well as the work force whose identity was tied to it. Reid also offers a model of how history of technology should be written, discussing issues in ways that are convincing to practitioners in the field yet accessible to all. Like a Brueghel painting, one can look at the overall surface of this book with a sense of bemused disgust, but focusing in on one of many of its smaller representational schemes, there is a depth of meaning and salience ready to satisfy the most voracious intellectual appetites. Easily confused with Alain Corbin’s The Foul and the Fragrant, Reid’s book deals in a far more subtle fashion with the social strategies and cultural agendas behind the multifarious campaign to control waste and odor. Strict social constructionists might disagree with Reid’s conclusion that sewer technology “has...