The Age of Water: The Urban Environment in the North of France, A.D. 300–1800 by André E. Guillerme

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 297 Aside from the final summary chapter, the four last chapters include a highly condensed account of the devastating consequences of economic decline and population growth in the Third World. They make the most melancholy reading in this learned, objective, and carefully crafted book. We look back on the Plague of 1348 as a horror that eventually passed and which mankind survived, but now we are faced with a kind of plague from which it will take the collective will and wisdom of the nations of the world to recover. Ironically enough, because of medical advances and the population explosion following the Industrial Revolution that rose to unimagined levels in the 20th century, the cities of the Third World expanded far beyond the agricultural and industrial capacities to support them. They have been called “hypertrophic cities,” a pathological analogy. The account is a relentless analysis in keeping with the scholarly objectivity of the book, but it serves also to underscore its limitation. It is most decidedly not meant for beginners: it is abstract, analytical, quantitative, mathematical in places, and overwhelming in its factual content. For the serious student of urban history, the close reading of the book ought ideally to be preceded by grounding in the physical form of cities through the ages and in the technological developments that have made their existence possible. The bibliography of urban history is enormous; if I were asked to suggest a starting point, I would begin with E. A. Gutkind’s International History of City Development, a copi­ ously illustrated and encyclopedic survey published in eight volumes from 1964 to 1972. As for the history of urban and agricultural technology, there are many lacunae, but such as we have forms a necessary complement to the Gutkind volumes. Carl W. Condit Dr. Condit is professor emeritus at Northwestern University. The Age of Water: The Urban Environment in the North of France, a.d. 300—1800. By André E. Guillerme. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1988. Pp. xv + 293; illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $29.50. Its chronological sweep, unusual perspective, and grand thematic claims make this book a tour de force for the reader and a daunting challenge to the reviewer. André Guillerme retells the history of eighteen cities of the Paris basin (but not Paris itself) in terms of the networks of waterways that surrounded and infiltrated their walls during their “age of water,” the millennium from the 9th to 19th century. Guillerme is an erudite historian who commands the conven­ 298 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE tional documentary sources and the relevant scholarship on urban history. He is also an urban engineer whose text and maps rest on the recent discoveries of urban archaeology and who sees the city as a physical system, an urban landscape to be explicated like a text. But his book is a true original, and one of considerable interest to readers of this journal, as indicated by its original French subtitle, “La cité, l’eau et les techniques” and the translation’s appearance in a series entitled Environmental History. Guillerme’s most fundamental and perhaps most surprising discov­ ery is the sheer extent of his cities’ water networks, which compared favorably in relative density with that of Venice. In the 10th and 11th centuries lay and clerical urban entrepreneurs built defensive walls and moats and diverted watercourses that encouraged the develop­ ment of gristmills, an “industrial revolution” in woolen manufacture (p. 79), and a demographic boom. Running water, nonpolluting technologies, policies of “collective hygiene” (p. 96)—the healthy, dynamic city of the High Middle Ages mirrored its hydrology. All this was utterly changed, Guillerme claims, from the later Middle Ages to the 18th century by endemic war and consequent alterations in the deployment of water for urban defense. Water­ logged belts of no-man’s-land outside the walls produced a “cloudy microclimate,” “pervasive moisture” (pp. 136—37). Stagnant water around the city and within the “filiform” canals and sinking base­ ments created the ideal humid environment for the manufacture of linen, hemp, gunpowder, paper, and leather. The master processes were now organic—fermentation and putrefaction; the urban econ­ omy was dominated...