Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations.

Johnson, Christopher H.

By Donald Reid (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991. 235pp. $39.95).

Donald Reid has written a delightful and profound book about a world unseen but always present and full of peril in the minds of surface people and about the sewermen themselves, men working on the margins of Parisian life whose very circumstances rendered them strength and dignity. It is a book concerned as much with engineering as manual labor, ecology as class, the larger culture as these workers' community. Reid has ransacked the archives, printed sources, and fiction for every trace of evidence about sewermen and the ways they and their environment were represented.

The Paris sewers, of course, have thrived on the psycho-sexual fears of generations of Westerners. One need only think of Jean Valjean and the phantom of the Opera to estimate their place in the literary imagination. Reid does a marvelous job in exploring these visions, but he also establishes their most important source: the writings of public hygenist Alexandre Parent-Duchatelet (1790-1835). It was he who made the link between the nether world, the stricken physiology, the dangerous sexuality, and the forbidden independence of prostitutes with the cloacal rot deep beneath the streets of the city. On the other hand, sewers and sewermen served as a useful tool of the left to castigate and riducule the bourgeoisie about its anal and sexual inhibitions.

Reid's section on the engineering history of the sewer system is fascinating. I was unaware that Pierre Leroux's "circulus," the injunction to utilize fully human waste to enhance agricultural productivity, had in fact been realized experimentally at the "irrigation fields" of Gennevilliers outside Paris, which was widely copied elsewhere. Kropotkin rapsodized about this marriage of peasant and worker as a model for social harmony. The analysis of the interplay among technology, ecology, and politics as successive regimes perfected the sewer system allows one to understand more clearly much larger issues.

Finally there are the sewer workers themselves, who built a unique community and a unique union. One must marvel at the esprit de corps generated by these marginal men, and at the curious endogamy and generational continuity that existed among them. Few groups of workers were better able to negotiate material benefits and use the welfare state without losing their autonomy. Within their union, which came into its own in the late nineteenth century, they created democratic structures and cultural institutions consonant with the control they exercized over their workplace and over the knowledge of the work process. They exemplified the best of the traditions of French working people--their independence coupled with a deep sense of mutual obligation to one another, their mistrust of authority and antagonism toward bureaucracy, and a willingness to use direct action when necessary, to identify the most obvious--and maintained them longer than virtually any other group. Only with the Paris self-governance law of 1975 and the coming of conservative technocrat Jacques Chirac to power was their autonomy deeply threatened. They answered cutbacks and controls with a major strike in 1977--and lost, largely because of their own internal political divisions, a function of the decline of the CGT and the PCF. Above all, sewermen lost control of recruitment, and new technology, consciously introduced for the purpose, cracked their power over the knowledge of work. There followed what Reid calls the "banalization" of sewermen as a Foucauldian night descended.

In general, the importance of this study far transcends its apparent narrow, if romantic, subject matter.