8/10/2019 DOWN AND DIRTY _ PARIS SEWERS AND SEWERMEN_ Realities and Representations By Donald Reid (Harvard University Press_ $39.95; 235 pp

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8/10/2019 DOWN AND DIRTY _ PARIS SEWERS AND SEWERMEN_ Realities and Representations By Donald Reid (Harvard University Press_ $39.95; 235 pp

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10/31/2014 DOWN AND DIRTY : PARIS SEWERS AND SEWERMEN: Realities and Representations By Donald Reid (Harvard University Press: $39.95; 235 p

http://articles.latimes.com/1991-04-14/books/bk-97_1_paris-sewer

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Johnny Cash's darkCalifornia days

Do-it-yourself parkingbans in Malibu

Gang tattoo leads to amurder conviction

engineers, Reid describes the city's efforts to bring all its human and organic waste under control, f irst by

means of a central city dump and then by the development of a city-wide sewer system flushing sewage

down-stream into the River Seine.

Bureaucratic in-fighting slowed the plan, and by the time of the French Revolution, the sewers were still a

provocative symbol of urban decay and royal indifference. "Fears of mysterious goings-on in the sewers

fed the culture of suspicion which infused the period," Reid explains. Gendarmes frequently searched the

sewers for caches of explosives or political outlaws in hiding.

Reid frames his narrative with sewer-related allusions from such distinguished writers as Victor Hugo,

Alexis de Tocqueville, Emile Zola, Jean Giraudoux, even Sigmund Freud. These references are important

for they reflected public perceptions of the sewers and sewermen. As Reid stresses, planners understood

the sewers' clean-up had to be accompanied by a cleansing of the system's public image. Sewermen too

needed to be publicly rehabilitated; how could an aesthetically pleasing and efficiently run city be created

some of its most vital workers were perceived to be malodorous and diseased?

The clean-up was laced with ironies. In the 19th Century, the sewer administration urged its workers to

dredge out salvageable goods so that they could be cleaned and sold to junk dealers, in what amounted toan early form of recycling. One item of especial worth was corks, as Reid explains: "The administration

directed sewermen to skim these corks off the top of the water. It then sold them to perfumers, who cut

them down for use as stoppers in perfume bottles. Thus did the foul meet the fragrant."

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