In 2004, during a presidential visit to a school, a pupil asked Monsieur Chirac whether he had done it yet. ‘No,’ he answered, ‘because I’m not sure the Seine has been getting on too well since I left City Hall.’ Joking aside, he admitted to the schoolkids that he shouldn’t have made a promise he couldn’t keep (thereby undermining the whole institution of electioneering, and setting alarm bells ringing across France’s entire political landscape).
The Seine is getting cleaner, though, and apparently there are now twenty-nine species of fish swimming past the Louvre and under the Pont Neuf, none of which has legs and three heads. Even so, bathing in the river has been forbidden since 1923, and anyone jumping in these days will be fined for wasting river-police time, if they don’t drown or poison themselves, that is.
Walking on water
At the end of January 1910, Paris’s motto about not sinking was contradicted by the Seine itself, as the river rose 8.62 metres and burst its banks, partially submerging the city for thirty-five days.
An estimated 2.4 billion cubic metres of water (I say ‘estimated’ because I have no idea how much that really is) poured into the streets creating a filthy lake that engulfed not only the quartiers by the riverbanks, but also low-lying areas way ‘inland’, including much of the 8th and 9th arrondissements, almost up to the Gare Saint-Lazare.
The sewers and the métro were flooded, countless cellars were turned into swimming pools, and many ground-floor apartments had to be evacuated. The Eiffel Tower, built on a bed of sand, shifted 2 centimetres off the vertical, but with German efficiency, the canny engineer Gustave Eiffel (real name Bönickhausen) had erected his tower on hydraulic pumps and it was easily righted.
During the great flood of 1910, the phrase ‘Do you need a lift?’ took on a new, more hands-on meaning.
As floods are meant to come around every century (according to the French, Nature works to a metric calendar), Paris has long been haunted by the fear of a repeat disaster in 2010. Engineers have built huge run-off reservoirs upriver, but these can only hold about 830 million cubic metres of water, leaving about 1.6 billion to gush onward to the capital if the river levels are the same as in 1910.
Paris has therefore resigned itself to getting its feet wet sometime soon, and has put in place a minutely detailed scheme to limit flood damage, aptly named the Plan Neptune.***** Scientists say that it wouldn’t be a flash flood—just as in 1910, the waters would take several days to rise to dangerous levels, so there would be time to mobilize all the city’s workers, as well as 10,000 soldiers.
To ensure that radio programmes won’t be interrupted (Paris wouldn’t want to be without endless debates on the philosophical meaning of the deluge, or talk shows with politicians blaming each other’s parties for the catastrophe), a 330-metre-long flood barrier has been prepared. It would be erected around the Maison de la Radio, which is by the river, near the Eiffel Tower. Meanwhile, the Maison’s toilets, sinks and taps have been fitted with valves so that the studios won’t be filled with river water and sewage (after all, journalists’ voices would sound strange if they had to wear pegs on their noses).
Over at the Louvre, as the waters rose, 700 volunteers would start carrying works of art out of the basement storage areas and up to higher floors—the heaviest sculptures have already been moved.
And just to prove that the city does think about its people as well as its media and culture, it should be pointed out that the very first measure in le Plan Neptune is to evacuate all the homeless people who sleep on the riverbanks. Although that might only be to avoid having them float in through the windows of the Louvre.
Perhaps the most dramatic measure of all in Plan Neptune is that Paris’s transport company, the RATP, plans to deliberately flood métro lines running alongside the river, presumably on the grounds that it’s better to drain off clean water than dirty. Though of course the water would no longer be clean when the flood receded—someone would have to collect up all the dead rats, mice and accumulated rubbish. It is to be hoped that Plan Neptune includes a few pairs of rubber gloves.
Throughout 2010, the city expressed this obsession with flooding in a series of exhibitions about the events of 1910, and at each one Parisians could be seen studying maps of the flooded area to see if their current address was in there. I naturally did the same, and was relieved to see that I am currently out of danger. Until 2006, however, I was living near the Bastille, well inside the evacuation zone, and even back then, my next-door neighbour had started stockpiling sacks of plaster to block up his toilet, shower and all of his sinks. As soon as the sewers flooded, he said, the drains would overflow and our houses would be turned into fountains of merde. Fortunately, he didn’t give his speech to potential buyers when I was trying to sell my place.
One of the flood-related exhibitions featured a collection of photos from a now-defunct newspaper called the Journal des Débats. The pictures showed that the streets of Paris, especially those around the river, have hardly changed since 1910. Apart from all the hats, long dresses and moustaches, the black-and-white photos could almost have been taken yesterday.
The traditional way of measuring the height of the Seine certainly hasn’t changed at all in a century. Parisians still look to the statue of the Zouave (a French-African colonial soldier) on the Pont de l’Alma. Usually he stands well above the river on a plinth, gazing with blithe detachment into the oncoming current. If he has his toes in the water, the Seine is running very high and Parisians start to feel empathetic rheumatism. But in the
