as towns and villages were full of horses needed for travel and transport, as well as poultry, pigs and goats, left to forage the streets for food, even in Paris. Then there were the strays, mainly dogs, which proliferated though men were employed to catch and kill them: these men were paid by the head, particularly in urban areas under Burgundian control. Only when epidemics seriously threatened did the authorities make temporary attempts to limit the number of animals, whose excrement was a regular feature of urban life. The same was true of humans, who ‘made water’, defecated or spat wherever the need took them.
Certain trades were a major source of noxious emissions for their immediate neighbourhood, including butchers, tripe makers, fishmongers, potters (who deliberately left their clay to sour in cellars in Paris and elsewhere), and painters who used pigments made from metal oxides. The worst were tanners, glove- and purse-makers, and fullers, who made abundant use of toxic plant and animal substances as mordants, like alum, tartar and soda, urine (often collected from humans), chicken droppings and dog excrement, which accelerated the process of fermenting and rotting the fibres they worked with. Attempts were made to force the smelliest and most harmful trades away from the overcrowded centres of towns and villages to the outskirts and downstream on rivers to keep the water at least vaguely drinkable. However, the growth of urban centres in the late medieval period only made the toxic pollution worse. More and more complaints were made about ‘fetor’, or foul smells, fetid water and unhealthy air, particularly in the warm summer months, when the atmosphere was simply impossible to breathe. Growing awareness of the problem led to progress in a number of areas, including the establishment of ‘privies’ and latrine pits shared by men and women, often placed at the back of a yard or giving onto a river. Efforts were also made to instil greater discipline in those living in such urban centres and to force the local authorities to take action to limit the accumulation of rubbish, combat dangerous emissions from latrines and graveyards, and prevent the pollution of streets, canals and rivers. While financial penalties played their part, the most significant steps were the installation of public latrines, sewers and gutters, and paving the main streets. However, real improvements were several centuries in the making.
Urban cesspits
From the fifteenth century on, the increasing number of regulations issued by local authorities seeking to police antisocial practices that caused odour pollution reflected not so much increased awareness of the problem as the severe and ongoing worsening of the situation, driven largely by urban expansion. In France, the urban population reached 10 per cent by around 1515 and 20 per cent in 1789; by the Second Empire, one in two French people lived in a town or city. Overcrowded urban centres, hemmed in by their city walls, almost literally choked to death during the dreadful outbreaks of plague that were an all too regular occurrence prior to 1720.
The noisy, dirty, crowded streets were home to more and more polluting trades, well before the Industrial Revolution. The ‘aerist’ movement of the 1750s was merely a flash in the pan, sparked by the concerns of a forward-thinking minority. The vast majority of the urban population took little notice of the aerists’ philosophical theories, preferring to put up with the stench rather than pay the significant costs of the works required by the authorities, particularly as several major instances of odour pollution arose from deeply ingrained habits that in some cases were a source of unspoken pride and pleasure. Nineteenth-century hygienists wrote despairingly that the size of the dung heap outside a peasant’s door was a visible sign of wealth that its owner refused to move. The same was true in urban areas, including in the Paris of François I.
In Grenoble, ‘masters of the street’ were responsible for the upkeep and cleanliness of public spaces. However, there was little they could do when their fellow citizens simply refused to cooperate: locals were ordered to clear away the heaps of dung from outside their homes in 1526, but by 1531 they were back again.6 Grenoble, a small town of some 12,000 inhabitants under Louis XIII, faced significant odour pollution, judging from evidence from regulations that were simply ignored and travel accounts: one visitor described its streets in 1643 as ‘very ugly and very dirty’. Yet the apocalyptic stench described by historians nonetheless formed the olfactory backdrop to many people’s lives. Their sense of smell was no less sensitive than that of outsiders; rather, they had become accustomed to the smell and simply no longer noticed it.
Despite its delightful setting, Grenoble shared all the unpleasant characteristics typical of urban areas of the time. Rubbish lay piled up everywhere, including human and animal excrement, which befouled the streets and ramparts. They mixed with rain and waste water and streamed down the streets, which were built with a slight downward incline towards a central gutter. The hoi polloi were expected to let their betters walk on the higher side away from the gutter, giving rise to the expression tenir le haut du pavé, literally ‘to keep to the upper paving stone’, meaning to have the upper hand. Walking on the higher side of the street meant avoiding being splashed with foul, stinking water or stepping in stagnant, fetid puddles. Dogs and pigs acted as walking rubbish disposal units, rooting around in the waste for food. Perhaps they appreciated the smell of human excrement, though a belief passed down by the medical theory of Antiquity held that it smelled much worse than animal droppings.7 The local population’s sense of smell, long accustomed to the urban fug, was triggered afresh by unusual events such as unexpected flooding from the Isère or Drac rivers, which left behind a tide of ‘stinking mud, a mix of latrines and graves’, as one observer wrote in 1733. The perhaps surprising evocation of graves came from the practice of burying bodies in very shallow soil. Just as in the medieval period, the stench arising from certain trades was also particularly off-putting. Butchers, skinners and tripe makers were among the worst offenders, along with candle makers, as pig tallow (or lard) smelled famously revolting. The seventeenth century saw the development of textile and leather workshops that generated foul-smelling emissions, though the urine and excrement used as raw materials in these trades did not trigger displays of disgust. Stored in abundance outside the workshop, they pointed to the owner’s prosperity just as dung heaps did, attracting customers. Until as late as 1901, barrels were left at major crossroads to ‘harvest’ urine from passers-by and local workmen. Tanners, leather curriers, dyers and fullers would share the contents out between them. Workers in the leather trade, including many glovers, used animal urine and dog excrement to prepare the hides. Fabric workshops were an equally unpleasant source of smells. Putrefied urine was mixed with vinegar to fix colours on fabrics and leather. Fullers soaked cloth in a blend of urine and warm soapy water to clean it before working it with their bare feet. Starch makers left ears of wheat to rot in water, generating stinking, acidic fumes. Lime and plaster kilns had to be built outside the town walls, though emissions of smoke and carbonic acid were still a nuisance if the wind blew the wrong way. Ironically, lime is excellent for neutralizing bad smells: it was used for whitewashing houses and bleaching canvas, readying latrines for emptying, and in burials, particularly in common graves following epidemics. It was also believed to protect against the plague: one author advised readers in 1597 ‘to whiten household linen often and to perfume clothes, as nothing else disinfects so well as air, water, fire, and earth, adding perfumes’. In Grenoble and towns and cities all over France, huge fires of sweet-smelling wood were lit morning and evening in each neighbourhood, sometimes sprinkled with violet or sorrel water.
Paris was on another scale altogether. Home to around 200,000 individuals by the dawn of the sixteenth century, it was the biggest city in Europe. It remained so until the late seventeenth century, when the population reached over half a million. It rose by at least 100,000 by the Revolution, but by this time it had been outpaced by London.
A royal edict issued on 25 November 1539 should be read with this population boom in mind. Paris was then nearing 300,000 inhabitants, a milestone reached in 1560.8 The edict criticized the ‘mud, dung, rubble and other rubbish’ piled up outside people’s doors and blocking the streets, despite earlier royal decrees. The filth also caused ‘great horror and very great displeasure to all people of decency and honour’ due to the ‘foulness and stench’ that they generated. Locals were ordered to remove the rubbish or face fines that would be increased if they persisted. They also had to pave
