Après le Déluge

By CAROLINE WEBER

PARIS UNDER WATER

How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910

By Jeffrey H. Jackson

Illustrated. 262 pp. Palgrave Macmillan. $27

Paris may be known as the City of Light, but “the City of Water” would be just as apt. Since its origins as an island outpost in the middle of the Seine, the city owes some of its greatest advantages — its trading routes, military security and fertile farmland — to its riverside position. That placement has also, however, long made Paris vulnerable to flooding. The city’s Roman name, Lutetia, is said to derive from the Latin word for mud (lutum), and one of its oldest neighborhoods, the Marais, was originally just that: a marsh. In 814, an unnamed author remarked that “when God wants to punish the people of Paris by water, he sends such a flood and overflows the river Seine.” Divine retribution or not, the deluge is an age-old Parisian problem and accounts for its otherwise improbable-sounding motto: Fluctuat nec Mergitur (“She is tossed about by the waves but does not sink”).

So she does not sink. But in late January 1910, she seemed perilously close to doing so, as unusual weather conditions combined with faulty engineering along the city’s quays to unleash a record-breaking flood. On Jan. 21, observant Parisians noticed that their river — swollen by months of torrential rainfall, flooding in its tributaries and an unseasonably early winter thaw — had risen six feet above its usual level. On Jan. 28, it peaked at 20 feet above normal, higher than it had measured in 250 years. By this time, yellowish, debris-ridden water had cascaded over the Seine’s stone battlements and seeped up through oversaturated soil throughout the city, transforming streets into canals and public squares into lagoons. The distinction between Right and Left Banks, which had defined Paris since time immemorial, had all but washed away. Within the space of a week, the City of Light had become, as Jeffrey H. Jackson writes in “Paris Under Water,” “a drowned city.”

Jackson, a professor of history at Rhodes College in Memphis, explains in an afterword that he discovered the story of the Paris flood not long before Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, and parallels between the two catastrophes are apparent throughout the book. (These emerge most clearly in the cases where the aid provided to victims is presented as scant and slow to come, as when one city official laments: “The situation is indescribable, and the help which we have waited for is not sufficient.”) Wisely, though, Jackson mentions more recent natural disasters only in his epilogue and otherwise keeps a strict narrative attention on Paris in 1910. The result is a tight, concentrated tale of adversity and survival — of the ravages the untamed waters wrought and of the citizens’ courageous efforts to save their city (and themselves) from ruin.

Though heroes abound in Jackson’s story, his noblest character is the intrepid Louis Lépine. Lépine’s responsibilities as Paris’s prefect of police included not only law and order but also street and river traffic, train schedules, telecommunications, fire-fighting, the food supply, waste disposal and public health. In late January 1910, all of these things demanded Lépine’s attention as floodwater rendered entire sections of Paris impassable except by boat or makeshift walkway. The flood trapped residents in their homes, toppled telegraph lines, and inundated Métro tunnels and train tracks. It also gave rise to looting, street violence and food shortages, not to mention a devastating fire at a suburban vinegar factory. Overflowing cesspools and sewers — as well as flotillas of drowned rats in the Seine — then raised the specter of a typhoid epidemic. Fortunately, Lépine was just the man to handle these crises, endowed as he was not only with a military sense of discipline (he was a decorated war veteran), stoicism and courage, but also with an earnest desire to make Parisians “see him as their man, the one who could keep them safe.”

To that end, Lépine worked tirelessly, traipsing throughout the soggy city in his rubber boots and bowler hat to identify problems and devise solutions. Teams of his officers conducted rescue missions, delivered supplies, built walkways, manned ferries, reinforced quays, cleared debris, apprehended criminals, quelled street violence and provided food and shelter to the dispossessed. Given the magnitude of the disaster, though, Lépine’s crew needed additional help, which they received from engineers, soldiers, sailors, members of the clergy and the Red Cross.

Everyday Parisians also pitched in, many of them displaying extraordinary valor. With just a single boat at his disposal, for instance, one Monsieur Coutant evacuated nearly 70 people from his neighborhood. (Still, Coutant couldn’t resist shouting, “I can’t be everywhere!” when his charges became too demanding.) For many commentators, this spirit of self-sacrifice represented the triumph of French brotherhood over entrenched sociopolitical divisions.

Despite many real acts of heroism, this “vision of complete social harmony in the face of disaster, in which political enemies gave up their differences to come together,” was also, in part, a myth. After the humiliations of the Franco-Prussian War (in which Prussia occupied Paris, then annexed Alsace-Lorraine) and the scandal of the Dreyfus Affair (in which a trumped-up treason case against a Jewish army officer uncovered the shocking anti-Semitism of many French conservatives), national unity was in short supply. In this context, “Paris’s much-vaunted solidarity” became an expedient political fiction: a flag around which, finally, the battered nation could rally. To avoid this ideological trap, Jackson tells his story in an evenhanded way, describing the egotism, violence and treachery that surfaced alongside loftier reactions. At the same time, he has a modest agenda of his own, which he lays out in the book’s conclusion.

“Maybe,” he suggests, “Paris can serve as a beginning point for thinking about how urban residents can reconnect with one another, since it is impossible to know when nature may present an unexpected challenge and when depending on one’s neighbors may determine one’s survival.” At once pragmatic and inspiring, this proposal has much to recommend it, if like the survivors of the great Paris flood, one would rather swim than sink.

Caroline Weber, a professor of French literature at Barnard College and Columbia University, is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/books/review/Weber-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3