The French, the English and the Water Closet....

!8th-century France was a world of stinking latrines, commodes and chamber pots. Only towards the end of the Ancien Regime did water closets make an appearance.  The facilities themselves have long since been swept away. Youri Carbonnier's book Maisons parisiennes des lumières (2006) surveys the remaining evidence from surveys, plans and literary sources. In theory at least Parisian apartment of the 18th century were equipped with two latrines, one close to the cesspit on the ground floor, either near the stairs or in an outbuilding,  and a second high in the attic to minimise smell.  It is not entirely clear who would use these facilities:  well-to-do householders with servants would no doubt prefer a swiftly emptied chaise percé. According to Carbonnier, water closets or cabinets à  l'anglaise - represented perhaps as little as 3% of all facilities.  They were largely confined to the most aristocratic hôtels. In the hôtel Lambert, rue Saint-Louis en l'Ile, for instance, the apartments on the first and second floors boasted cabinets à l'anglaise,  one with a marble bowl, as well as two traditional cabinets d'aisances.  In the 1780s the hôtel de Langeac rented by Jefferson was also equipped these "lastest inventions in modern plumbing".

Water closets - architectural treatises

Architectural works suggest a somewhat earlier date than might be supposed for the introduction of water closets into France.  The earliest references uncovered by Youri Carbonnier occurs in the work of  Jacques-François Blondel (1705-1774) whose private École des Arts, set up in Paris in 1743 was influential in the formation of many well-known neoclassical architects. Blondel's treatise "on pleasure houses" published as early as 1737 describes a cloakroom furnished with what he calls lieux à soupape - "toilets with a valve" - which can be safely sited off a bedroom since "they never give off a bad odour".  He specifies that these should be prettily decorated and fitted in a wooden surround (Blondel, De la distribution des maisons de plaisance et de la décoration des édifices en général, p.29).  

More detail can be found volume four of Blondel's Course of Architecture, published  in 1773 by his pupil Pierre Patte on the basis lectures delivered in the 1750s. This description, complete with illustrative plate, leave no doubt that Blondel's "valve toilet" was indeed a primitive form of water closet.  We are told that cloakrooms ("Garderobes") known as lieux à soupape should be provided with a circular or square niche sufficient to house a bench of fourteen or fifteen inches in height containing a hollowed out block of marble with sloping sides "to facilitate the fall of matter".   A  mechanism operated by a handle (C in Fig.1) operates a stop (N) which covers the outlet pipe leading down to the cesspit. This is is the "valve" which minimises rising miasmas.  In addition there are further taps (E and F) which allow water into the bowl:  "abundant water" washes  matter down into the cesspit with sufficient force to ensure that no odour is left in the cloakroom.  As a further refinement the toilet may be provided with its own separate cesspit, though even here water is necessary to ensure that no offending matter remains in the pipes.  So great are the advantages that expense should not prevent their installation in buildings of consideration or even in "an ordinary house". Blondel notes that such facilities are often called lieux à l'Angloise but that this is an error, since "several persons of consideration" who have lived in London  assured him that they did not know about their usage until they came to France. 

Blondel's patriotic denial that water closets originated in England is echoed by several other writers. The carpenter A. J. Roubo, for instance, notes that  "the cloakrooms most frequently used in houses of consideration are those known as lieux à soupapes, or sometimes à l'Angloise, though with little reason, since they were known in France a long time before they came into use in England" (Roubo, L'Art du menuisier (1769-70) vol.1, p.203).

In later writings, the designation Lieux à l'Angloise is usually accepted: here are a couple of further descriptions:


 " Lieux à l'Angloise" in Pierre Bullet Architecture pratique (1768) p.462-3
(This account is noteworthy for its distinction between closets with a dedicated reservoir


"Lieux à l'Angloise are in great use today.  They are very convenient and do not give off bad odours.  

They must not be connected with communal or public cesspits. They should have their own pit, or rather a well, with three or four feet of fresh water.  It is known from experience that fecal matter which falls into water loses its odour. The little room destined for this use is normally enlivened with paintings, marbles, marquetries etc.  A niche is built for the seat...
The bowl must be of polished marble.  Its usual measurement is three feet long, 16 inches wide and 15 inches high, cut with a slope...At the bottom of the slope is a hole of about three inches in diameter, and opposite are two notches for the water jets.

The surround of the bowl is wooden, with a seat and a hinged lid. On the right are two handles, one of which allows a little stream of water into the bowl, the other the flush of water for cleaning.  On the left is another handle which lifts a copper valve which fits tightly into the hole.  When the valve is open water and matter wash into the hole, after which the valve or stop is allowed to fall and neither water nor matter remain in the bowl.  A reservoir must be built to provide water to the taps via lead pipes.  

In bourgeois houses,  porcelain bowls are used, and a lead reservoir is built at a certain height and filled with water as necessary to form a pool in the bowl. Since the bowl will be connected to the communal cesspit, care must be taken when lifting the stop, to ensure that vapours do not rise; this can be avoided by making sure that the stop is lifted only when the bowl is well filled with water.

Marble and porcelain are the only suitable materials for toilet bowls, since they are odour- resistant.  Neither stone nor lead should be used.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=63UOAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA462#v=onepage&q&f=fals

Lequeu, Jean Jacques (1757-1825?), Plans for Lieux à soupape (1785)   
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b77035645

Le Camus de Mézières, Le génie de l'architecture (1780)

This final extract comes from The Genius of Architecture by the visionary architect Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières.  Describing a luxuriously appointed hôtel, Le Camus is much more interested in appropriate appearance than the intricacies of plumbing.  He mentions two sorts of facilities, a garderobe de propriété and a cabinet à l'Anglaise.  The first, significantly, houses a commode rather than any sort of latrine - one door gives on to the bedroom and a second onto a lobby "so that servants may attend to it without passing through the principal rooms of the apartment".

Water Closet:  This room closely resembles the foregoing; it serves much the same purpose, except that it is not in such general use. It is called cabinet à l'Anglaise, because it came to us from the English. The bowls are marble troughs to receive the matter, and this is soon washed away when one lifts the plug with its valve and turns the faucet, which gives water in abundance and carries away whatever is in the bowl; the plug closes hermetically, so that the odours cannot pass; it is even covered by a little water, so that no vapors may escape. There are also little conduits from which water springs when one desires to wash oneself, a custom that combines cleanliness and health. A cistern is usually placed in the mezzanine above. Delicacy suggests the attachment of a cylinder of hot coals, so that the water shall not be too cold in winter. Water is drawn from this same cistern to supply a little fountain for washing the hands, which is emptied by an overflow pipe. It is easy to give an artful arrangement to this room. The seat must never be placed facing the door, but to the right or left. It most commonly occupies a niche,square in plan, and to either side there are shelves for white napkins. At the height of the seat there is a little press in which to drop the day's soiled linen. The frames that support the little shelves for linen and scented waters normally taper to serve as a base for a vase full of perfumes and scents. 

This room is paved with freestone or with marble; it has a ceiling and a cornice. It is pointless to lavish ornaments upon it. The wainscoting must be simple and massive, with the look of architecture rather than of woodwork, and with panels that are either in relief or recessed in the walls; for it is generally to be painted to resemble marble, well polished, and varnished. The effect is more solid than stucco but lacks its brilliance. The same decoration may be made in plaster; but observe that the arrises are never sharp enough, which is a great disadvantage. To remedy this, you may leave your walls quite smooth and paint them to look like marble. Shadow and perspective will create whatever masses you may desire. The windows in this room will face North, so that the odors may be less in evidence; the fermentation of the matter is less promoted by cold than by heat.

But, once again, this room must not offer an elegance that would be out of keeping with the rest; without a just relation between the parts and the whole, there is no architecture.

Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières, The Genius of Architecture; or, The Analogy of That Art with Our Sensations, trans.David Britt, Getty Publications, 1992.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ILVDAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA122#v=onepage&q&f=false

The water closets of Versailles

19th-century water closet in the Queen's Apartments 

When did Royalty flush?This is actually quite a difficult question to answer conclusively, but Versailles was certainly not at the vanguard of sanitary innovation.   No trace of pre-Revolutionary fitments now exists; although there are several antique water closets on view these date only from the reconstructions of Louis-Philippe.  According to the recent Versailles dictionary, the first lieux d'aisances à l'anglaise were installed in the palace at the time of Louis XV. One was certainly fitted for Marie-Antoinette as part of the refurbishment of the  Petit Appartement de la Reine, in the early 1780s (Pierre Verlet, Le château de Versailles (1985), p.403, cited in Wikipedia).  The Trianon, however, had no flushing toilets. The royal page Hézecques noted the existence in the King's private apartments of a sumptuous toilet, built à l'anglaise in marble, porcelain and acajou, which made the venerable office of porte-chaise d'affaires redundant (Souvenirs, p.212).  This must have been a very new addition. Louis XVI had wanted to install a water closet in the garde-robe off the King's bedroom as early as 1775 but it was apparently only in 1788, on the eve of Revolution, that his wish was finally fulfilled.

"Modern reconstruction" in the King's apartments 

References

Youri Carbonnier, Maisons parisiennes des lumières (2006) p.401-9https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Xm4bIAwbP3IC&lpg=PP1&pg=PT389#v=onepage&q&f=false

On Versailles:  Louis XVI's water closet in Mathieu Da Vinha and Raphaël Masson, Versailles: Histoire, Dictionnaire et Anthologie (2015)  https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=LKF4CgAAQBAJ&pg=PT47#v=onepage&q&f=false

Article on the restoration of Louis's cloakroom: http://www.chateauversailles.fr/resources/pdf/fr/presse/dp_louisxvi_fr.pdf"

Cabinet de la chaise de la Reine" [Discussion]  Le Forum de Marie-Antoinettehttp://marie-antoinette.forumactif.org/t1861-cabinet-de-la-chaise-de-la-reine

More 18th-century cesspits ....

The cesspits and their emptiers

The provision of cesspits in the houses of the capital was made compulsory by an Arrêt of the Parlement of Paris at the surprisingly early date of 1533. In 1777 a survey found their existence all but universal; often cesspits were shared between several adjacent proprietors, either dug out immediately at ground level, usually in courtyards, or under basements - the standard rates for emptying differed accordingly.  Regulations demanded retaining walls of at least a foot in thickness; they were generally tiled or provided with clay lining, though the problem of leaching was not successfully addressed until the 19th century.

 The vidangeurs, cesspit emptiers, usually worked by night.  They sometimes just skimmed off the liquid at the top of the cesspit using a system of ladles, buckets, and pulleys, but periodically they were obliged to descend right down into the pits to remove encrusted solid matter with shovels. Due to the inefficiency of fluid retention 18th-century cesspits needed emptying less frequently than those of later years;  the great 19th-century hygienist Parent du Châtelet observed that in 1835 cesspits often had to be cleaned once or twice annually whereas in the 18th century the larger pits were cleaned out only once every eight or ten years.  Unfortunately for the same reason the build up of noxious fumes was that much greater;  the vidangeurs  were usually obliged to work in irregular bursts because of the fetid conditions.  The ordure then had to be taken by cart or trundled away in barrels, in theory  all the way to the voirie at Montfaucon. Not surprisingly, given the conditions under which they laboured, the vidangeurs had a reputation for hard drinking, truculence and malpractice.  Police played a cat-and-mouse game trying to catch them illegally dumping: much complain was caused by the use of pierced barrels or "lanternes" which allowed liquid waste to pour off conveniently into the gutter.  Regulations promulgated in 1726 and succeeding years laid down in detail how the task was to be completed,  including a strict prohibition on diverting to cabarets or eau-de-vie sellers.

Despite their marginal status and frequent confrontations with authority, the cesspool workers were integrated into the guild structure of Paris.  In 1776 there were thirty-six master vidangeurs, each of whom was required to produce a chef d'oeuvre (!) and  pay a fee of one hundred francs.  In 1729 the Parlement of Paris reaffirmed the master cesspool cleaners' monopoly of the trade in Paris.  The guild also claimed the right to self-policing and appointed paid inspectors to enforce the rules.  However, the occupation continued to attract penniless and inexperienced labourers who undermined the guild's control, often to the detriment of safe practice.

Early attempts at improvement

In the closing decade of the Ancien Régime, growing government intervention in public health and hygiene tranformed cesspits and their cleaning, rather bizarrely, into a subject of  fashionable concern.  In 1777 Louis XVI appointed a royal commission, composed of the great Lavoisier and others, to investigate and evaluate proposed improvements.  Some of the most celebrated chemists of the age took part:  Bosc,  Brisé, Cadet de Vaux, Fougeroux, Fourcroy, Frandin, the two Girard, Guyton-Morveau, Gourlier de Gardone, Hallé,  Janin de Combe Blanche, Laborie, Lavoisier,  Marcorelle,  Parmentier, Pilâtre de Rozier, Portal (listed provided by Liger,  Fosses d'aisances (1875) p.94).  Efforts concentrated almost exclusively  on determining the composition of the miasmic gases which accumulated in the pits. (According to Google Ngram Viewer, "méphitisme" and  "gaz méphitique" are neologisms of the late 1760s).  An assortment of  neutralising agents  was proposed  - chalk, quicklime and similar alkalines   (Bosc, Marcorelle, Gourlier de Gardone, Parmentier, Cadet de Vaux and Laborie); fire (Lavoisier); vinegar (Janin de Combe Blanche) hydrochloric acid (Guyton-Morveau in 1773).  Mercier in the Tableau de Paris remarks on the intrepidness of modern chemists "who make light of all the deadly miasmas and who offer to descend into cesspools with the same confidence that a dancer at the fair walks a tightrope."  Donald Reid, historian of the Paris sewermen,  concludes that  the interest was less to do with occupational welfare than a general preoccupation with noxious odours -  the vidangeurs "provided a microcosm of the urban experience of living in a world of mephitic exhalations"(p.90-1).  However, the generously egalitarian sentiments of  Marcorelle, Baron d'Escale, are not in doubt:

......an operation so important and at the same time so dangerous as that of emptying privies, should not be left to chance. On this operation depends the health and the lives of men, and principally of that class who undertake it: a class so useful, and yet so despised: whose functions are so revolting against nature, and the imminent perils of which render it so deplorable; in fine, a class who hazard their lives to preserve the lives of others, and are exposed every instant to the risk of finding a grave in their laboratory.

How mortifying it is to hear it coolly remarked afterwards, that this class is only composed of porters, accustomed to sell the strength of their shoulders to their fellow citizens, an inhuman and contemptible reflection, which none but base and savage minds could be capable of making; it would be more difficult to change them, than to neutralise the most fetid mass of corruption.
Marcorelle, Advice for neutralising necessary houses (1782) p.4

Cadet de Vaux and the Ventilator

The most practical measure suggested to improve the lot of the cesspit cleaner was the use of a "ventilateur". This device was an airtight structure placed over the entrance to the cesspit, with bellows fitted to force the stagnant air out into the street. Its application was advocated in a paper entitled  Observations sur les fosses d'aisance, read and approved  by the Academy of Sciences in 1777 and subsequently published as a pamphlet.  The  authors were Louis-Guillaume Laborie, a member of the College of Pharmacists,  Antoine-Alexis Cadet de Vaux (1743-1828) and his associate Antoine-Augustin Parmentier (1737-1813). Cadet de Vaux was a reformer with a gift for publicity, who in 1777 founded the highly successful Journal de Paris to promote his ideas. (In the Revolutionary years he was to be behind the celebrated clearance of the Cimetière des Innocents)  The ventilator was not a new invention - privileges had been issued for its use in the 1760s - but the Observations added refinements; the use of quicklime as a disinfectant and the addition of a furnace to encourage the movement and dispersal of gases. 

 Under the patronage of Lenoir, radical steps were now taken to put the idea into practice.  In 1779 a Société du ventilateur was formed with Cadet de Vaux and his father-in-law Charles Delaplace among its associates. Royal letters patent awarded the new company exclusive rights to empty the cesspits of Paris. The guild of vidangeurs was simply swept aside, its members displaced or reduced to employees of the company.  (Exact timing is a little confused: Reid puts this initiative in 1776 in the context of Turgot's reforms but the Journal de Paris has a notice  with a date of 11th May 1779). The enlightened reformers laid down exactingly high standards of cleanliness, capped with a proud declaration that all cesspits would henceforth be emptied by day.  Prices were set at 65 livres per toise for pits on the ground floor and 70 livres for those in cellars. In the event, however, the venture was shortlived.  The costs, passed on to disgruntled consumers, proved too high;  after a few years, the company was disbanded and the guild reinstated.

Laborie, AA. Cadet de Vaux, AA Parmentier
Observations sur les fosses d'aisance, et moyens de prévenir des inconvéniens de leur vidange, Paris 1778.
http://www.biusante.parisdescartes.fr/histoire/medica/resultats/index.php?cote=32510x04&do=chapitre

Notice in the Journal de Paris
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BDETAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA626#v=onepage&q&f=false

Cadet de Vaux in Dictionnaire des journalistes
http://dictionnaire-journalistes.gazettes18e.fr/journaliste/136-antoine-cadet-de-vaux

Some cesspit accidents

1.  Fatalities at Narbonne 

This incident was the subject of a report by Jean-François de Marcorelle, baron d'Escale (d.1787), a keen local mathematician and scientist and corresponding member of the Parisian Royal Academy of Sciences. His paper was read to the Academy and subsequently published.  He went on to write an  Avis pour neutraliser à peu de frais les fosses d'aisance (in the English version, "Advice for neutralising necessary houses at a small expense" )  This second work was sharply criticised in the Journal de Paris for advocating the use of quicklime or whitewash ("chaux vive" / "lait de chaux"), already put forward in the Observations of  Laborie, Cadet de Vaux and Parmentier.


The accident, which claimed the lives of three workmen and five rescuers, occurred on 16th April 1779  in a large house near the old town walls of Narbonne known as Le Luxembourg after an inn which once occupied the building.  The owner, an pharmacist named Faure, had let the accommodation to a large number of different tenants, all of whom were employed in noxious trades:  anatomical demonstrations took place in one room, silk manufacturers occupied the ground floor, whilst the basement was given over to the production of verdigris. The whole building was served by a single cesspit situated in the second of two courtyards.  It was eleven-and-a-half feet by six feet, nine feet deep and covered with a slanting roof.  This monster received not only excrement from the entire household, but silk cocoons, anatomical debris, sediment from the verdigris and a host of  "other substances likely to produce  infected, dangerous,  murderous vapours  which would poison those who breath them".  Despite M. Faure's entreaties, local vidangeurs had refused point blank to empty it.

M. Faure finally decided that there was no other solution but to have a second cesspit dug. It was then that disaster struck.  "By the saddest of fates", comments Marcorelle, "the means he employed to avoid death in the first cesspit brought him death in the second." On morning of 16 April construction was well under way when suddenly the retaining wall between the two pits dramatically collapsed and a "mephistic torrent" poured into the new pit.  The builder and his assistant, a girl of 18 years, who were working in the new pit were instantly overwhelmed.  Two workmen were  dislodged from the scaffolding.  One fell into the pit.  The son of the second came to his father's rescue and he too fell in and drowned.  A wool merchant who tried heroically to rescue the unfortunate builders was also overcome.  At this point M. Faure himself went down and was asphyxiated, as were two other passing tradesmen who followed.  Finally M. Faure's two young nephews succeeded in bringing up their uncle and the builder.  A 31 year-old former grenadier pulled out the others.  All eight were pronounced beyond help.  Marcorelle is scathing about the medical treatment they received. though he at first revived, M. Faure himself eventually succumbed under the onslaught of repeated bleedings in a sealed room.  Only the builder survived both the cesspit and the attention of the doctors.   Marcorelle finishes his account by reproducing a royal edict of 1740  based on the researches of Réamur, which offered rather more intelligent advice on how to deal with drowning - warming the victims, moving their limbs, blowing warm air into their lungs.

References
Détails de l'accident funeste arrivé dans une Fosse d'aisance de la ville de Narbonne, le 16 Avril 1779.
Read to the Académie des Sciences in Paris on 3rd May.
http://www.histanestrea-france.org/Details-de-l-accident-funeste-2393.html

Avis pour neutraliser à peu de frais les fosses d'aisance, afin d'en faire la vidange sans inconvénient & sans danger, Narbonne : J. Besse, 1782, in-12, with parallel English text.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=DQH0fqBBiGIC&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Jean-Christophe Sanchez "Les travaux de Jean-François Marcorelle, académicien des Lumières" (Presentation) November 2014.
https://www.academia.edu/13182097/

2.  An unfortunate experiment  

Academic attempts at improvements were not without their dangers; this second incident is recounted in a report by Jean-Noël Hallé: 

On 23rd March 1782 experts gathered in front of the Hôtel de la Grenade in the rue de la Parcheminerie to witness the cleansing of a cesspit. Among the dignitaries of the Academy of Sciences were Lavoisier, Le Roy and Fougeroux.  Also present were five members of the Royal Society of Medicine,  the chemists Macquer and Fourcroy, the duc de la Rochefoucauld,the abbé Tessier, and  Hallé himself. Their objective was to put to the test the antimephitic properties of vinegar advocated by the Lyonnais opthalmologist Jean Janin de Combe Blanche.  The landlady was certain that medical students had added to the occasion by burying  arms, legs and other body parts beneath the excrement.

At about noon meteorological conditions seemed favourable : the temperature was cold - a mere two degrees on the Réamur scale, there had been a heavy snowfall and the wind was blowing from the north. Janin duly spread about his substance; Teslier and Hallé climbed intrepidly up and down ladders primed to gauge the intensity of the stench.  So far, so good. Then at about three in the afternoon a dramatic accident occurred  The vinegar had evidently masked the odour  without dispersing the noxious gases.  One of the vidangeurs, overcome by fumes, fell into the pit.   Two further workmen who went to the rescue "lost pulse, respiration and movement" and a fourth "entirely suffocated" .  The man was eventually pulled out but attempts to revive him prove unsuccessful.  At this point one Monsieur Verville, an inspector for the ventilator company, inadvertently took the breath of the dying man:  Hallé graphically describes the spectacular effect of even this minimal exposure:

He had scarcely inhaled the air that was coming from the mouth of the mortally ill man when he shouted "I am a dead man!" and fell down unconscious ... I saw that he was making an extreme
effort to regain his breath; he was held by the arms, as he reared up with a loud groan; his chest and his stomach moved up and down alternately in violent convulsive movements. He had lost consciousness; his limbs were cold; his pulse became weaker and weaker ... Occasionally his mouth even filled with foam, his limbs became stiff, and the sick man appeared to be having a genuine epileptic fit. (Hallé p.57-8)

In fact Verville soon recovered but remained convinced that "cesspool gases that have been transmitted" were even more noxious than those which have asphyxiated the unfortunate workman.

Jean-Noël Hallé  Recherches sur le méphitisme des fosses d’aisances, 1785
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AmisWKWazUAC&source=gbs_navlinks_s

The incident is recounted by Alain Corbin, The Foul and the fragrant (1986) p.2
https://www.scribd.com/doc/215893024/Alain-Corbin-M-Kochan-The-Foul-and-the-Fragrant-Odour-and-the-French-Social-Imagination-Berg-Publishers-1986

General references

Donald Reid, Paris sewers and sewermen:  realities and representations (Harvard 1993)  https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=VJn2puwsquYC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA88#v=onepage&q&f=fals

Pierre-Denis Boudriot . "Essai sur l'ordure en milieu urbain à l'époque pré-industrielle. Boues, immondices et gadoue à Paris au XVIIIe siècle" .Histoire, économie et société, 1986, 5(4), p.515-528 http://www.persee.fr/doc/hes_0752-5702_1986_num_5_4_2346#hes_0752-5702_1986_num_5_4_T1_0520_0000

François Liger, Fosses d'aisances, latrines, urinoirs et vidanges  (Paris, 1875)
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k740549/f94.item.zoom