Parisian Sewers and Modern Novels
Hundreds of pages into Les Miserables, French Romantic Victor Hugo unexpectedly detours into the poetry, architecture, and civil engineering of Parisian sewers. This extensive world-building ultimately culminates in a dramatic underground escape from battle. With numerous intestinal metaphors and a belabored use of the word ‘cloaca’, he also analyzes the economic failure to convert human waste into agricultural fertilizer, an annual loss of 25 million francs that also poisons the rivers — and laments that the Chinese outsmarted the French on such a lucrative recapture opportunity.
He lauds the sewers as both “the conscience of the city” and “a mirror of human vices” while recounting the historical and preventable ravages of cholera as an exposé of who can afford access to closed and treated sewage systems versus who must subsist next to raw open sewage.
“But, in spite of all the processes of disinfection, it exhales, a vague, suspicious odor like Tartuffe after confession.” — Victor Hugo
Some scholars describe the sewer scenes as the heart of Les Miserables — they unapologetically expose the era’s classism that bifurcated the most wretchedly impoverished and the wealthy noblesse.
Les Miserables is two parallel books in one — a character-driven story winding through Napoleonic Paris, and a stereotypically dry…
