Just 200 years ago, Paris was famously one of the foulest and smelliest cities in Europe. In this programme historian Dan Snow sniffs out the rotten story of the French revolution.
Stunning CGI reveals the stinking streets where ordinary people slaved in toxic industries and suffered grotesque poverty and disease. Dan immerses himself in their world, visiting a perfumer to recreate the stench of the 18th-century city. He has a go at one of the worst jobs in history - tanning leather by 18th-century methods using dog excrement and urine - to make exquisite luxury goods that only the filthy rich could afford.
He gets a rare glimpse of the private rooms of infamous Queen Marie Antoinette at the glittering palace of Versailles and reveals some surprising facts about the royal court. Plus he comes face to face with the ultimate killing machine - the gruesome guillotine. Dan finds out what happened to the thousands of bodies that overflowed in the cemeteries of Paris during The Terror.
Dan discovers how monumental filth and injustice drove Parisians to a bloody revolution which would transform their city and give birth to a new republic.
Stunning CGI reveals the stinking streets where ordinary people slaved in toxic industries and suffered grotesque poverty and disease. Dan immerses himself in their world, visiting a perfumer to recreate the stench of the 18th-century city. He has a go at one of the worst jobs in history - tanning leather by 18th-century methods using dog excrement and urine - to make exquisite luxury goods that only the filthy rich could afford.
He gets a rare glimpse of the private rooms of infamous Queen Marie Antoinette at the glittering palace of Versailles and reveals some surprising facts about the royal court. Plus he comes face to face with the ultimate killing machine - the gruesome guillotine. Dan finds out what happened to the thousands of bodies that overflowed in the cemeteries of Paris during The Terror.
Dan discovers how monumental filth and injustice drove Parisians to a bloody revolution which would transform their city and give birth to a new republic.
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TVTranscript
00:00Paris is heralded as the most glamorous, beautiful and sophisticated cultural centre of Europe,
00:12adorned by magnificent palaces, gardens and boulevards, but it wasn't always like this.
00:24It's hard to believe now, but this beautiful city used to stink.
00:34The streets of 18th century Paris were narrow, crowded and fetid.
00:40They were those of a medieval city, not a modern capital.
00:43This was the most disgusting city imaginable.
00:49Some 200 years ago, Paris was famously one of the foulest and smelliest cities in Europe.
00:55Wading through human and animal filth, a slave in toxic industries,
01:00ordinary Parisians suffered grotesque poverty, sickness and starvation.
01:05But after generations of injustice, it wasn't just the conditions that were revolting.
01:10The people of Paris had had enough.
01:12Filth, the result of poverty and injustice, was becoming political.
01:17Paris was a pressure cooker and it was about to explode.
01:22Paris was on the brink of an epic transformation.
01:25I'm going to sniff out the rotten story of how filth and squalor drove Parisians into revolt.
01:33Experience the most toxic and stinking of Paris' gruelling industries.
01:37Recreate the foul smell that choked the streets.
01:42Come face to face with the ultimate killing machine.
01:47All to understand how ordinary Parisians fought to clean up their ancient cesspits from the bottom up.
01:55In less than 100 years, Paris would be transformed from a filthy, fetid place
02:00into a model city, the blueprint for every modern metropolis.
02:05But it wouldn't be an easy path.
02:06It would be bloody, violent and dirty.
02:17A trip down the river Seine in the 18th century would have looked and smelt very different.
02:23Paris' main source of drinking water was little more than an open sewer,
02:28with up to 300 tonnes of human excrement dumped in it daily.
02:32With no notion of public hygiene or proper sanitation,
02:35there was just too much waste for the city to cope with.
02:39As King Louis XVI came to the throne in 1774,
02:43the city had been growing for centuries, and now it was fit to burst.
02:48Over half a million people were crammed into an area just seven by four kilometres.
02:54And the thriving industries continued to lure tens of thousands more to the capital,
02:59to work as dyers, launderers, hatters and gunsmiths,
03:04all spewing their toxic waste into the Seine and foul odours into the air.
03:10For Parisians, the filth, misery and stench was intolerable.
03:16This was the smelliest part of 18th-century Paris.
03:19There's a road up there called the Rue Mouffetard, which at the time meant putrid stench.
03:24The reason for that smell was the river Bièvre, which came out through here
03:28and was noxious, notoriously so, and it's now two metres below my feet,
03:33covered up by the street.
03:35Back then, it was the centre for the most toxic, stinking and downright disgusting industry in Paris,
03:41the gruesome process of turning animal hides into leather, tanning.
03:47This area was home to dozens of tanneries up and down here.
03:51They used to pour their filthy waste straight out into the river.
03:54I mean, the air was so toxic, it used to give people ulcerated throats.
04:00To get a sense of the foul, polluted stink that was aggravating the people of Paris,
04:04I've joined Andrew Parr, and we're using the traditional filthy ingredients to make leather.
04:09Wow.
04:11The most caustic stage is soaking the fatty hides in alkaline lime for three weeks.
04:17It's a rotting, dead animal smell.
04:19The smell, I mean, this is hydrated lime, so it's watered down,
04:22but the smell is still there.
04:24It's a rotting, dead animal smell.
04:27The smell, I mean, this is hydrated lime, so it's water and lime mixed together,
04:30and they've worked on the hide, so they've been working on the hair and the flesh,
04:33and you're getting a certain amount of ammonia coming off, so that's what you can smell.
04:39It wasn't just the lime that was dangerously contaminating the air and the water.
04:43In the late 18th century, with over 30 tanneries crammed along the river Bièvre,
04:48each stage was adding layers of fetid pollution.
04:52Drag it up over the beam, so it's then ready for the de-hairing process.
04:57Oh, look at that.
04:58So it's got three blades, and you work it so the blade is pointing back towards you,
05:02so you're pulling the hair out rather than pushing it out.
05:04Just work it away like that.
05:06With so many tanneries, the heaps of loose hair piling up would have been foul.
05:10It's a funny process, though, isn't it?
05:12This used to be a living animal, and now you're preparing it to be a pair of shoes.
05:17To add to the matted hair floating in the river, the grisly flesh is cut from the other side.
05:23A tanner's lot was certainly backbreaking, messy and vile.
05:27You're just going to cut away all that nice fleshy part there, all that fat and sinew.
05:34I like the way it all splashes up on your face. That's really pleasant.
05:39You're getting what is sort of dissolved fat, really,
05:42because the lime has started to dissolve it, so it's all really squidgy.
05:45Quite unpleasant, really.
05:46Basically, you spend all day creating piles of fat like that.
05:50Stinking fat dumped into the water supply is hazardous,
05:54but there was an even more disgusting evil ingredient,
05:57as the Parisian tanners relied on a foul pollutant to do their dirty work.
06:02Right, so you get the dog poo and put it in there.
06:04Baiting is a key part of the tanning process.
06:07The tanners used a mixture of dog and bird dung in hot water to release bacteria.
06:12What is it about dog poo that is just so disgusting?
06:15The hide was immersed in this revolting concoction to soften it.
06:21There was no shortage of dog poo in Paris,
06:23as there were thousands of stray dogs leaving their muck all over the place.
06:27It's running like a fresh bait.
06:29Every time you do that, it just waves.
06:31This was then mixed with human urine, collected from piss pots left on street corners.
06:36Because it's full of bacteria, of course the bacteria multiplies,
06:39so it gets worse as the day goes on.
06:41So if you keep it for several days, especially if it's warm in the summer,
06:44it just breathes and breathes and breathes and the smell gets worse.
06:47I think I have to do it by hand. It's going to go away.
06:49The dog poo, hair, fat and acid all got chucked into the Bièvre
06:54that flowed directly into the River Seine.
06:58So it's a pretty filthy industry.
07:00I mean, if you were living downstream of a tannery,
07:02your life expectancy wouldn't be that good.
07:04If you were drinking this water, it wouldn't be good at all.
07:07I think that's why they drank wine.
07:10The miserable working conditions of industrial Paris
07:13were breeding not just foul pollutants,
07:15but the stench of injustice and discontent.
07:19Paris was an awful place to live,
07:21where many people worked in disgusting conditions doing back-breaking work
07:25in tanneries like this one.
07:27But out of this, exquisite luxury goods were produced, like these gloves.
07:31But it was also a very unequal society.
07:33These gloves would have cost ten times what a family of four
07:36would have been able to spend in a week.
07:38Only the super-rich could afford them.
07:42This blatant injustice riled the people of Paris.
07:45In the late 18th century, French society was clearly divided
07:48into the haves and the have-nots.
07:51The privileged nobility and clergy
07:53accounted for just 2% of the population.
07:56The other 98% were marginalised, and the majority were desperately poor.
08:00These Parisians were deeply unhappy with their lot.
08:03They slaved to make Paris tick, but saw few of the benefits.
08:08Around this city of 600,000 people was a three-metre high wall.
08:12It was designed to regulate the flow of people and goods in and out of the city.
08:16But to the people of Paris, it was both a jailer and a taxman,
08:20because there were 60 of these tollhouses here,
08:23and all goods coming into the city were heavily taxed.
08:26The people of Paris felt they were being squeezed,
08:29physically and economically.
08:33That's a very beautiful building.
08:35A typical 18th-century government.
08:37If they're going to take money off you,
08:39they're going to do it in pleasant neoclassical surroundings.
08:42So in here were the crowded streets of Paris,
08:44and out there was the sweet-smelling countryside.
08:47The people in here particularly resented paying taxes,
08:50so a king they found increasingly irrelevant and inefficient.
08:53Of course, they had no say in how those taxes were spent,
08:56because it was an absolute system.
08:58One project that particularly angered them
09:00was when a king in the 18th century built what was effectively a ring road,
09:04which meant he didn't even have to travel through his own capital city.
09:11Built by his father, this solution to the stench and crush of insalubrious Paris
09:15was readily embraced by the young Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette.
09:21Trouble was, abandoning their subjects to rot in their own filth
09:25just made matters worse.
09:27And unlike England's king, who was based in London itself,
09:31Louis XVI chose to exercise his absolute rule
09:35from an isolated and privileged retreat, the Palace of Versailles.
09:54This really was the home of the filthy rich,
09:57the palace of perfume and powder, of pleasure and power.
10:01It covers an area of 67,000 square metres.
10:05There are 700 rooms with 2,000 windows.
10:10Even though it was close to Paris,
10:12it was a world away from those crowded, stinking streets.
10:16It was quite literally the most extravagant palace on the planet.
10:23The spectacular Hall of Mirrors,
10:25where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette held court,
10:28is almost as long as a football pitch
10:30and required 8,000 candles a night to light it,
10:33impolitic at a time when the king's subjects could barely afford bread.
10:39The palace was open, light, full of mirrors and glass,
10:42at every level giving the appearance of all that Paris was not.
10:48Surprisingly, given that their lives in many ways
10:51couldn't have been more different from the filthy, poor people out there,
10:54the super-rich had one thing in common.
10:56They were filthy and smelly themselves.
11:00Over 2,000 people lived and worked in the palace,
11:03and with few toilets and hundreds of visitors every day,
11:06it's claimed that people had to relieve themselves almost anywhere.
11:10The English writer Horace Walpole
11:12wrote that the approach to Versailles was magnificent,
11:14but the squalor inside was unspeakable.
11:17Nowadays we think of Versailles as a byword for exquisite luxury,
11:21but back in the 18th century, this was a public building.
11:24It was thronged with petitioners
11:26hoping to get a favour out of the king or the queen,
11:29which meant that in between these exquisite rooms,
11:32the corridors acted like public lavatories.
11:34They were cesspits.
11:35There was filth everywhere and the stink would have been unbelievable.
11:39Another prominent writer of the time documented that
11:42there was the smell of butchers roasting pigs,
11:45the courtyard and corridors were full of urine and stagnant water,
11:49and livestock even defecated in the great gallery.
11:54It was so dirty that people actually used to wear dresses
11:57with hems that were brown so it wouldn't sharp the muck,
12:00but of course the king and queen needed some private space
12:02in which they could be clean,
12:04and that's why there's a secret door right over there.
12:11Right, so this is the private side of Versailles,
12:14the bit the public don't see,
12:16except that all the courtiers and all the people clamouring
12:19for the queen's attention wouldn't have seen,
12:21and I suspect Marie Antoinette would have been far more comfortable in here.
12:24You go from the grandeur out there to the far more simple,
12:27far smaller rooms in here.
12:29It's a real human scale.
12:31And the only people allowed back here would have been personal servants,
12:35people helping her with her hair and her skin, her make-up.
12:38She would have been comfortable here
12:40and shielded to the mass of people out there.
12:43Wonderful.
12:45Now, through here, I think...
12:48Yeah, this, I think, is the bathroom.
12:50Yeah, this is where the bathtub used to be.
12:53She was infamous for spending hours of time in the bathroom.
12:56In fact, she used to have her lunch in the bathroom.
12:58In such a filthy, dirty age,
13:00this was considered extremely strange behaviour.
13:05Marie Antoinette favoured ostentatious powdered wigs,
13:08expensive make-up and extravagant perfumes
13:11to maintain an air of cleanliness.
13:14But Marie's obscene levels of luxury,
13:16paid for by taxing the poor, were provocative,
13:19especially as the aristocracy didn't pay tax.
13:23The more the royals tried to escape the filth,
13:26the more they seemed to be rubbing ordinary people's noses in it.
13:30Masking bad smells is one thing,
13:32getting rid of their causes quite another,
13:34unless you're one of the privileged few
13:36that can get their hands on a cutting-edge piece of technology.
13:40A place with cleanliness had to have a lieu anglais,
13:43a place of the English.
13:45Possibly having a bit of a dig at the English,
13:47or possibly because this was the latest inconveniences from across the channel.
13:51It's where we get the word loo from,
13:53one of the first toilets in France,
13:56where Marie Antoinette would sit and get rid of the waste
13:59in what we now consider a civilised fashion.
14:02Of course, apart from her, no-one in Versailles had these mod cons.
14:06For everyone else at Versailles, they had simple chamber pots,
14:09and that meant once they'd finished their business,
14:11they had to just throw them out the windows,
14:13which of course was pretty tough when people walked around on the ground floor,
14:16and apparently they used to use leather umbrellas
14:18to keep this rain of filth off their heads.
14:26Just as this crazy invention deflected the stinking mess,
14:30Louis and his court shielded themselves from the realities of the political situation.
14:35Not only were the filthy poor funding the lavish lifestyle at Versailles,
14:39France had also been embroiled in costly wars abroad.
14:44The coffers were empty.
14:46People were overtaxed and on the verge of destitution.
14:4915 miles away in Paris, it would take more than expensive perfume
14:53to cover up that stench or the real desire for political change.
15:00Neglected and suffering from grotesque filth and poverty,
15:04living in Paris was described as being sucked into a fetid sewer,
15:09and what put everyone's noses out of joint was the malodorous, relentless stink.
15:15I want to get a sense of what it felt like to be condemned to live like this.
15:21Paris is home to some of the most famous fragrances in the world,
15:24like Chanel and Dior, but I haven't come here to find a sophisticated scent.
15:29Instead, I'm going to enlist the help of a man
15:31with one of the most discerning noses in the city,
15:33and together we're going to recreate the stench of 18th-century Paris.
15:41I want to brew up the definitive, heady blend of Pong de Paris.
15:45I've brought a few of the terrible smells that would have assaulted the senses
15:49to the Givaudin perfumery to inspire Olivier Pichaud.
15:53OK, let's smell it.
15:55There's a disgusting picture of an open grave
15:57and bodies decaying without lids on the coffers.
16:00Calabrese, yeah.
16:01Not very nice.
16:03Bit of an old onion.
16:04Yeah, pretty strong.
16:06Then, of course, some of these, very French garlic.
16:09Very strong smell.
16:11Merchants from all over the country flocked to the biggest market in Paris,
16:15Les Halles, to sell their goods.
16:17Emile Zola later called it the stomach of Paris.
16:21That's not so fresh.
16:23Without refrigeration, age-old meat, rotting vegetables and rancid cheese
16:27would vie for the nose's attention.
16:30The manure and garbage that fested in the streets.
16:34Fresh this morning.
16:36Where did you find that in Paris?
16:38Some horse manure.
16:39With only nine bathhouses and a general suspicion of water,
16:42washing was rare.
16:44The worst smell was from the people themselves, escaping from every pore.
16:49Smelly T-shirt that I've been wearing for a few days.
16:51Wow, serious?
16:52Yeah, afraid so.
16:53Breath smelling of rotting teeth and sour milk,
16:56sweat, dirty hair, bodily secretions.
16:59Human urine.
17:01OK, I'm not going to smell it.
17:03I trust you.
17:07In the perfume lab, we concoct a powerful blend of some pretty evil ingredients,
17:12with a base note of stale urine and a top note of old fish.
17:17An hour later, our bespoke 18th century stench is ready for a snifter.
17:23So you want to smell the result?
17:25Yes, please.
17:27Will you be marketing this one heavily?
17:29That's going to be difficult, yeah.
17:31Oh, that's so bad.
17:33It brings tears to the eyes.
17:35You have everything.
17:36You have everything in there.
17:37Especially this one.
17:38This one from the horse.
17:39It's a little bit like garlic also.
17:41A little bit like garlic.
17:42Yeah, it's quite...
17:43Fatty, heavy.
17:45Quite musky.
17:46It comes in different ways, doesn't it?
17:48Sometimes you get overwhelming vegetable smell,
17:50and then suddenly some fish or some rotting flesh comes at you.
17:55I would not like to live in that world.
17:57This stuff really stinks.
18:00But don't just take my word for it.
18:02I'm going to unleash it onto Parisians today
18:04to see if they can stomach what their city would have smelt like 200 years ago.
18:09Madame, would you like to try some perfume?
18:16How about you?
18:18They like it. That's great.
18:20It's meant to smell like a disgusting street in 18th century Paris.
18:24It's weird.
18:25What do you think it smells like?
18:27I don't know, but I hate it.
18:31C'est pas bon.
18:32Really? Not good?
18:33Not good.
18:34Can you try this perfume?
18:38Not good?
18:39Oh!
18:40Excuse me.
18:42Well, the people of Paris have spoken,
18:44and they do not like the Pong de Paris.
18:46I can't say I'm entirely surprised it is absolutely stinking,
18:49but that isn't as close as most of these people are ever going to come to time travel.
18:53Back in the 18th century, people knew their city stank.
18:56What they were worried about was, was that smell bad for them?
19:02Paris was killing its own.
19:04Around 20,000 people died each year in the capital.
19:08One in four newborns perished,
19:10and the average life expectancy at birth for a poor labourer was just 23 years.
19:15The shocking death toll was so bad that it created a macabre problem.
19:21It wasn't just the waste from the living that made Paris stink so much.
19:25The city was terribly overcrowded, and so too, inevitably, were its burial grounds.
19:29And this square is on the site of what in the 18th century was the largest of them all.
19:34It was known as the Cemetery of the Innocents,
19:36and for eight centuries, Parisians buried their dead in the ground here
19:40in a completely haphazard fashion, few of them in proper coffins.
19:44Rotting corpses, ravaged by smallpox, tuberculosis and syphilis,
19:48started piling up in church graveyards.
19:51Parishioners stayed away from their daily worship as the smell of bodies was so strong
19:56it made their eyes water and their throats wretch.
19:59But that wasn't all.
20:01By the late 18th century, this place was filled literally to overflowing,
20:07as one local restauranteur, Mr Gravelot, found to his cost
20:11when he made a particularly shocking trip to his basement.
20:16In June 1780, the smell emanating from Mr Gravelot's cellar was revolting.
20:21As he went to investigate, he saw that his wall had collapsed,
20:25and through the wet earth, corpses were spilling out from the adjacent cemetery.
20:31Rotting, putrefying smells like this terrified Parisians.
20:35For centuries, they'd believed that evil odours themselves,
20:39like plasmas, were the cause of sickness and death.
20:44But now some forward-thinking Parisians were questioning this medieval idea.
20:49They wanted to see if there was a scientific link between dirt and disease.
20:54With historian Andrew Hussey,
20:56I'm retracing the steps of one pioneering hygienist
20:59who wanted to drag Paris out of the Dark Ages.
21:03It's all a bit gentrified around here now, isn't it?
21:06But this used to be a real cesspit, eh?
21:08This was... You know, I think as a 21st-century person,
21:11you would have been on your knees with the sheer noxiousness
21:14of what went on round here.
21:16I mean, this effectively was an open latrine.
21:18The river was full of sewage and dead bodies.
21:21So this place was absolutely amazingly rank.
21:25So it sounds pretty noxious.
21:27I mean, was it actually bad people's health living round here?
21:30People believed that smells could kill you,
21:32but there was no scientific basis for this.
21:34We haven't got yet to the age of hygiene,
21:37because there's no connection between germ theory and disease and mortality.
21:41But in the age of reason, you know, it was a logical question to ask why.
21:44And who starts to ask those questions and what do they start to find out?
21:47The leading figure is a man of science and reason called Jean-Noël Allais,
21:52and his assistant, Bonserf, who decided that the best way
21:55to understand the connection between smells and disease
21:58was to set off in Paris,
22:00using the only scientific equipment they had, which was their noses,
22:03and to discover what was really going on.
22:06Armed with nothing but a map and their sense of smell,
22:09Allais and Bonserf embarked on a route that penetrated
22:12the most notoriously filthy and contaminated areas of Paris.
22:16Their aim was to improve public hygiene
22:18by recording which areas smelt worse and why.
22:22First, they descended to the banks of the Seine.
22:25Still not the cleanest city in the world, some nasty-looking sludge.
22:29Yeah, but there was a belief that if you touched that,
22:31you'd get gangrene within days. I don't want to put it to the test.
22:34So we've just come out of the Pont Neuf,
22:36and we've got the Pont Aux Champs over there.
22:38Now, this is described by Allais as a kind of mud bank
22:41that's so black the stench is poisonous,
22:44and that's because it's been fed by the open sewer of Châtelet,
22:48which is just over there.
22:50The mud bank of sewage then meets the detritus
22:53of the abattoirs and the butchers.
22:55So you've got a mound of rotting meat,
22:58you can imagine the flies, the maggots, the larvae,
23:01surrounded, encrusted by a kind of coulis of sewage.
23:07It must have just been relentless because other cities
23:10throughout the world have got rivers where it's tidal
23:12and they kind of get swept out,
23:14whereas the Seine is quite slow-moving, isn't it?
23:16You've got to think of the Seine as a kind of open,
23:19weeping sore in the centre of the city.
23:22On their horrible 10km journey around the Seine,
23:25they recorded the levels of human sewage,
23:27rotting matter and fetid air
23:29to establish the difference between merely unpleasant pongs
23:32and smells that were actually dangerous.
23:35The area that was most distressing to the Parisians
23:38was the east of Paris, the centre for the polluting industries.
23:41There, the noxious fumes from the rancid tanneries were so acute
23:45that Châtelet heroically sent Bonserf to go on alone.
23:49What happened was that Bonserf went down there,
23:51right down to the tanneries, and within half an hour,
23:54his tongue had swollen up, his mouth had swollen up
23:56with lesions on his throat,
23:58he was retching, his mouth was ulcerated,
24:00he thought he was going to die.
24:02And he came back to Alais and said,
24:04don't go down there under any circumstances.
24:06Well, when he recovered, what they worked out
24:08was that there was this distinction between
24:10the stench of excrement over there in the west
24:12and the poisons that could kill you over in the east.
24:15Now, this wasn't germ theory,
24:17this wasn't the beginnings of germ theory,
24:19but what it was was the distinction between smell,
24:22which can be pretty harmless,
24:24and poison, which is going to kill you.
24:26Although it was very primitive, this was the first time
24:28that anyone had actually experimented with it
24:30in a kind of scientific way.
24:32I don't think it's any exaggeration to say that what happens here
24:35is one of those moments in history where you've got a gear change
24:38between the medieval mind and the modern mind,
24:40the medieval city and the modern city,
24:42and Paris is the first modern city in the world.
24:44Everything we see around us was invented in the 19th century
24:47as a product of modernity, lay in order over disorder,
24:50and Châtelet's journey through the excrement,
24:53the stench, the smells, the nasty ponds of Paris
24:56was the beginning of that historical journey.
25:01It wasn't just the men of science who had a vision
25:03for a modern, cleaner and healthier future,
25:05but also a group of intellectuals
25:07who were offering the emerging educated and literate middle class,
25:11the bourgeoisie, a very persuasive alternative
25:14to life in stinking Paris.
25:19I always love coming to this place.
25:21It obviously imitates the Pantheon in Rome
25:23where the ancient Romans went to celebrate their gods,
25:26but this is a temple not of gods but of men,
25:29of people like Voltaire and Rousseau, the Olympians of the Enlightenment.
25:33The Enlightenment was a movement of change
25:35where thinkers used science and reason
25:38to challenge authority, tradition and superstition.
25:41And Voltaire believed that a sanitary, clean, civilised city
25:45was very much part of a new enlightened society.
25:48He was so disgusted by the filth of Paris
25:50that he began to imagine what a new city would smell and look like.
25:56We rightly blush to see public markets in narrow streets
26:00displaying dirtiness, spreading infection and causing public disorders.
26:05We need to open public markets, water fountains which work.
26:09We must widen the narrow and unhealthy streets.
26:15Filth was now becoming a catalyst for political change.
26:19Depression, squalor and desperation had reached tipping point.
26:24The Parisians were now clamouring to radically improve
26:27their overcrowded, stinking and poisoned city.
26:33In a bid to quell the mounting unrest,
26:35the King commissioned a nationwide survey of his subjects' concerns.
26:40Gathered from all over the country,
26:42the National Archives keeps all the written complaints.
26:50These are the Cahiers des doléances, the Books of Grievances,
26:54and there are 25,000 of them.
26:57We have just a fraction of them here.
26:59This was a remarkable, totally unexpected response
27:02to Louis' attempt to placate his people
27:04by asking them what was concerning them in their lives.
27:07And actually, it was a huge reservoir of bitterness
27:09that had been building up because they'd been denied that kind of outlet before.
27:13So this was an unprecedented national survey.
27:16It gives us a wonderful snapshot of what life was like in late 18th century France.
27:20This one here talks about the people who lived near a slaughterhouse
27:23and they say the smell is absolutely terrible.
27:26It's stinking, particularly in the summer.
27:28And they're terribly worried about the effect of fire
27:31during all the process of making candles.
27:33Fire, of course, was an omnipresent fear
27:36for people that lived in these tightly packed conditions, wooden houses.
27:39It's wonderful how rough these are.
27:41You can still see people's signatures and crossings out
27:44as people change their mind.
27:46These ones were collated just a few years later into slightly smarter volumes.
27:50This one refers to the River Bièvre,
27:52which is the tribute tree to the seminal the tanneries were, of course.
27:55It says that the water was so polluted it was impossible to drink
27:58and impossible to make soup out of,
28:00particularly by all the dye from the colorists that was flooding in there
28:04and people worried they'd be poisoned.
28:07Really what lies behind all this is the idea of rights.
28:10The people of France had come to believe
28:12that they had rights that were being infringed
28:14by their denial of access to clean water and decent living conditions.
28:18They wanted to be heard and they wanted to protect those rights and advance them.
28:21This man here is an architect
28:23and he says he's been forwarding all sorts of ideas for cleaning up Paris,
28:26for example, dredging the Seine, which at the moment is nothing but a sewer,
28:29but he's not being listened to.
28:31And people were struggling to improve their quality of life
28:34and for them it was absolutely linked in their minds
28:37to the achievement of political rights as well.
28:40And that's why these documents are not just a list of grievances,
28:43they are revolutionary.
28:47Expectations had been raised.
28:49From all over France, tens of thousands contributed
28:52and those who'd signed wanted to see significant results.
28:57They believed the king would act in their interests
29:00and alleviate the filth and degradation piled upon them.
29:03But after all this effort,
29:05when the complaints were read at the Palace of Versailles in May 1789,
29:09it was a total sham.
29:11The scale of the problems was so vast
29:14that the king, with little money or inclination to take on this challenge,
29:18changed nothing.
29:21What's so ironic about the king's big gesture is that it totally backfired.
29:26People were politicised,
29:28they were radicalised by this process of consultation.
29:31It gave them the taste for political involvement.
29:33It also showed just how impotent the king was.
29:36He was penniless, so he was unable to do anything
29:38about all these grievances that had been raised.
29:40Rather than dispelling revolutionary feeling in the country,
29:44the king had fanned its flames.
29:51Parisians were incensed that their suggestions for a modern,
29:54cleaner and more just city had been ignored.
29:58On the streets, the anger was palpable.
30:02The masses were ready for action.
30:05Incendiary pamphlets flew off the printing presses,
30:09revolutionary speakers fired up the people in the streets,
30:12and in this café, radicals gathered to plan their strategy.
30:16One of them was a 26-year-old called Camille Desmoulins,
30:19and on 12 July 1789, he made one particularly fervent speech,
30:24brandishing a pistol.
30:26From one end of the country to the other, he said,
30:30The same universal cry is heard.
30:32Everyone wants to be free.
30:35Paris was slipping from the king's grasp.
30:38Middle-class revolutionaries started to adopt the filth-covered
30:41clothes of tradesmen to stress their solidarity with the workers.
30:44Revolution was in the air.
30:48What finally tipped the city into open revolt was a natural disaster.
30:53A volcano erupted in Iceland, causing havoc across Europe.
30:57The harvest in 1788 was decimated,
31:00making bread the most basic staple impossible to buy.
31:05Such was the desperation that fights broke out.
31:08Bakers were even lynched for stockpiling flour
31:11or using the contaminated river water to make foul bread.
31:15Events now accelerated with terrifying momentum.
31:19Paris was seething.
31:21People were living surrounded by filth, unable to afford bread,
31:24and being ruled over by a king who was useless,
31:27and his administration, despite all of their taxes, was bankrupt.
31:31And when people are threatened with starvation,
31:33when people are desperate, they turn violent.
31:40On July 14, 1789,
31:43the people of Paris charged through the filthy streets.
31:47It was revolution.
31:51They wanted their basic human rights,
31:53a cleaner, modern city for all, and an end to royal tyranny.
31:59As they march up this road towards the site of the Bastille,
32:02which is just there,
32:04they were starting a long French tradition of resistance and revolution.
32:08Today, people are marching about pensions,
32:11but ever since then, the French people have marched physically
32:15and metaphorically towards the Bastille.
32:19The Bastille was the main prison in Paris,
32:22and was thought to contain supplies of muskets and gunpowder.
32:25The starving, dirty, marauding mob
32:28wanted to storm the fortress and arm themselves against the king's troops.
32:33The choice of the Bastille was obvious.
32:35For the people of Paris, it symbolised arbitrary, tyrannical government.
32:38The king was allowed to throw men in there as political prisoners
32:42without due process of law.
32:45Filth even played its part.
32:47One key revolutionary, Sonterre,
32:49dragged carts filled with horse manure up to the Bastille
32:52and set them alight.
32:54The acrid smoke was crucial in shielding the mob's advance.
33:00Like the protesters today, the rioters arrived here at the Bastille
33:04and stormed the fortress.
33:06They carried out the governor and executed him in the street.
33:09It was the start of the bloodiest revolution in French history.
33:20The storming of the Bastille is still celebrated every year,
33:23all over France.
33:25It symbolises the start of the French Revolution,
33:28the first steps towards a modern democracy,
33:31based on the principles of liberté, égalité and fraternité.
33:38Just a month after the Bastille was stormed,
33:40a document was drawn up outlining the people's vision
33:44to state their basic human rights.
33:48It's kept under lock and key here at the National Archives.
33:53This really is a unique opportunity
33:55to have a look at a momentous landmark
33:58on the road to modern democratic thought.
34:02I have to be very, very careful here
34:04because it is the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,
34:08made in 1789, and it's still a beautiful document.
34:12Just incredible to be handling the original like this.
34:16It's also one of the most inflammatory documents ever created
34:20because this lists a series of rights that men have,
34:23not as a product of their class or their race
34:26or their educational background or their wealth,
34:28but because they are men.
34:30And any government that disrespects those rights
34:33is illegitimate and should be overthrown.
34:36It's a very short document, it's only 800 words,
34:39it could be easily printed on one page, easily understood,
34:42and it spread like wildfire through Europe.
34:44It was translated into countless languages.
34:46And the preamble starts by making a strong link
34:49between rights and the actual living conditions of normal people.
34:53Rights matter, and this is the reason.
34:55It says, the representatives of the French people
34:57believe that ignorance, neglect or contempt of the rights of man
35:01are the sole cause of public calamities
35:04and of the corruption of governments.
35:06And once you've defined the rights of man,
35:08you can then build a government that protects them,
35:10and that will be a better government than what has gone before.
35:15Incredible to think that out of the seething, filthy chaos of Paris,
35:19a cornerstone of Western democracy was laid.
35:22It is such an influential document
35:25that it's seared into the fabric of our modern world.
35:28When the United Nations set down
35:31their Declaration of Human Rights in 1948,
35:34it was modelled on this.
35:36And today, here in Paris, proud Parisians have displayed
35:39every word on the walls of the metro station, Concord.
35:44But back in the 18th century,
35:46it was just too radical for the king to accept.
35:49He refused to relinquish his sovereign power
35:52into the hands of the great unwashed,
35:54but soon the people gave him no choice.
35:57In the autumn of 1789,
35:59a group of rowdy women gathered in Paris.
36:02Fishmongers, prostitutes and market stallholders
36:05determined to march to Versailles.
36:07They confronted the king and demanded food
36:09and demanded his presence in Paris.
36:11Reluctantly, he signed this, and his signature is still here.
36:16But as the months were on, feeling became increasingly radicalised.
36:19Louis himself was seen now to be incompatible
36:22with the sentiments expressed in this document.
36:25And for that, he would pay the ultimate price.
36:32The people's desire for a more ordered, just and sanitary city
36:36was clear.
36:38But the path to modernity would be gruelling and bloody.
36:41Paris was about to get filthier and more chaotic than ever.
36:47It's a typical, rather quaint street in a touristy part of Paris,
36:51lined with pleasant shops,
36:53but behind this door is a machine that's become synonymous
36:56with all that is ghoulish and macabre.
37:03Wow. Guillotine.
37:05One of only four remaining from the revolutionary period
37:08and the only one here in Paris.
37:11It's a lot bigger than I was expecting.
37:13It must have towered over the crowd.
37:15It's amazing being this close to what is definitely
37:18the most infamous instrument of death in history.
37:22I wonder if it's still sharp.
37:24This killing machine was first used in 1792.
37:28It was revolutionary execution technology.
37:31But despite its terrifying reputation for bloodshed,
37:34it was also an example of equality in human rights.
37:37This is a surprisingly humane form of capital punishment.
37:43For centuries, executioner had a class divide.
37:46Ordinary prisoners were slowly hanged, broken on the wheel
37:49or burnt at the stake.
37:51But the aristocracy were more simply decapitated by sword.
37:56Armourer Damien Mitchell is showing why this method
37:59was just too inefficient for mass slaughter.
38:02It's pretty heavy, isn't it?
38:03I mean, it's weighted at the end, so when you get the swing,
38:05it cuts nicely through the air.
38:07The drawbacks of killing with a sword is it's not very efficient.
38:09You would have to sharpen it afterwards every time
38:11and if the cut was not exact, it could be a very painful death.
38:14The movement of the person kneeling down
38:16can't guarantee a clean kill every time.
38:18Even the most skilled swordsmen would occasionally mess up.
38:21One small twist either way and you could take a nose off or an ear
38:24and then they would have to be finished off as they were lying there screaming,
38:27which is not a very pleasant way of going.
38:29Right, see how it works? Yeah. OK.
38:31Well, it's not a human head.
38:33This is a piece of lamb that we got from the butchers today
38:36just to give you the indication of how difficult it is
38:38and why they move from the sword onto the guillotine.
38:41So I'm going to go for about there, I think.
38:43So remind me, it's up. Up.
38:45It's the twist. Build momentum.
38:47Very similar to a golf swing, if you start thinking like that.
38:50A golf up is a good walk ruined.
38:52I've never played in my life, but I'll try it.
38:57Ooh!
38:58You can really feel that in your shoulders.
39:00Absolutely. Let me take that off you.
39:02Wow.
39:03Now, you can see we've got quite a clean cut there,
39:06cut all the way through the bone.
39:08You can feel that as you pass through.
39:10It sends a jolt right through your body. Yeah.
39:12It's amazing, the concentration.
39:14I was trying to get that sweet spot and it's an incredible focus, isn't it?
39:18Absolutely, but imagine there's 1,000 people
39:20trying to watch you as you do this.
39:22You're normally masked, there's a lot of pomp and ceremony attached,
39:25so the pressure would have been on.
39:27It's a windy day. Absolutely.
39:29There was just too much potential for making gory mistakes.
39:32You can see why the guillotine, a far more efficient way of doing it.
39:36This is the mechanisation of that process, isn't it?
39:39Absolutely, and you'd have a master executioner with six assistants
39:43and it is like a production line.
39:45So you'd be strapped to the bascule, which is like a wheelbarrow,
39:48they would be wheeled in, your neck would be placed
39:51and then you'd drop this, the lunette,
39:53which means half-moon, onto the neck.
39:55You can see why. And locked in place.
39:57And the blade, like when you cut a loaf of bread at home,
40:00nice and angled so it would cut all the way through
40:02so that all the pressure is at one point instead of flat when it comes down.
40:05So you're talking about 35 kilos falling seven feet
40:08and that's a serious amount of force, so it would cut straight through the neck.
40:11We can put something inside it and see how efficient it can be.
40:14Nicely. Set it all the way in.
40:16OK, ready? Yeah.
40:19Whoa!
40:21Wow, that is unbelievable. You get a sense of the force
40:24because of the way the meat just fires into the basket. It's shocking.
40:27Cut clean through and this hasn't been used for the best part of 150 years.
40:31You can see here how it's just cut straight through.
40:34That is just astonishing, isn't it? Wow.
40:37So actually this is an enlightened bit of kit.
40:39It's science, finding more efficient ways of killing people.
40:42Absolutely. It was an instrument of equality
40:44and it didn't matter who you were, king, pauper, peasant, soldier,
40:47this is how your life was ended.
40:51Super-efficient the guillotine may have been,
40:53but this created another problem, the scale of the bloodshed.
40:57As the revolution grew ever more radical,
41:00eventually it was decided that only the blood of King Louis XVI himself
41:04could wash away the remnants of the absolutist state.
41:09Only with the king dead could France be democratic and free,
41:13and so on 21st January 1793,
41:17Louis was brought here to what is now the Place de la Concorde.
41:20In front of his cart marched drummers
41:22to drown out the sound of any loyal shouts in the crowd.
41:25Thousands of people gathered here, a guillotine towering above them.
41:29Once on it, Louis made a brave speech pardoning his executioners,
41:34and seconds later his head was severed from his body.
41:38There was a hushed silence, then people surged forward
41:41with their handkerchiefs trying to dip it in the blood of the king,
41:44a grisly souvenir of what was a historic day.
41:48But the king's death wasn't enough.
41:52Following his execution, the terror began.
41:55Thousands were executed as rival political factions fought for supremacy,
42:00and with that came unprecedented amounts of gruesome filth.
42:04The most famous executioner was Charles-Henri Saint-Saëns.
42:08On a good day, he could execute up to one person a minute.
42:12He said,
42:13I can chop off your head in the twinkling of an eye
42:16and you'll only feel a slight freshness around the neck.
42:19As the head was severed, the body jerked back, muscles twitching,
42:23and supposedly the blood in the head would keep the victim's brain alive
42:27for three to five seconds.
42:29This was a gruesome but compelling spectacle.
42:33The crowd packed into this square, baying for blood.
42:36The victims were led onto the guillotine,
42:38and then everyone listened out for the terrifying sound,
42:41the gasp and the thud as the blade cut into the victim's neck,
42:45and the crash as their head fell into the basket.
42:48But all these killings, 300 in one weekend, for example,
42:52were giving Paris a new problem.
42:54That was a lot of bodies.
43:01It wasn't just the loathed aristocracy that were being massacred,
43:05but anyone seen as unrevolutionary, calling each other madame or monsieur
43:10or citizen.
43:12Here in Paris, 2,794 people were killed.
43:17The youngest was 13, the oldest was 93.
43:24Piles of decapitated bodies and severed heads
43:28made for an unbearably grisly city.
43:31The streets were filled with the stench of rotting bodies
43:35and pools of fermented blood that became rancid in the heat.
43:40You could always tell an executioner in revolutionary Paris.
43:43He had blood to his elbows, there was so much of it about.
43:46They tried digging trenches and pits, but soon those overflowed.
43:49Each human, when decapitated, produces about three litres of blood,
43:54so this whole area would have been covered in pools of stagnant blood
43:59with human tissue in and flies buzzing around.
44:05With Paris at its most pestilent and grim,
44:08some way had to be found to deal with the piles of bloody bodies.
44:15The Chapelle Expiatoire is built on the site
44:18of one of the largest mass burial pits.
44:21During the terror, thousands of bodies were brought here,
44:25stripped of their clothing and rotting.
44:28One man who has experience of mass graves full of putrefying corpses
44:32is forensic pathologist Dr Dick Sheppard.
44:36There were two huge pits at this site that they were dug,
44:40about three metres deep.
44:42Into those pits, the bodies were tipped.
44:45Is this also where the king and queen were brought?
44:47Yeah, they were buried in exactly the same place.
44:50So Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, one in January, one in October,
44:53were dumped here in exactly the same way.
44:55So different to the way their ancestors would have been buried.
44:58I mean, just thrown into a grave, all the commoners and...
45:01Absolutely. I mean, it's complete degradation.
45:04Aimed at these people.
45:06I just can't imagine a more disgusting sight,
45:09and, of course, the smell as well would have been mind-blowing.
45:12To look into this pit 200 or so years ago
45:15would have been just utterly, utterly awful.
45:18In it would have been bodies in all stages of decomposition.
45:21They'd probably been fluid at the bottom,
45:23so they'd have been floating around a bit
45:25in the fluids coming from the bodies.
45:27In your career, you've seen burial pits
45:29with people that have been in mass killings.
45:31Can you give me any sense of what that looks and smells like?
45:34The smell is just horrendous.
45:37We all know what a piece of off-meat smells like in the fridge.
45:41Just imagine that with thousands and thousands of rotting bodies.
45:45It is just a disgusting stench.
45:47How long does it take for someone to decompose?
45:49What are the stages of that?
45:51It's a totally temperature-dependent process.
45:55The warmer the temperature, the faster decomposition will take place.
45:58The process begins usually with green discolouration of the abdomen.
46:02Then you get this change in the skin
46:04as the bacteria from the body spread throughout the blood vessels
46:08and produce quite a pretty discolouration on the skin called marbling,
46:12because it's like the veins of colour.
46:15You get through a good marble.
46:17And then the body will begin to bloat.
46:20Then you'll get the distention of the abdomen, the genitalia.
46:24There'll be leakage of the fluids from all of the orifices,
46:27any areas of damage.
46:29And then after that sort of rather wet decomposition phase,
46:33the process then will be hastened by maggots.
46:36This pit was more unpleasant than most
46:38because they all had their heads chopped off as well.
46:40Exactly. I mean, their heads would have been separate.
46:42It may have had a peculiar effect that the heads would have been
46:45better preserved than the rest of the bodies,
46:47so the heads would perhaps have remained more recognisable for longer.
46:53More than a decade after the revolution ended,
46:56the skeletal remains were finally laid to rest.
47:01With the cemeteries already overflowing,
47:03the authorities had found a burial place for centuries of Paris's dead.
47:09These labyrinthine catacombs were fashioned as a grisly mausoleum.
47:13As you enter, the sign reads,
47:15stop, this is the empire of death.
47:21I'm 20 or 30 metres below the streets of Paris
47:24and I've come to see the solution to that overcrowding in the cemeteries,
47:28and that is finding an old limestone quarry here
47:30and sticking the remains of countless bodies in here.
47:35It's absolutely extraordinary. I've never seen anything like it.
47:39It's macabre. Look how they're all ghoulishly laid out,
47:43a mixture of sort of decoration and uniformity.
47:47It's extraordinary.
47:50And look down there. It stretches for half a mile underground.
47:56They have tried to estimate how many bodies are in here
47:59and they think it's something like six million.
48:03You can see how high. This is two metres high, this bank here,
48:08and it stretches back... I can't even see the back wall.
48:12I mean, 30 or 40 metres, I'd say, at least.
48:16It's just extraordinary.
48:20Somewhere in this section here are also the remains
48:23of the thousands of people who were killed on the guillotine.
48:27They were dug up out of that burial pit.
48:30It's amazing to think they're in here as well.
48:33And while some order was being imposed on this necropolis underground,
48:37one man up there was trying to do the same on the streets of Paris.
48:42He was a courageous, handsome, successful general
48:47who had been winning battles right across Europe.
48:50After a revolutionary decade, Napoleon turned his attention
48:54to the still-turbulent city with another adversary in mind.
48:58He was determined to wage war on filth.
49:02Famous for spending hours luxuriating in lovely hot baths,
49:06Napoleon had himself crowned Emperor of the French in 1812.
49:10He had an obsession with clean, fresh water,
49:13so his accession marked a new era for Paris in terms of health and hygiene.
49:18Freshwater fountains and canals sprang up all over the city.
49:27He commissioned 56 of these ornamental fountains,
49:31had five new bridges built,
49:34eight covered markets to sell food and flowers,
49:37and five new slaughterhouses to feed the city.
49:40His dream was to turn Paris into the most beautiful city in the world,
49:44a contemporary version of imperial Rome.
49:47And to do that, he drove this magnificent boulevard
49:50through the middle of the city, the Champs-Elysees,
49:53and at the end he erected that arch to his military victories,
49:56the Arc de Triomphe.
50:00For me, Napoleon shouldn't just be heralded as a military genius
50:03and architectural visionary.
50:05He should also be remembered for declaring war on Paris' invisible enemy.
50:13One of the worst killers in France was smallpox.
50:19Frédéric Tangy, at the Institut Pasteur, specialises in vaccination,
50:24the weapon Napoleon used to fight this virulent disease.
50:27So, in honour of Napoleon's breakthrough with smallpox,
50:30I decided to get some make-up put on, some prosthetics.
50:33How good do you think that is? Looks like smallpox?
50:36Yeah, it looks like smallpox, but the pustules are too scarce.
50:40You don't have enough.
50:42There would have been more than this.
50:44Yes, this is a true image of smallpox, and your whole body should be covered.
50:48Wow!
50:50This is awful.
50:52This is awful, this is probably worse.
50:54This is awful.
50:56This is awful, this is probably one of the most,
50:59the worst disease that humanity ever experienced.
51:03That's incredible.
51:05And is that terribly painful as well?
51:07Yes, very painful, because each one, you will have a scar.
51:11And it's very, you scratch the scar, you bleed, you re-scratch, etc.
51:16Once you are infected like that, the virus goes into your blood,
51:21then invades your lung, your spleen, your stomach, everywhere, OK?
51:26And when you have that inside the body, you die in a matter of days.
51:32With tens of thousands dying of smallpox in France each year,
51:36Napoleon took a radical approach.
51:38In 1809, he pioneered the first ever state-funded immunisation programme.
51:44He thought of himself as a very modern man, I suppose.
51:46Yes, he decided to protect his troops and to protect the country,
51:50and he decided to have a country where everybody has the same right,
51:55because it was just after the French Revolution,
51:58so he wanted people making what he thought was good for them.
52:02So everybody must be vaccinated, everybody must be clean,
52:06everybody must go to school.
52:07He invented the mass vaccination campaigns, in fact.
52:10Incredible.
52:11Vaccination is a way of protecting the whole society, rather than yourself.
52:16So you protect yourself, but you protect the others.
52:18So where does the idea of vaccinating come from?
52:20The observation that already infected people are protected from the next epidemic.
52:25So the first idea was to take something from those pistols
52:29and to give that to other people.
52:31You'd be a brave person if you...
52:33Yeah, which is disgusting, I agree.
52:35So you'd get one of these.
52:37You take that, then you take a little bit...
52:39Scoop a bit of pus out of there.
52:41Yes.
52:42And you scratch it on another guy.
52:44Disgusting, isn't it?
52:46And you infect him with your disease.
52:50Although this arm-to-arm inoculation looks rudimentary and risky,
52:54it forms the basis of how vaccinations work today.
52:57In fact, the word vaccination came from this period
53:00when cowpox was used instead of human pustules,
53:04and vacca is the Latin for cow.
53:09Napoleon had started to put Paris on the road to modernity,
53:12with improvements to public health creating some order out of the chaos.
53:16But there was still a long way to go.
53:20It wasn't until 1848 when Napoleon's nephew,
53:23Louis-Napoleon III, came to power
53:26that the Parisians got a leader determined to finish the job.
53:33After more decades of conflict, revolutions and turmoil,
53:36Paris was still desperate for the ultimate clean-up.
53:40To finally wrench it away from centuries of filth, pestilence and squalor
53:44and drag it into the modern, civilised world.
53:48This was to be an absolutely no-nonsense approach.
53:51There would be no more pissing around.
53:53In 1850, they passed a law which forbade the urinating on the street,
53:58and they established 500 of these, ironically nicknamed Vespasiens,
54:02after the Roman emperor Vespasian,
54:05who put jugs of drinking water on the street for citizens
54:08and fined heavily anyone found jovially pissing in them.
54:14Not only were Parisians' toilet habits freshening up the city above ground,
54:18down below, the removal of the waste was being tidied up considerably.
54:24Next on the agenda was sewage.
54:26In 1850, Louis-Napoleon ordered the small, vaulted sewers
54:30that his uncle built to be made 20 times larger, cleaner and more efficient.
54:35Over 600km of tunnels were built,
54:38funnelling all the waste water away from the city centre
54:42and bringing in clean, running water into people's homes.
54:45It was an incredible feat of engineering
54:47and is still lauded as one of the most extensive urban sewer systems in the world.
54:52Not only were these sewers radically cleaning up Paris in the 19th century,
54:56but they also instilled civic pride.
54:59Visitors flocked to see this sewage spectacular.
55:03Even the Tsar of Russia.
55:06Paris was well on its way to becoming a model modern city.
55:14It wasn't just underground that Paris was being cleaned up.
55:17Above, the streets were getting a radical, fresh new look.
55:21This is now a pretty typical modern road junction,
55:23but back then this was highly innovative.
55:25Wide, open streets, nice and airy,
55:28and on the ground, this tarmac, a Scottish invention
55:31but used here in Paris for the first time.
55:33This meant the roads were a lot cleaner
55:35because all the manure couldn't get stuck between the cobbles.
55:37It also meant that people couldn't prise the cobbles up
55:40and throw them at each other during bouts of revolutionary fervour.
55:43Queen Victoria visited Paris in 1855
55:46and she commented on its beautiful roads.
55:51Paris continued to forge ahead as a pioneering city.
55:54Its pièce de résistance was taking urban planning to inspiring new heights.
56:01In 1850, Napoleon III and his famous chief architect Baron Haussmann
56:06embarked on the strategic beautification of Paris.
56:10Haussmann dreamt of a city with grand boulevard and parks and buildings
56:14so that the whole thing would look like a palace.
56:19Haussmann acted with remarkable audacity and ambition.
56:23He bulldozed three quarters of Paris,
56:26ripping out its guts, flattening the city
56:29and calling himself the world's first demolition artist.
56:34He destroyed 20,000 houses and built 40,000 more.
56:38He planted 100,000 trees
56:41and lined long pavements with brand-new gas lamps.
56:47And this is the effect of that Haussmannisation,
56:50the most dramatic reordering of any city in Europe.
56:54Look at these boulevards stretching off in all different directions.
56:58This one here runs five kilometres without a single kink.
57:03Parisians had the ordered, clean city that they wanted.
57:07But there was an irony here.
57:09This was about strategy as much as beautification.
57:12Poor people in the way of these streets were moved out to the suburbs.
57:16They're wide enough to make sure that any revolutionary barricade
57:19wouldn't really be effective.
57:21Troops can be moved quickly from one area of town to the next.
57:24And the field of fire here is perfect.
57:27Soldiers can shoot down revolutionary mobs in no time at all.
57:32Haussmann had sanitised Paris.
57:34He had drained the swamp from which revolutionary fervour
57:38had been emanating for generations.
57:45Paris had finally been dragged out of the dark ages of its filthy past.
57:51Centuries of chaotic, squalid living,
57:54filled with disease, pollution, blood and death, had been cleansed.
57:59Now in its place, a pioneering modern city had emerged, resplendent.
58:07MUSIC
58:19The transformation of Paris was a triumphant achievement.
58:22These slum-like medieval streets, with their squalor and filth,
58:25their chaos and revolution,
58:27had given birth to the world's first truly modern city,
58:30one which many still think is the most beautiful on the planet.
58:34It was an inspiration for 19th-century London and New York,
58:38and it became the blueprint for the modern metropolis.
58:46And there's more filthy cities at the same time next Tuesday.
58:50Next this evening, there's plenty more dirt to be dished in EastEnders.
59:04MUSIC