specialist in nineteenth and twentieth-century France. He has authored books on primary schooling and nationalism in Alsace-Lorraine, the Michelin tire company, nudism in modern France, and the history of rubber.
Harp applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Riviera, Exposed: An Ecohistory of Postwar Tourism and North African Labor and reported the following:
On page 99, I give background on the history of the sewage system in Nice. In the 1930s, Nice pioneered an early “separate” sewer system, separating run-off rain water from human sewage. Long an elite destination, Nice was on the cutting edge. Yet that same system proved woefully inadequate after World War II, when there were far more tourists, and they consumed up to 100 times more water, most of it ending up in a sewer system characterized by regular overflows into the sea. Imagine how floating human waste could hurt tourism!Learn more about The Riviera, Exposed at the Cornell University Press website.
Page 99 includes a fascinating detail. Since most of Nice is on a narrow plain along the sea, sewer lines were narrow with very little pitch. To clean lines too small for humans to enter, sanitation workers used sewer dogs, chiens-égoutiers. Workers attached a cable to the dog’s harness, and the dog ran down the pipe to the next manhole. Workers then used the cable to knock waste off the inside of the pipe. I first learned about the practice from newspaper articles bemoaning the fact that foreign tourists had complained, leading to its abandonment. Sanitation workers maintained that they had treated the dogs well.
Here is a clear case of the wonders of working in the era of the internet. From newspaper accounts, I didn’t understand how dogs helped to clean sewers or even what a “sewer dog” might be. So I googled chiens-égoutiers. I ultimately found a clip from channel TF1 on the site maintained by the French Institut nationale de l’audiovisuelle (which gets a copy of everything airing on French TV, just as one copy of every book published in France ends up in the Bibliothèque nationale de France). Come to find out, sewer dogs were still hard at work in the city of Rennes in 1982. Workers in Rennes assured viewers that the dogs were cleaned, well-fed, and received caresses. Without that news segment, I don’t think I could have figured out how dogs cleaned sewers.
In the end, page 99 represents the spirit of the book, in exposing some of the grit that underlay the glamour of the French Riviera. But page 99 doesn’t fully reveal just how thoroughly mass tourism transformed the environment of the Riviera. Nor does it show how much that transformation depended on North African migrant laborers who did much of the work—often while living without access to potable water or WCs in squats and shantytowns.
--Marshal Zeringue
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