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The curious history of how the Parisian 'pissoir' urinals shaped the City of Love
The occasionally seedy yet oddly fascinating history of the pissoir is closely intertwined with the capital’s role as a bastion of freedom and sexuality
Romantic walks along the Seine; chocolat chaud sipped on café terrasses; the smell of freshly baked croissants. These are the experiences conjured to mind when we picture Paris.
But for decades the defining symbol of the City of Love was the image (and stench) of the pissoir. The city that brought us some of the century’s most sophisticated art, philosophy and cuisine also gave the world the vespasienne.
These days the pissoirs - open-air street urinals for men - might be gone, but they’re certainly not forgotten. This month saw Marc Martin’s seminal exhibition Les Tasses (slang for urinals) take over the gallery space at Point Éphémère after its inaugural appearance at the Schwules Museum in Berlin. It runs until December 5 before moving to Leslie-Lohman Museum, New York.
The first project to look at both the history and cultural significance of the pissoir, the show and Martin’s accompanying book of the same name were a product of the artist’s desire to reclaim the pissoir’s reputation and rewrite its history from one of shame to pride.
It turns out there’s more to this unlikely icon of French design - some of them impressively ornate - than you might think. The occasionally seedy yet oddly fascinating history of the pissoir is closely intertwined with the capital’s role as a bastion of freedom, sexuality and artistic expression.
The first street toilets were introduced to Paris in spring 1830, but their time was short lived as many were dismantled and turned into barricades later that summer during the July Revolution; a dirty job, one imagines. It was not until Claude-Philibert Berthelot, comte de Rambuteau, began an ambitious plan to clean up the city in 1841 that they made a comeback. It is key to note that until this point, Parisians would be more than happy to relieve themselves in the street wherever they pleased.
By 1843 Paris, a city welcoming a fresh wave of immigration as France opened its first train lines, was home to 468 vespasiennes, as they came to be known, in dubious honour of the Roman Emperor Vespasian, who famously imposed a urine tax on public toilets in Rome around 70 AD.
These new cast-iron recepticles replete with in-built plumbing were a storming success, their design becoming ever more elaborate. After all, they allowed for much more creative expression than the chamber pots of the time. From single-box pissoirs dubbed “colonnes Rambuteau” to six-compartment kiosk-style pissotières, they transformed public conveniences. Architectural merit, not just privacy, became chief among architects’ concerns. Quite a journey from Rambuteau’s original goal to save the city’s trees from death by pee.
The heyday of the street toilet, however, was during the Belle Époque, when Paris had some 1,500 vespasiennes. It was around this time that Henri Cartier-Bresson took the famous photograph of Charles Henri Ford zipping up his flies on a Parisian boulevard – a daring and sexually charged image for the time. The humble pissoir had become more than just a sanitation saviour. They were intimate billboards for political campaigns, plastered with commercial advertising and an increasingly quintessential feature of the Parisian streetscape. It’s claimed they were even used as meeting places for the Resistance during Nazi occupation in the Second World War.
Their reign was not to last. The nail in the urinal’s coffin came in 1960 as they began to be removed, starting in the city’s most desirable quartiers – but by then the pissoir was inexorably part of Parisian culture. They were immortalised in not just Claude Maillard’s 1967 book Les Précieux Edicules: Les Vespasiennes de Paris (a riff on the title of Molière’s Les Précieuses Ridicules) but in countless travel guides and the city’s global image (and scent).
Yet for many years part of the pissoirs’ history was overlooked. Their role hinted at in Cartier-Bresson’s photograph – as spaces of emancipation for the gay community – was excluded from the narrative. It’s a topic that Martin’s work explores thoroughly for the first time. They offered a rare place where men from all walks of life came together, both businessmen and blue-collar workers, and where hook-ups and casual sex could go unseen in a time of widespread oppression.
Today, only one vespasienne is left in Paris - at 75 Boulevard Arago, a remnant of the city’s past. It still inspires some to visit – and others to pen poetry in Google reviews (four stars). Efforts to install modern and eco-friendly “uritrottoirs” have done more to annoy Parisians than encourage them to use them. Many were vandalised by activists highlighting the continued male dominance of public spaces and widespread gender discrimination - it is fair to say the history of the pissoir excludes half of the Parisian populace; the idea of introducing options for women was considered but dismissed.
For now, in the pissoirs’ place all that remain are some four hundred or so drab sanisettes cubicles. They might be handy for the students who booze by the Canal Saint-Martin on summer evenings, but they play no more complex role in the city’s culture.
The streets might (mostly) smell sweeter, but the uniquely Parisian history of the pissoirs is all but washed away down the drain.
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