Many intellectuals speak of France as if it were the model of civilization.
Yet the history of cleaning up the Seine reveals a very different reality, one sustained by colonial exploitation, the opium trade, harsh taxation, and nuclear testing.
Through Masayuki Takayama’s essay, this piece exposes the true nature of France that blind admiration for the West can never grasp.

2019-04-06
Kenzaburō Ōe and a certain Mr. Kokubun seem to believe that Japan is an inferior country compared with France and others.
But what kind of country is France in reality?

This is a chapter I published on September 19, 2018, under the title: “He appointed Georges-Eugène Haussmann, tore down the slums that occupied one-third of Paris, and carried out urban reform by laying out twelve grand avenues centering on the Arc de Triomphe.”
As I have already written, I subscribe every week to Shukan Shincho in order to read the serialized columns of Masayuki Takayama and Yoshiko Sakurai.
Kenzaburō Ōe and a certain Mr. Kokubun seem to believe that Japan is an inferior country compared with France and others.
But what kind of country is France in reality?
Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world, brilliantly depicts the reality that people intoxicated with the West such as those above can never understand.
What follows is from “Henken Jizai,” the celebrated closing column in the issue of Shukan Shincho released today.

Going Down the Seine

The filth of the Seine flowing through Paris has a long history.
At the time when Saigyō, while performing ablutions, composed the verse, “Would that I might die beneath the blossoms in spring,” the people living along this river had absolutely no concept of toilets or washing their hands.
They ate with their hands and threw excrement into the Seine together with kitchen waste.
As a result, the current stagnated and a foul stench covered the area.
On top of that, slaughterhouses stood in rows on the opposite bank from Île de la Cité, and herds of pigs and cattle added another layer of stench and clamor.
Prince Philip, son of Louis VI, was riding his horse along the riverside road when he collided with a sow that had escaped from a slaughterhouse.
The prince fell from his horse, plunged face-first into the muddy filth, and suffocated to death.
Even though the heir of the Capetian dynasty had died because of the mire, the citizens of Paris showed no remorse.
They did not abandon the custom of throwing excrement into the river and urinating on the walls of nearby houses.
As a result, buildings rotted at the base, tilted, and collapsed like a department store in Seoul.
Eight hundred years later, at last, a politician appeared who thought the city should be cleaned up.
It was Napoleon III, the nephew of Napoleon.
He appointed Georges-Eugène Haussmann, tore down the slums that occupied one-third of Paris, and carried out urban reform by laying out twelve grand avenues centering on the Arc de Triomphe.
He also remodeled the underground, extended sewers for 600 kilometers, required citizens to install toilets, and transformed Paris into a city free of the stench of human waste.
Even now, when one enters an old shop along the Seine, every toilet is in the basement.
That stems from the idea that, even if ordered by the government, sacrificing precious first-floor space would be unthinkable.
Napoleon III decided to finance this urban renewal not only through the issuance of government bonds, but also, following Britain’s example, through the opium trade.
As luck would have it, a French missionary was killed in Indochina.
Using that as a pretext, French forces attacked and seized French Indochina as a colony.
An opium corporation was established in every town, and opium was allotted to the inhabitants and sold to them.
“The intention was ultimately to addict all Vietnamese to opium and make a profit,” journalist André Viollis wrote in Indochina SOS.
With the profits from opium trafficking, they were able to cover about half the cost of the sewer construction.
So, did the Seine become clean?
In fact, it did not.
Human waste was indeed sent into the sewers, but beyond that it was discharged straight into the Seine.
To make the Seine still cleaner, the French government imposed not only head taxes and salt taxes on the residents of French Indochina, but even taxes on marriages and funerals.
The sewer system was doubled in length.
During the last war, the Japanese military advanced in and put a stop to such rapacious taxation, but de Gaulle appealed to Roosevelt, saying, “Please return French Indochina to us for the revival of glorious France,” and exploitation of Indochina resumed immediately after the war.
However, de Gaulle did not direct that revenue toward cleaning the Seine.
He chose nuclear testing first for the revival of French glory.
Thus, the profits from the colonies were poured into nuclear research, and from 1960 onward, four atmospheric nuclear tests were conducted in the Algerian desert.
But Africa is close to Europe.
Because public scrutiny there was troublesome, France carried out 194 nuclear tests in the South Pacific.
In 1997, Chirac said that this had made France a great power.
Then France turned to the unfinished work of cleaning the Seine, but by that time the colonies such as French Indochina, its former sources of revenue, had long since become independent.
France had returned once again to being a poor household.
Today, 300,000 sewer pipes run through Paris, and although 90 percent of the wastewater is treated at treatment plants, the remaining 30,000 pipes discharge untreated filth directly into the Seine.
Paris is to host the Olympic Games after Tokyo.
Various races, including the triathlon, are scheduled to be held in the Seine, but there is still no prospect of full purification.
At the Asian Games, sailing events were held in Jakarta Bay, which was swarming with E. coli, and the Japanese athletes suffered from diarrhea.
At the French Olympics, French athletes raised amid such filth seem to have the advantage.
Would this not amount to a kind of reverse doping?