Paris is heralded as the most glamorous,
beautiful and sophisticated cultural centre of Europe -
adorned by magnificent palaces, gardens and boulevards.
But it wasn't always like this.
It's hard to believe now, but this beautiful city used to stink.
The streets of 18th-century Paris were narrow, crowded
and fetid - they were those of medieval city, not a modern capital.
This was the most disgusting city imaginable.
Just 200 years ago, Paris was famously one of the foulest and smelliest cities in Europe.
Wading through human and animal filth to slave in toxic industries,
ordinary Parisians suffered grotesque poverty, sickness and starvation.
But after generations of injustice, it wasn't just the conditions that were revolting.
The people of Paris had had enough.
Filth, the result of poverty and injustice, was becoming political.
Paris was a pressure cooker, and it was about to explode.
Paris was on the brink of an epic transformation.
I'm going to sniff out the rotten story of how filth and squalor drove Parisians into revolt,
experience the most toxic and stinking of Paris's gruelling
industries, recreate the foul smell that choked the streets,
come face to face with the ultimate killing machine...
Yikes!
All to understand how ordinary Parisians
fought to clean up their ancient cesspit from the bottom up.
In less than 100 years, Paris would be transformed from a filthy, fetid place into a model city,
the blueprint for every modern metropolis.
But it wouldn't be an easy path - it would be bloody, violent and dirty.
A trip down the River Seine in the 18th century would have looked and smelt very different.
Paris's main source of drinking water was little more than an open sewer,
with up to 300 tonnes of human excrement dumped in it daily.
With no notion of public hygiene or proper sanitation,
there was just too much waste for the city to cope with.
As King Louis XVI came to the throne in 1774, the city
had been growing for centuries, and now it was fit to burst.
Over half a million people were crammed into an area just seven by four kilometres.
And the thriving industries continued
to lure tens of thousands more to the capital to work as dyers, launderers, hatters and gunsmiths,
all spewing their toxic waste into the Seine, and foul odours into the air.
For Parisians, the filth, misery and stench was intolerable.
This was the smelliest part of 18th-century Paris -
there's a road still there called the Rue Mouffetard,
which at the time meant putrid stench.
The reason for that smell was the River Bievre,
which came out through here and was noxious - notoriously so.
And it's now two metres below my feet, covered up by the street.
Back then it was the centre for the most toxic, stinking and downright
disgusting industry in Paris, the gruesome process of turning animal hides into leather - tanning.
This area was home to dozens of tanneries up and down here,
who used to pour their filthy waste straight out into the river.
I mean, the air was so toxic that it used to give people ulcerated throats.
To give a sense of the foul, polluted stink that was aggravating the people of Paris,
I've joined Andrew Parr, and we're using the traditional filthy ingredients to make leather.
The most caustic stage is soaking the fatty hides in alkaline lime for three weeks.
There's a rotting, dead animal smell!
The smell, this is hydrated lime, water and lime mixed together.
They've worked on the hide, they've been working on the hair and the flesh, and you're getting
ammonia coming off, so that's what you can smell.
It wasn't just the lime that was dangerously contaminating the air and the water.
In the late 18th century, with over 30 tanneries crammed along
the River Bievre, each stage was adding layers of fetid pollution.
Drag it up over the beam, so it's then ready for the de-hairing process.
Ho-ho, look at that! So it's got three blades, and you work it so the blade is pointing
back towards you, so you're pulling the hair out, rather than pushing it out, just work it away like that.
With so many tanneries, the heaps of loose hair piling up would have been foul.
It's a funny process though, isn't it? This used to be a
living animal and now you're preparing it to be a pair of shoes.
To add to the matted hair floating in the river, the grisly flesh is cut from the other side.
A tanner's lot was certainly back-breaking, messy and vile.
Just cut away all that nice fleshy part there, all that fat and sinew.
I like the way it all splashes up in your face, really pleasant!
You're getting dissolved fat, really, because the lime has started to dissolve it,
so it's really squidgy. Quite unpleasant.
So basically, you spend all day creating piles of fat, like that.
Stinking fat dumped into the water supply is hazardous, but there was an even more
disgusting, evil ingredient, as the Parisian tanners relied on a foul pollutant to do their dirty work.
Right, so you get the dog poo and put it in there.
Baiting is a key part of the tanning process.
The tanners used a mixture of dog and bird dung in hot water to release bacteria.
What is it about dog poo that is so disgusting?
The hide was immersed in this revolting concoction to soften it.
There was no shortage of dog poo in Paris, as there were thousands
of stray dogs leaving their muck all over the place.
Nothing like a bit of fresh bait.
Oh, every time you do that, there's this wave...!
This was then mixed with human urine, collected from piss pots left on street corners.
Because it's full of bacteria, of course the bacteria multiplies, so it gets worse as the day goes on.
If you keep it for several days, especially if it's warm in the summer, the smell gets worse.
Do it by hand, it's going to... No way.
The dog poo, hair, fat and acid all got chucked into the Bievre,
that flowed directly into the River Seine.
So it's a pretty filthy industry. I mean, if you're living downstream
of a tannery, your life expectancy wouldn't be that good...
If you were drinking this water, it wouldn't be good at all - I think that's why they drank wine.
The miserable working conditions of industrial Paris were breeding
not just foul pollutants, but the stench of injustice and discontent.
Paris was an awful place to live, where
many people worked in disgusting conditions, doing back-breaking work in tanneries like this one.
But out of this, exquisite luxury goods were produced, like these gloves.
It was also a very unequal society.
These gloves would have cost ten times what a family of four would have been able to spend in a week -
only the super rich could afford them.
This blatant injustice riled the people of Paris.
In the late 18th century, French society was clearly divided into the haves and the have-nots.
The privileged nobility and clergy accounted for just 2% of the population.
The other 98% were marginalised, and the majority were desperately poor.
These Parisians were deeply unhappy with their lot.
They slaved to make Paris tick, but saw few of the benefits.
Around this city of 600,000 people was a three-metre-high wall, designed to regulate the flow of
people and goods in and out of the city.
But for the people of Paris, it was both a jailer and a tax man,
because there were 60 of these toll houses here, and all goods coming into the city were heavily taxed.
The people of Paris felt they were being squeezed, physically and economically.
A very beautiful building - typical 18th-century government,
if they're going to take money off you, they do it in pleasant, neo-classical surroundings.
So in here were the crowded streets of Paris, and out there was the sweet-smelling countryside.
And the people in here particularly resented paying taxes toa king
they found increasingly irrelevant and inefficient.
Of course they had no say in how those taxes were spent, because it was an absolute system.
And one project that particularly angered them was when the king, in the 18th century,
built what was effectively a ring road, just out there,
which meant he didn't even have to travel through his own capital city.
Built by his father, this solution to the stench and crush
of insalubrious Paris was readily embraced by the young Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette.
Trouble was, abandoning their subjects to rot in their own filth just made matters worse.
And unlike England's king, who was based in London itself, Louis XVI chose to exercise his absolute rule
from an isolated and privileged retreat, the Palace of Versailles.
This really was the home of the filthy rich,
a palace of perfume and powder, of pleasure and power.
It covers an area of 67,000 square metres - there are 700 rooms, with 2,000 windows.
Even though it was close to Paris, it was a world away from those crowded, stinking streets.
It was quite literally the most extravagant palace on the planet.
The spectacular hall of mirrors, where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette held court,
is almost as long as a football pitch and required 8,000 candles
a night to light it - impolitic, at a time when the king's subjects could barely afford bread.
The palace was open, light, full of mirrors and glass,
at every level giving the appearance of all that Paris was not.
Surprisingly, given that their lives in many ways couldn't have
been more different from the filthy poor people out there,
the super rich had one thing in common - they were filthy and smelly themselves.
Over 2,000 people lived and worked in the palace,
and with few toilets and hundreds of visitors every day,
it's claimed that people had to relieve themselves almost anywhere.
TRICKLING WATER Horace Walpole wrote that the approach
to Versailles was magnificent, but the squalor inside was unspeakable.
Nowadays we think of Versailles as a byword for exquisite luxury, but back in the 18th century this was
a public building, it was thronged with petitioners hoping to get a favour out of the king or the
queen, which meant that in between these exquisite rooms, the corridors
acted like public lavatories, they were cesspits.
There was filth everywhere and the stink would have been unbelievable.
Another prominent writer of the time documented, "There was the
"smell of butchers roasting pigs, the courtyard and corridors were
"full of urine and stagnant water, and livestock even defecated in the great gallery".
It was so dirty people used to wear dresses
with hems that were brown, so it wouldn't show up the muck.
But of course, the king and queen needed some private space in which they could be clean, and that's why
there's a secret door right over there.
Right, so this is the private side of Versailles, the bit the public don't see, the bit that
all the courtiers and all the people clamouring for the queen's attention wouldn't see.
I suspect Marie Antoinette would have been far more comfortable in here.
You go from the grandeur out there to the far more simple, far smaller
rooms in here, it's a real human scale.
And the only people allowed back here would have been personal servants,
people helping her with her hair and her skin, her make-up.
She would have been comfortable here and shielded to the mass of people out there.
Wonderful.
Now through here, I think,
yep, this I think is the bathroom, this is where the bathtub used to be.
She was infamous for spending hours at a time in the bath, in fact, she used to have her lunch in the bath.
In such a filthy, dirty age, this was considered strange behaviour.
Marie Antoinette favoured ostentatious powdered wigs,
expensive make-up, and extravagant perfumes to maintain an air of cleanliness.
But these obscene levels of luxury, paid for by taxing the
poor, were provocative, especially as the aristocracy didn't pay tax.
The more the royals tried to escape the filth,
the more they seemed to be rubbing ordinary people's noses in it.
Masking bad smells is one thing, getting rid of their causes quite another,
unless you're one of the privileged few that could get their hands on a cutting-edge piece of technology.
A woman obsessed with cleanliness had to have a "lieu anglais", place of the English.
Possibly having a bit of a dig at the English, or because
this was the latest in conveniences from across the Channel.
It's where we get the word loo from, one of the first toilets in France, where Marie Antoinette would sit
and get rid of the waste in what we now consider a civilised fashion.
And of course, apart from her, no-one in Versailles had these mod cons,
for everyone else at Versailles, they had simple chamber pots.
That meant once they'd finished their business, they throw them out of the windows,
which was tough for the people walking around on the ground floor.
Apparently they used leather umbrellas to keep this rain of filth off their heads.
Just as this crazy invention deflected the stinking mess, Louis and his court shielded themselves
from the realities of the political situation.
Not only were the filthy poor funding the lavish lifestyle
at Versailles, France had also been embroiled in costly wars abroad.
The coffers were empty.
The people were overtaxed and on the verge of destitution.
15 miles away in Paris, it would take more than expensive perfume
to cover up that stench, or the real desire for political change.
Neglected and suffering from grotesque filth and poverty, living
in Paris was described as being sucked into a fetid sewer.
And what put everyone's noses out of joint was the malodorous, relentless stink.
I want to get a sense of what it felt like to be condemned to live like this.
Paris is home to some of the most famous fragrances in the world, like
Chanel and Dior, but I haven't come here to find a sophisticated scent.
Instead I'm going to enlist the help of a man with one of the most
discerning noses in the city, and together we're going to recreate the stench of 18th-century Paris.
I want to brew up the definitive heady blend of Pong de Paris.
I've brought a few of the terrible smells that would have assaulted
the senses to the Givaudan Perfumery,
to inspire Olivier Pescheux.
OK, let's smell. Here's a disgusting picture of an open grave
and bodies decaying without lids on the coffins. Cadavers, yeah.
Not very nice. Bit of an old onion. Wow. Yep, pretty strong. Yeah.
Then of course, some of these, very French - garlic.
Very strong smell.
Merchants from all over the country flocked
to the biggest market in Paris, Les Halles, to sell their goods.
Emile Zola later called it the stomach of Paris.
That's not so fresh.
Without refrigeration, age-old meat, rotting vegetables and rancid cheese
would vie for the nose's attention, with the manure and garbage that festered in the streets.
Fresh this morning.
Where did you find that in Paris?
Some horse manure.
With only nine bath houses and a general suspicion of water,
washing was rare. The worst smell was from the people themselves, escaping from every pore.
Smelly T-shirt that I've been wearing for a few days. Wow. It's yours? Yep, afraid so.
Breath smelling of rotting teeth and sour milk, stale sweat, dirty hair,
bodily secretions. Human urine.
OK, I'm not going to smell it, OK, I trust you, thank you.
In the perfume lab,
we concoct a powerful blend of some pretty evil ingredients,
with a base note of stale urine and a top note of old fish.
An hour later, our bespoke 18th-century stench is ready for a snifter.
So you want to smell the result of Paris? Yes, please.
Will you be marketing this one heavily?
That's going to be difficult, yeah.
Oh, that's so bad! Yeah. It brings tears to the eyes.
You have everything actually. Everything?
Especially this one. From the horse.
It's a little bit like garlic also.
A little bit like garlic, yeah, it's quite...
Fatty, heavy. Quite musky.
It comes in different waves. Sometimes
overwhelming vegetable smell and then suddenly some fish, or some rotting flesh comes at you.
Eurgh.
I would not like to live in that world.
This stuff really stinks, but don't just take my word for it.
I'm going to unleash it onto Parisians today, to see if they can
stomach what their city would have smelt like 200 years ago.
Madame...
Would you like to try some perfume?
Argh!
How about you?
They like it, that's great. It's, er, meant to smell like a disgusting street in 18th-century Paris.
It's weird.
What do you think it smells like? I don't know, but I hate it.
Pas bon. Really? Not good.
OK. Can you try this perfume?
Not good? SHE SPITS
Oh-ho! Excuse me.
Well, the people of Paris have spoken, and they do not like the Pong de Paris.
I can't say I'm entirely surprised, it is
absolutely stinking, but that is as close as most of these people are ever going to come to time travel.
But back in the 18th century, people knew their city stank -
what they were worried about was, was that smell bad for them?
Paris was killing its own.
Around 20,000 people died each year in the capital, one in four newborns
perished and the average life expectancy at birth for a poor labourer was just 23 years.
The shocking death toll was so bad that it created a macabre problem.
It wasnust the waste from the living that made Paris stink so much.
The city was terribly overcrowded and so too, inevitably, were its burial grounds.
And this square is on the site of what in the 18th century was the largest of them all.
It was known as the Cemetery of the Innocents and for eight centuries, Parisians buried their
dead in the ground here, in a completely haphazard fashion, few of them in proper coffins.
Rotting corpses, ravaged by smallpox,
tuberculosis and syphilis started piling up in church graveyards.
Parishioners stayed away from their daily worship as the smell of bodies
was so strong, it make their eyes water and their throats retch.
But that wasnll.
By the late 18th century, this place was filled literally to overflowing - As one local restaurateur, a Mr
Gravelot, found to his cost, when he made a particularly shocking trip to his basement.
In June 1780, the smell emanating from Mr Gravelotellar was revolting.
As he went to investigate, he saw that his wall had collapsed,
and through the wet earth, corpses were spilling out from the adjacent cemetery.
Rotting, putrefying smells like this terrified Parisians.
For centuries, theyelieved that evil
odours themselves, miasmas, were the cause of sickness and death.
But now, some forward-thinking Parisians were questioning this medieval idea.
They wanted to see if there was a scientific link between dirt and disease.
With historian Andrew Hussey, Ietracing the steps of one
pioneering hygienist who wanted to drag Paris out of the dark ages.
Itll a bit gentrified around here now, isnt?
But this used to be a real cesspit, did it?
This was, you know, I think as a 21st century person,
you would have been on your knees with the sheer noxiousness of what went on round here.
I mean this, effectively, was an open latrine, the river was full of sewage
and dead bodies, so this place was absolutely amazingly rank.
So it sounds pretty noxious.
Was it actually bad for peopleealth living round here?
People believed that smells could kill you, but there was no scientific basis for this.
But we havenot yet to the age of hygiene, because thereo
connection between germ theory and disease and mortality.
But in the age of reason, you know, it was a logical question to ask why.
And who starts to ask those questions and what do they start to find out?
The leading figure is a man of science and reason called Jean Noel Halle, and his assistant, who decided
that the best way to understand the connection between smells and disease was to set off in Paris, using the
only scientific equipment they had, which was their noses, and to discover what was really going on.
Armed with nothing but a map and their sense of smell, Halle and his assistant embarked
on a route that penetrated the most notoriously filthy and contaminated areas of Paris.
Their aim was to improve public hygiene by recording which areas smelt worse and why.
First, they descended to the banks of the Seine.
Ittill not the cleanest city in the world, some nasty-looking sludge.
Yeah. But there was a belief that if you touched that, youet gangrene within days.
But I donant to put it to the test. Now wejust come
out of the Pont Neuf and we got the Pont au Change over there.
Now this is described by Halle as a kind of a mud bank thato black, the stench is poisonous.
And thatecause iteing fed by the open sewer of Chatelet, which is just over there.
The mud bank of sewage then meets the detritus
of the abattoirs and the butchers, so yougot a mound of rotting meat.
You can imagine the flies, the maggots, the larva,
and iturrounded, encrusted by a kind of coulis of sewage.
It must have just been relentless, because other cities throughout the world have got rivers
where itidal and they kind of get swept out, whereas the Seine is quite slow-moving, isnt?
Yougot to think of the Seine as a kind of open, weeping sore in the centre of the city.
On their horrible ten kilometre journey around the Seine,
they recorded the levels of human sewage, rotting matter and fetid air, to establish the difference
between merely unpleasant pongs and smells that were actually dangerous.
The area that was most distressing to the
Parisians was the east of Paris, the centre for the polluting industries.
There, the noxious fumes from the rancid tanneries was so acute
that Halle heroically sent his assistant to go on alone.
What happened was that he went down there, right down to the tanneries,
and within half an hour, his tongue had swollen up, his mouth had swollen up, with lesions on his throat,
he was retching, his mouth was ulcerated, he thought he was going to die.
And he came back to Halle and he said, dono down there under any circumstances.
Well, when he recovered, what they worked out was there was the distinction between the stench of
excrement over there in the west and the poisons that could kill you over in the east.
Now this wasnerm theory, this wasnhe beginnings of germ theory, but it was the distinction between
smell, which can be pretty harmless, and poison, which is going to kill you. Thatreat.
So although it was very primitive, this was the first time that anyone
had actually experimented with it, in a kind of scientific way.
I donhink itny exaggeration to say that what happens here is one
of those moments in history where yougot a gear change between the medieval mind and the modern mind,
the medieval city and the modern city.
And Paris is the first modern city in the world, everything we see around us was invented in the 19th century,
as a product of modernity, laying order over disorder.
And Halleourney through the excrement, the smells,
the nasty pongs of Paris, was the beginning of that historical journey.
It wasnust the men of science who had a vision for a modern, cleaner and healthier future,
but also a group of intellectuals, who were offering the emerging educated and literate middle class,
the bourgeoisie, a very persuasive alternative to life in stinking Paris.
I always loved coming to this place, it consciously imitates the Pantheon
in Rome, where the ancient Romans went to celebrate their gods.
But this is a temple not of gods but of men, of people like Voltaire
and Rousseau, the Olympians of the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment was a movement of change, where thinkers used science
and reason to challenge authority, tradition and superstition.
And Voltaire believed that a sanitary, clean, civilised
city was very much part of a new, enlightened society, and he was so
disgusted by the filth of Paris that he began to imagine what a new city would smell and look like.
We rightly blush to see public markets in narrow streets displaying
dirtiness, spreading infection and causing public disorders.
We need to open public markets, water fountains which work,
we must widen the narrow and unhealthy streets.
Filth was now becoming a catalyst for political change.
Generations of oppression, squalor and desperation had reached tipping point.
The Parisians were now clamouring to radically improve their overcrowded, stinking and poisoned city.
In a bid to quell the mounting unrest,
the king commissioned a nationwide survey of his subjectsncerns.
Gathered from all over the country, the national archives keeps all the written complaints.
These are the cahiers de doleances, the books of grievances, and there are 25,000 of them.
We have just a fraction of them here.
This was a remarkable, totally unexpected response
to Louistempt to placate his people by asking them what was concerning them in their lives.
And actually, it was a huge reservoir of
bitterness that had been building up, because theyeen denied that kind of outlet before.
So this was an unprecedented national survey, it gives us a
wonderful snapshot of what life was like in late 18th century France.
This one here talks about the people that live near a slaughter house,
and they say the smell is absolutely terrible, stinking, particularly in the summer.
And theyterribly worried about the effect of fire during the process of making candles.
Fire of course was an omnipresent fear for people that lived in these
tightly-packed conditions, wooden houses.
Itonderful how rough these are, you can still see people signatures and crossings-out as
people change their mind. These ones were collated just a few years later into slightly smarter volumes.
This one refers to the River Bievre, which is the tributary to the Seine,
where all the tanneries were of course.
And it says that the water was so polluted it was impossible to drink,
impossible to make soup out of, particularly with all the dye from
the colourists that was flooding in there, and people were worried theye poisoned.
Really what lies behind all this is the idea of rights.
The people of France had come to believe that they
had rights that were being infringed by their denial of access to clean water and decent living conditions.
They wanted to be heard and they wanted to protect those rights and advance them.
This man here is an architect, and he says heeen forwarding all
sorts of ideas for cleaning up Paris.
For example, dredging the Seine, which at the moment is nothing but a sewer.
But heot being listened to. And people were struggling to improve their quality of life, and
for them it was absolutely linked in their minds to the achievement of political rights as well.
Thathy these documents are not just a list of grievances, they are revolutionary.
Expectations had been raised.
From all over France, tens of thousands contributed.
And those whoigned wanted to see significant results.
They believed the king would act in their interests and alleviate the
filth and degradation piled upon them, but after all this effort,
when the complaints were read at the Palace of Versailles in May 1789, it was a total sham.
The scale of the problems were so vast that the king, with
little money or inclination to take on this challenge, changed nothing.
Whato ironic about the kingit gesture is that it totally backfired.
People were politicised, they were radicalised by this process of consultation.
It gave them the taste for political involvement, it also showed just how impotent the king was.
He was penniless so he was unable to do anything about all these grievances that had been raised.
Rather than dispelling revolutionary feeling in the country, the king had fanned its flames.
Parisians were incensed that their suggestions for a modern, cleaner and more just city had been ignored.
On the streets, the anger was palpable.
The masses were ready for action.
Incendiary pamphlets flew off the printing presses,
revolutionary speakers fired up the people in the streets.
And in this cafe, radicals gathered to plan their strategy.
One of them was a 26 year-old called Camille Desmoulins, and on the 12th of July 1789,
he made one particularly fervent speech, brandishing a pistol.
From one end of the country to the other, he said, "The same universal cry is heard.
"Everyone wants to be free."
Paris was slipping from the king's grasp.
Middle class revolutionaries started to adopt the filth covered clothes
of tradesmen to stress their solidarity with the workers.
Revolution was in the air.
What finally tipped the city into open revolt was a natural disaster.
A volcano erupted in Iceland, causing havoc across Europe.
The harvest in 1788 was decimated.
Making bread, the most basic staple, impossible to buy.
Such was the desperation that fights broke out.
Bakers were even lynched for stockpiling flour
or using the contaminated river water to make foul bread.
Events now accelerated with terrifying momentum.
Paris was seething, people were living surrounded by filth,
unable to afford bread and being ruled over
by a king who was useless and his administration,
who despite all of their taxes, was bankrupt.
And when people are threatened with starvation,
when people are desperate, they turn violent.
On July 14th 1789, the people of Paris charged through the filthy streets.
It was revolution.
They wanted their basic human rights.
A cleaner, modern city for all and an end to royal tyranny.
As they marched up this road toward the site of the Bastille,
which is just there, they were starting a long French tradition
of resistance and revolution.
Today, people are marching about pensions, but ever since then,
the French people have marched, physically and metaphorically, towards the Bastille.
The Bastille was the main prison in Paris
and was thought to contain supplies of muskets and gunpowder
The starving, dirty, marauding mob wanted to storm the fortress
and arm themselves against the king's troops.
The choice of the Bastille was obvious.
For the people of Paris it symbolised arbitrary, tyrannical government.
The king was allowed to throw men in there as political prisoners without due process of law.
Filth even played it's part.
One key revolutionary, Santerre, dragged carts filled with
horse manure up to the Bastille and set them alight.
The acrid smoke was crucial in shielding the mob's advance.
Like these protesters today,
the rioters arrived here at the Bastille and stormed the fortress.
They carried out the governor and executed him in the street.
It was the start of the bloodiest revolution in French history.
The storming of the Bastille is still celebrated every year all over France.
It symbolises the start of the French Revolution
and the first steps towards a modern democracy
based on the principles of liberte, egalite and fraternite.
Just a month after the Bastille was stormed,
a document was drawn up outlining the people's vision
to state their basic human rights.
It's kept under lock and key here at the national archives.
This really is a unique opportunity to have a look at a momentous
landmark on the road to modern, democratic thought.
I have to be very, very careful here.
Because it is the Declarations of the Rights of Man and Citizen,
made in 1789, and it's still a beautiful document,
just incredible to be handling the original like this.
It's also one of the most inflammatory documents ever created
because this lists a series of rights that men have,
not as a product of their class or their race or educational background
or their wealth, but because they are men.
And any government that disrespects those rights
is illegitimate and should be overthrown.
It a very short document, it's only 800 words,
it could be easily printed on one page,
easily understood, and it spread like wildfire through Europe.
It was translated into countless languages.
And the preamble starts by making a strong link between rights
and the actual living conditions of normal people.
Rights matter, and this is the reason.
It says, "The representatives of the French people believe that ignorance,
"neglect or contempt of the rights of man are the sole cause of public calamities
"and of the corruption of governments."
Once you've defined the rights of man, you can build a government that protects them,
and that will be a better government than what has gone before.
Incredible to think that out of the seething, filthy chaos of Paris,
a cornerstone of western democracy was laid.
It is such an influential document that it's seared into the fabric of our modern world.
When the United Nations set down their Declaration of Human Rights in 1948,
it was modelled on this.
And today, here in Paris, proud Parisians have displayed
every word on the walls of the Metro station Concorde.
But back in the 18th century, it was just too radical for the king to accept.
He refused to relinquish his sovereign power into the hands of the great unwashed.
But soon the people gave him no choice.
In the autumn of 1789, a group of rowdy women gathered in Paris.
Fishmongers, prostitutes and market stall holders, determined to march to Versailles.
They confronted the king and demanded food and demanded his presence in Paris.
Reluctantly, he signed this, and his signature is still here.
But as the months wore on, feeling became increasingly radicalised.
Louis himself was seen now to be incompatible
with the sentiments expressed in this document,
and for that, he would pay the ultimate price.
The people's desire for a more ordered,
just and sanitary city was clear.
But the path to modernity would be gruelling and bloody.
Paris was about to get filthier and more chaotic than ever.
A typical, rather quaint street in a touristy part of Paris, lined with pleasant shops.
But behind this door is a machine that's become synonymous
with all that is ghoulish and macabre.
Wow.
Guillotine, one of only four remaining from the revolutionary period
and the only one here in Paris.
It's a lot bigger than I was expecting, it must have towered over the crowd.
It's amazing being this close to what is definitely
the most infamous instrument of death in history.
I wonder if it's still sharp?
This killing machine was first used in 1792.
It was revolutionary execution technology.
But despite it's terrifying reputation for bloodshed,
it's also an example of equality and human rights.
This is a surprisingly humane form of capital punishment.
For centuries, execution had a class divide.
Ordinary prisoners were slowly hanged, broken on the wheel, or burnt at the stake.
The aristocracy were more simply decapitated by sword.
Armourer Damian Mitchell is showing why this method was just
too inefficient for mass slaughter. It's pretty heavy, isn't it?
It's weighted at the end,
so when you get the swing, it cuts through the air.
The drawbacks of killing with a sword is it's not very efficient.
You would have to sharpen it afterwards, and if the cut was not exact, it could be a painful death.
You can't guarantee a clean kill every time.
So even skilled swordsmen would occasionally mess up?
One small twist either way and you can take a nose or an ear off.
They would have to be finished off as they were lying there screaming.
Would you like to see how it works? Yeah. OK.
It's not a human head, this is a piece of lamb that we got from the butchers today,
to give you the indication of how difficult it is
and why they moved from the sword onto the guillotine.
So I want to go for about there, I think.
So remind me, it's up...?
Up, it's the twist, build momentum, very similar to a golf swing,
if you start thinking like that.
Golf is a good walk ruined, I've never played in my life. But I'll try it.
Ooh, you can really feel that in your shoulders. Absolutely.
Let me take that off you. Wow.
Now you can see, we've got quite a clean cut there,
cut all the way through the bone.
You can feel that as you pass through it,
it sends a jolt right through your body. Yeah.
It's amazing, the concentration... I was trying to get that sweep spot and it takes incredible focus.
But imagine 1,000 people trying to watch you as you do this,
you're normally masked, there'sa lot of pomp and ceremony attached,
so the pressure would have been on.
It's a windy day... Absolutely.
There was just too much potential for making gory mistakes.
You can see why the guillotine is a far more efficient way of doing it.
This is the mechanisation of that process, isn't it?
Absolutely, you would have a master executioner with six assistants,
and it is like a production line.
So you'd be strapped to the bascule, which is like a wheelbarrow,
they would be wheeled in, your neck would be placed.
And then you'd drop this, the lunette, which means half moon, onto the neck.
I can see why. And locked in place.
And the blade, like when you cut bread at home, nice and angled
so it would cut all the way through, so that all the pressure is at one point instead of flat.
So you're talking about 35 kilos falling seven feet,
and that's a serious amount of force, so it would cut straight through the neck.
We can put something inside it and see how efficient it can be.
Nicely, so all the way in.
OK, ready? Yeah.
Whoa.
That is unbelievable. You get a sense of the force
because the meat just fires into the basket, it's hocking.
Cut clean through and this hasn't been used for the best part of 150 years.
You can see here how it just cut straight through.
That is just astonishing, isn't it?
Wow. So this is an enlightened bit of kit,
it's science finding more efficient ways of killing people.
It was an instrument of equality.
And it didn't matter who you were, king, pauper, peasant,
soldier, this is how your life was ended.
Super-efficient the guillotine may have been, but this created another problem.
The scale of the bloodshed.
As the revolution grew ever more radical,
eventually it was decided that only the blood of King Louis XVI himself
could wash away the remnants of the absolutist state.
Only with the king dead could France be democratic and free.
And so, on the 21st of January 1793, Louis was brought here,
to what is now the Place de la Concorde.
In front of his cart marched drummers to drown out the sound of any loyal shouts in the crowd.
Thousands of people gathered here, a guillotine towering above them.
Once on it, Louis made a brave speech pardoning
his executioners and seconds later, his head was severed from his body.
There was silence, then people surged forward with their handkerchiefs,
trying to dip it in the blood of the king.
A grisly souvenir of what was an historic day.
But the king's death wasn't enough.
Following his execution, the terror began.
Thousands were executed as rival political factions fought for supremacy.
And with that came unprecedented amounts of gruesome filth.
The most famous executioner was Charles Henri Sanson.
On a good day, he could execute up to one person a minute.
He said, "I can chop off your head in the twinkling of an eye
"and you'll only feel a slight freshness around the neck."
As the head was severed, the body jerked back, muscles twitching,
and supposedly the blood in the head
would keep the victim's brain alive for three to five seconds.
This was a gruesome, but compelling spectacle.
The crowd packed into this square, baying for blood.
The victims were led onto the guillotine
and then everyone listened out for the terrifying sound,
the rasp and the thud, as the blade cut
into the victim's neck and the crash as their head fell into the basket.
But all these killings, 300 in one weekend, for example,
were giving Paris a new problem.
That was a lot of bodies.
It wasn't just the loathed aristocracy that were being massacred,
but anyone seen as unrevolutionary,
calling each other madame or monsieur, instead of brother or citizen.
Here in Paris, 2,794 people were killed.
The youngest was 13, the oldest was 93.
Piles of decapitated bodies and severed heads made for an unbearably grisly city.
The streets were filled with the stench of rotting bodies
and pools of fermented blood that became rancid in the heat.
You can always tell an executioner in revolutionary Paris.
He had blood to his elbows, there was so much of it about.
They tried digging trenches and pits, but soon those overflowed.
Each human, when decapitated,
produces about three litres of blood,
so this whole area would have been
covered in pools of stagnant blood with human tissue in
and flies buzzing around.
With Paris at its most pestilent and grim,
some way had to be found to deal with the piles of bloody bodies.
The Chapelle Expiatoire is built on the site of one of the largest mass burial pits.
During the terror, thousands of bodies were brought here, stripped of their clothing and rotting.
One man who has experience of mass graves full of putrefying corpses
is forensic pathologist Dr Dick Sheperd.
There were two huge pits at this site that were dug, about three metres deep.
Into them the bodies were tipped.
Is this also where the king and queen were brought?
Yep, they were buried in exactly the same place,
so Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, one in January, one in October, were dumped here in exactly the same way.
So different to the way their ancestors were buried, thrown into a grave with all the commoners and...
Absolutely, it's complete degradation aimed at these people.
I can't imagine a more disgusting sight,
and of course the smell would have been mind-blowing.
To look into this pit, 200 or so years ago,
would have been just utterly, utterly awful.
In it would have been bodies in all stages of decomposition,
there would probably have been fluid at the bottom, so they have been floating around a bit in the fluids.
In your career you've seen burial pits with people that have been in mass killings.
Can you give me any sense of what that looks and smells like?
The smell is just horrendous.
We all know what a piece of off meat smells like in the fridge.
Just imagine that with thousands and thousands of rotting bodies.
It is just a disgusting stench.
How long does it take for someone to decompose? What are the stages?
It is a totally temperature-dependent process.
The warmer the temperature, the faster decomposition will take place.
The process begins usually with green discolouration of the abdomen,
then you get this change in the skin as the bacteria from the body spreads throughout the blood vessels
and produces quite a pretty discolouration on the skin called marbling,
because it's like the veins of colour you get through a good marble.
And then the body will begin to bloat, then you'll get the distension of the abdomen, the genitalia,
there'll be leakage of the fluids from all of the orifices, any areas of damage.
And then, after that rather wet decomposition phase, the process then will be hastened by maggots.
This pit was more unpleasant than most because they had their heads chopped off as well.
Exactly. Their heads would have been separate and it may have had
a peculiar effect that the heads would have been better preserved,
so would perhaps have remained more recognisable for longer.
More than a decade after the revolution ended, the skeletal remains were finally laid to rest.
With the cemeteries already overflowing,
the authorities had found a burial place for centuries of Paris' dead.
These labyrinthine catacombs were fashioned as a grisly mausoleum.
As you enter, the sign reads, "Stop, this is the empire of death."
I'm 20 or 30 metres below the streets of Paris
and I've come to see the solution to that overcrowding in the cemeteries.
And that is finding an old limestone quarry here and sticking the remains of countless bodies in here.
It's absolutely extraordinary, I've never seen anything like it.
It's macabre, look how they're all ghoulishly laid out.
A mixture of decoration and... and uniformity.
It's extraordinary.
And look down there, it stretches for half a mile underground.
They have tried to estimate how many bodies are in here
and they think it's something like six million.
And you can see why. This is two metres high, this bank here,
and it stretches back.
I can't even see the back wall.
30 or 40 metres, I'd say, at least.
It's just extraordinary.
Somewhere in this section here are also the remains
of the thousands of people who were killed on the guillotine.
They were dug up out of that burial pit. It's amazing to think they're in here as well.
And while some order was being imposed on this necropolis underground, one man up there
was trying to do the same on the streets of Paris.
He was a courageous, handsome, successful general who had been winning battles right across Europe.
After a revolutionary decade, Napoleon turned his attention
to the still turbulent city, with another adversary in mind.
He was determined to wage war on filth.
Famous for spending hours luxuriating in lovely hot baths,
Napoleon had himself crowned emperor of the French in 1804.
He had an obsession with clean, fresh water, so his accession
marked a new era for Paris in terms of health and hygiene.
Fresh water fountains and canals sprang up all over the city.
He commissioned 56 of these ornamental fountains,
had five new bridges built,
eight covered markets to sell food and flowers
and five new slaughterhouses to feed the city.
His dream was to turn Paris into the most beautiful city in the world,
a contemporary version of Imperial Rome.
To do that, he drove this magnificent boulevard through the city, the Champs Elysees.
And at the end he erected that arch to his military victories, the Arc de Triomphe.
For me, Napoleon shouldn't just be heralded as a military genius
and architectural visionary, he should also be remembered
for declaring war on Paris' invisible enemy.
One of the worst killers in France was smallpox.
'Frederic Tangy at the Institut Pasteur specialises in vaccination,
'the weapon Napoleon used to fight this virulent disease.'
So, in honour of Napoleon's breakthrough with smallpox,
I decided to get some makeup put on, some prosthetics.
How good do you think that is? Looks like smallpox?
Yeah, it looks like smallpox but the pustules are too scarce.
You don't have enough. There would have been more than this?
Yes, this is a true image of smallpox,
your whole body should be covered.
Wow, ugh! This is...this is awful.
This is awful, this is probably one of the most...
the worst disease that humanity ever experienced.
That's incredible. And is that terribly painful as well?
Yes, very painful, because each one, you will have a scar.
And it's very... You scratch the scar, you bleed, you rescratch, etc.
Once you are infected like that, the virus goes into your blood
then invades your lung, your spleen, your stomach, your everywhere, OK?
And when you have that inside the body, you die in a matter of days.
'With tens of thousands dying of smallpox in France each year, Napoleon took a radical approach.
'In 1809 he pioneered
'the first ever state-funded immunisation programme.'
He thought of himself as a very modern man, I suppose?
Yes, he decided to protect his troops and to protect the country
and he decided to have a country where everybody has the same right.
Because it was just after the French Revolution,
so he wanted people making... what he thought was good for them.
So everybody must be vaccinated, must be clean, must go to school.
He invented the mass vaccination campaigns, in fact. Incredible.
Vaccination is a way of protecting the whole society
rather than yourself, so you protect yourself but you protect the others.
So where does the idea of vaccinating come from?
The observation that already infected people are protected from the next epidemic.
So the first idea was to take something from those pustules and to give that to other people.
You'd be a brave person if you... Yeah, which is disgusting, I agree.
So you'd get one of these.
Yeah, you take that. Then you take a little bit.
Scoop some pus out of there. Yes.
And you scratch it on another guy.
Disgusting, isn't it? So you infect him with your disease.
Although this arm-to-arm inoculation looks rudimentary and risky,
it forms the basis of how vaccinations work today.
In fact, the word vaccination came from this period,
when cowpox was used instead of human pustules,
and vacca is the Latin for cow.
Napoleon had started to put Paris on the road to modernity,
with improvements to public health creating some order from the chaos.
But there was still a long way to go.
It wasn't until 1848, when Napoleon's nephew, Louis Napoleon III, came to power,
that the Parisians got a leader determined to finish the job.
After more decades of conflict, revolutions and turmoil,
Paris was still desperate for the ultimate clean-up, to finally wrench it away
from centuries of filth, pestilence and squalor
and drag it into the modern, civilised world.
This was to be an absolutely no-nonsense approach, there would be no more pissing around.
In 1850 they passed a law which forbade urinating on the street and they established 500 of these,
ironically nicknamed Vespasiennes, after the Roman Emperor Vespasian,
who put jugs of drinking water on the street for citizens
and fined heavily anyone found jovially pissing in them.
Not only were Parisians' toilet habits freshening up the city above ground,
down below the removal of the waste was being tidied up considerably.
Next on the agenda was sewage.
In 1850, Louis Napoleon ordered the small vaulted sewers that his uncle built
to be made 20 times larger, cleaner and more efficient.
Over 600 kilometres of tunnels were built, funnelling all the waste water away from the city centre
and bringing in clean running water into people's homes.
It was an incredible feat of engineering and is still lauded
as one of the more extensive urban sewer systems in the world.
Not only were these sewers radically cleaning up 19th-century Paris,
but they also instilled civic pride.
Visitors flocked to see this sewage spectacular,
even the Tsar of Russia.
Paris was well on its way to becoming a model modern city.
It wasn't just underground that Paris was being cleaned up.
Above, the streets were getting a radical, fresh new look.
This is now a pretty typical modern road junction,
but back then this was highly innovative.
Wide open streets, nice and airy, and on the ground this, Tarmac.
A Scottish invention but used here in Paris for the first time.
This meant the roads were a lot cleaner because the manure couldn't get stuck between the cobbles.
It also meant people couldn't prise the cobbles up and throw them during bouts of revolutionary fervour.
Queen Victoria visited Paris in 1855 and she commented on the beautiful roads.
Paris continued to forge ahead as a pioneering city.
Its piece de resistance was taking urban planning to inspiring new heights.
In 1850, Napoleon III and his famous chief architect, Baron Haussmann,
embarked on the strategic beautification of Paris.
Haussmann dreamt of a city with grand boulevards and parks and buildings,
so that the whole thing would look like a palace.
Haussmann acted with remarkable audacity and ambition.
He bulldozed three-quarters of Paris,
ripping out its guts, flattening the city and calling himself
the world's first demolition artist.
He destroyed 20,000 houses and built 40,000 more.
He planted 100,000 trees
and lined long pavements with brand-new gas lamps.
And this is the effect of that Haussmannisation,
the most dramatic reordering of any city in Europe.
Look at these boulevards stretching off in all different directions.
This one here runs five kilometres without a single kink.
Parisians had the ordered, clean city that they'd wanted.
But there was an irony here.
This was about strategy as much as beautification.
Poor people in the way of these streets
were moved out to the suburbs,
they're wide enough to make sure that any revolutionary barricade wouldn't really be effective.
Troops can be moved quickly from one area of town to the next and the field of fire here is perfect.
Soldiers could shoot down revolutionary mobs in no time at all.
Haussmann had sanitised Paris, he had drained the swamp
from which revolutionary fervour had been emanating for generations.
Paris had finally been dragged out of the dark ages of its filthy past.
Centuries of chaotic, squalid living,
filled with disease, pollution, blood and death, had been cleansed.
Now in its place, a pioneering, modern city had emerged, resplendent.
Transformation of Paris was a triumphant achievement.
These slum-like medieval streets, with their squalor and filth, their chaos and revolution,
had given birth to the world's first truly modern city.
One which many still think is the most beautiful on the planet.
It was an inspiration for 19th-century London and New York
and it became the blueprint for the modern metropolis.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd