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Versailles facing the degradation of its water supply from the Seine River: governance, water quality expertise and decision making, 1852–1894

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Abstract

In 1852 a new machine to provide greater volumes of Seine River water to Versailles was decided. The new Marly Machine was operated by the Versailles Water Service (VWS), a 150-year old state-owned institution supervised by state ministries, managing the water supply over a vast domain that covered 32 towns in 1903. The VWS provided financial, technical and administrative resources to the city of Versailles, but the city council had no word in decision-making. Soon after the installation of the Machine in 1859, the city of Paris started to collect its wastewaters and discharge them untreated into the river, 16 km upstream of the Marly Machine. In 1874 the Seine River was officially declared infected by Paris sewers. The VWS reacted in 1877 by asking several French chemists, pioneers of river surveys, to assess the quality of the Versailles waters by innovative chemical approaches that had been developed on the Seine River since the Boudet ammonia river profile in 1861. In 1874 Gérardin’s oximetric profiles revealed the severe depletion of oxygen in the Seine at Marly in the summer, explaining the fish kills. This degradation of Versailles water intake in the Seine River mobilized local, regional and national actors over the coming 20 years. Finally, the VWS was forced to gradually use (1880–1895) groundwater to supply the Marly Machine. In 1892, another new water quality criterion was considered, the bacteriological survey, and in 1894 the Seine River water was completely excluded as a water source, ending a multidecadal debate in which scientific expertise played a prominent role.

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Notes

  1. In the administrative divisions of France, the département is one of the levels of government between the national level and the town.

  2. These two departments were reorganized in 1968 into the smaller départements Yvelines and Paris and the creation of five new départements.

  3. The department archives of Yvelines, 7 M 98: The state of unsanitary, inconvenient or dangerous industries in the city of Versailles in 1875.

  4. A civil list is a list of State properties.

  5. The département archives of Yvelines, 2Q non coté 10 et 11.

  6. In 1870, the VWS supplied water to 13 cities in the Seine-et-Oise département. The cities of Saint-Cloud, Ville-d’Avray, la Celle-Saint-Cloud, Garches, Marnes and Sèvres were connected in between 1859 and 1860. In 1903, 32 cities depended on Versailles State-owned water service: Versailles, Marly, Meudon, Saint-Cloud, Le Chesnay, Rocquencourt, Buc, Toussus, Villiers-le-Bâcle, Châteaufort, Guyancourt, Saint-Cyr, Trappes, Le Mesnil-Saint-Denis, Coignières, Les Essarts-le-Roi, Bougival, Port-Marly, Louveciennes, Marly-le-Roi, Bailly, Noisy-le-Roi, La Celle-Saint-Cloud, Rueil, Vaucresson, Garches, Marnes, Ville-d’Avray, Sèvres, Viroflay, Clamart and Vélizy. Chaville, using local springs, was not connected to the VWS network. In 1980 the VWS was finally split into two entities: for the first time in three centuries the drinking water supply (Société des Eaux de Versailles et de Saint-Cloud (SEVESC) was separated from the Gardens water supply (Service des fontaines de Versailles).

  7. The French National Archives: F/21/2877.

  8. The French National Archives: F/8/205.

  9. The Versailles City Council deliberations file 1 D 61* 1875, City of Versailles Archives.

  10. The Versailles City Council deliberations file 1 D 74* 1891, City of Versailles Archives.

  11. See below, paragraph Bacteriological analyses.

  12. The Versailles City Council deliberations in the city Archives: 1 D 74*, 1891.

  13. Napoléon III donated about 2 million Francs.

  14. Dismantled in 1969.

  15. The city Archives of Versailles: N3 1709.

  16. Until 1900 water quality graphics in technical reports were very rare.

  17. The minimum summer oxygen in the Seine River downstream of Paris sewer release, confirmed by annual surveys made by the Montsouris laboratory at Paris (Meybeck et al. 2017), was a permanent feature of the river; it lasted until the 1990s, until the wastewater treatment plant network was finally efficient (Meybeck et al. 2016).

  18. Journal officiel de la République française, 10 Avril 1875, N° 98, pp. 2583–2588.

  19. The Yvelines Archives: 2Q non coté 45 Gérardin’s water analyses in Versailles, 1876–1877.

  20. The city Archives of Versailles: N3 5122.

  21. The city Archives of Versailles: N3 1710.

  22. Achille Delesse (1817–1881) was a famous French geologist and mineralogist.

  23. The city Archives of Versailles: N3 1710.

  24. Chloride, sulfuric acid, organic matter, weight loss, two indicators of hardness.

  25. The Yvelines Archives: 2Q non-coté 10 and 2Q non-coté 11.

  26. The département Archives of Yvelines: 2Q non coté 47.

  27. For more information on Paris sewage treatment in irrigated farms and the Seine River sanitation, see Barles (1999, 2007). See also Lestel and Carré (2017).

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Acknowledgments

We are indebted to the participants of the ANR Makara project as well as archivists of The France National Archives, the Département Archives of Yvelines and the Municipal Archives of Versailles for their assistance and courtesy. We especially thank Aurélien Baro (UMR Metis 7619) for producing the maps and figures that are used in this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sorbonne Université, CNRS, EPHE, UMR 7619 Metis, 75005, Paris, France

    Tatiana Dmitrieva, Laurence Lestel & Michel Meybeck

  2. Université Paris 1, UMR 8504 Géographie-Cités, 75005, Paris, France

    Sabine Barles

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  1. Tatiana Dmitrieva
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  2. Laurence Lestel
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  3. Michel Meybeck
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  4. Sabine Barles
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Correspondence to Laurence Lestel.

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Dmitrieva, T., Lestel, L., Meybeck, M. et al. Versailles facing the degradation of its water supply from the Seine River: governance, water quality expertise and decision making, 1852–1894. Water Hist 10, 183–205 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12685-018-0216-7

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