The Brown Gold of the 19th Century: Human Excrement, Fertiliser for Market Gardeners
- Art d'Histoire
- May 28
- 3 min read
The Parisian population was exploding, and with it, the volume of organic waste. How was the immense quantity of human excrement evacuated by Paris to be managed?
Should it not be seen as a source of wealth for the surrounding countryside?
From Filth to Fertiliser
For the engineer François Liger, human waste, once transformed into "poudrette," constituted the natural fertiliser with the highest nitrogen concentration in the territory, capable of adapting to almost all soils and crops.
Victor Hugo himself participated in the debate in 1862, protesting against the waste represented by the discharge of sewage into the river system and then into the ocean. It was the discarding of organic matter that France greatly needed, while simultaneously infecting the water, leading to a fatal cycle conducive to famine and epidemics.
It was necessary to reorganise the system of excrement evacuation in favour of enriching arable land and to close the loop by feeding Parisians with vegetables fertilised by the very faecal matter they themselves had produced.
Spreading: An Expanding Topography
At the end of 1870, forty hectares already benefited from wastewater and twenty others from sludge from purification basins. By 1876, there were more than three hundred hectares of land thus fertilised. This radical transformation of the landscape drew a new nourishing belt dependent on the urban metabolism.
The land initially planned in Clichy proving too limited, the capital reached an agreement in 1869 with the commune of Gennevilliers to deploy its spreading fields there. The treated surfaces thus grew from an experimental phase of six hectares to more than four hundred hectares in 1880.
Even more surprising, the fertilisation method nourished the luxury industry, as the floral essences destined for the famous perfumery of Grasse came from plants cultivated with these faecal materials, François Liger noted in 1875.
Criticized Logistics
The Encyclopédie d'horticulture, however, tempered the enthusiasm of agronomists by warning that this fertiliser, although very economical, transmitted an undesirable flavour to the most delicate vegetable products, such as lettuce and strawberries.
Satirical poems were written by a certain K. de Monpétard—an evocative pseudonym—portraying a suburban landscape stretching from Clamart to Argenteuil, by way of Aubervilliers and Gennevilliers, where the visual abundance of cabbages, radishes, and melons was accompanied by omnipresent exhalations of excrement.
Beyond the scent, the danger of the dried matter was proven: the handling of "poudrette" caused lethal toxic emanations that decimated the crew of the ship Arthur in 1818 during a maritime transport to Guadeloupe... since France exported this faecal gold for a time.
Logistical Epilogue and Return to the River
Ultimately, high transportation costs, combined with a too-timid agricultural demand for human fertiliser and the skepticism of some hygienists, limited the development of this circular economy on French territory.
And despite attempts to export to Belgian and English border markets, mounds of "poudrette" inevitably ended up clogging the road systems. It was finally the slow flow of the Parisian river that was forced to carry and absorb these wastes—a river where painters and Parisians worked, relaxed, or bathed.
The young worker wearing a red cap in Georges Seurat's Bathers at Asnières thus drinks water far less pure than the nobility of the lines and the atmospheric purity would suggest, the title leaving the spectator in no doubt about the highly toxic location of the scene.
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