By Andrea Widburg
The Palace of Versailles was famously filthy because it had over 2,200 rooms and several times that many people but no toilets. Instead, every dark corner was a toilet. Paris itself was famous for its pissoirs, public urinals with walls, but no toilet other than the pavement (which might have a small drain). Even now, Paris remains famous for combining sidewalks and toilets. Once activists get involved, you end up with a promise to fill Paris’s Seine River with fecal matter before the Olympics.
I won’t unpack the Versailles and pissoir stuff. You can read about Versailles’ famous sanitary problems here and about pissoirs here. This post will focus, instead, on the modern Parisian sanitary problem and on the leftist fixation with fecal matter—all of which is heading for the Seine.
When it comes to uncontrolled urine, freed even from pissoirs and public restrooms, Paris is troubled:
While urine is stinky, it’s not the biggest problem (although it will dissolve ancient buildings).
The big problem is that unrestrained fecal contamination is a health hazard, and Paris has it. Indeed, it may even be as bad as in San Francisco. While San Franciscans offer homeless-people poop, Parisians have a lot of dog poop. Indeed, not that long ago, Paris was unofficially the “dog poop on the street” capital of the world.
I’m also willing to bet, although I can’t find authority one way or another to support this sense, that France’s large North African and Middle Eastern population isn’t overwhelmingly finicky about public defecation. After all, in Canada, the government had to put up posters reminding immigrants from Ghana not to poop on public beaches:
You can’t tell that this isn’t happening in France, too, with its ballooning population of sub-Saharan Africans. That’s especially true because Paris, like all modern cities, has a sizable homeless population, more than half of whom are not French natives.
With all the urine and fecal matter floating around on Paris streets, it’s no surprise the Seine has a high level of contaminants with fecal origin.
So, that’s Paris and the French when it comes to poop.
Now let’s speak briefly about activism and poop. While Tea Partiers cleaned up after themselves, activists with a leftist bent are invariably obsessed with poop, something I believe comes because they never emotionally outgrew the toddler stage. They throw tantrums, make up science as they go along because they believe that nothing existed before they did (especially constant changes to the earth’s climate), want other people’s things while insisting on keeping their own, believe in magic (such as magically changing sexes), and so much more. And, like every toddler, poop fascinates them.
Here are just a few leftist poop stories stretching back decades:
- June 2006: A Democratic activist left dog poop at the campaign headquarters of U.S. Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R. Co.).
- September 2008: A well-known photographer for The Atlantic showed an ape defecating on John McCain’s head.
- November 2008: An activist group asked San Francisco voters to rename a sewage treatment plant after George W. Bush. (The initiative failed.)
- October 2011: Occupy Wall Street was an orgy of fecal matter.
- March 2013: An Occupy Wall Street protestor dumped at Chase Bank.
- November 2013: Martin Bashir said on MSNBC that someone should defecate in Sarah Palin’s mouth.
- September 2014: The hard-left San Francisco Chronicle raved about a German movie that was all about bodily fluids.
- September 2019: The New York Times wrote an entire article about women pooping.
I stopped tracking poop stories after that last one. I felt that there was nowhere left to go.
However, in Paris, there is still one place left to go: The Seine itself.
People angry at the expense of cleaning up the river [for the Olympics] have rallied under the hashtag #JeChieDansLaSeineLe23Juin, which translates as “I shit in the Seine on 23 June”.
Sunday was supposed to be the date Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo would swim in the Seine to prove the water was clean enough for Olympic athletes – but she delayed the dip until after the French elections in July.
President Emmanuel Macron has also promised to swim in the Seine before the Games, but has not said when.
[snip]
People are frustrated so much money has been invested in the clean-up operation when other social issues have been neglected.
Aspects of the Olympics have proved controversial. Parisians face hiked transport costs during the Games; homeless encampments have been cleared, prompting accusations of France trying to “hide poverty”; and students have been moved to make way for Olympics workers.
While the protest isn’t explicitly leftist, it just has that vibe because conservatives, unless they’re farmers fighting plans to shut down their farms, don’t use their own poop for protests.
As of today, the pooping Parisians have temporarily delayed their plan because they can’t currently score a political point, but it’s still all there: France, activism, poop. There’s nothing more to say.