Review Article

This paper addresses itself to a problem that faces all cities but which was — and was seen to be — an ever more grave one for the burgeoning cities of nineteenth century Europe: environmental pollution. This problem — and in particular sewage which is the focus of the article — has as yet been little studied by historians. The paper shows, first, that in Paris in the period 1750–1850 the city was confronted by rapidly increasing quantities of sewage and that for complex cultural, class and scientific reasons Parisian elites came to perceive sewage removal as a problem that required solution and to adopt a series of strategies to do so. It shows, secondly, that the city's administration brought about changes which were of greater import than those effected under Haussmann in the 1850s and 1860s. The limits to what it could do were imposed not by short‐sightedness or parsimony, but by long‐term structural constraints of different orders, attitudinal, technological, power relationships in the capitalist city.