It’s really only been not much more than a century since “great stinks” caused tremendous disruptions of daily life across major world cities. Lack of sufficient public sanitation, open sewers, abattoirs, and a host of other elements of those times would combine with seasonal weather patterns and other phenomena to produce a level of stench that could not only cause people to alter the activities, they could – and in some cases did – literally bring the activities of governments to a halt.
But in Paris in 1895, one of these noxious odor outbreaks, while most certainly offending Parisian noses, failed to cause any significant disruption beyond loud exclamations of “Sacre bleu – le pew!” (or something similar, at least). What changed? Had everyone simply grown accustomed to such smells?
As Prof. David S. Barnes explains in his new The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs, what had actually happened was a revolution – but this time one with far fewer guillotines and far more science.
