All language subtitles for BBC.Filthy.Cities.2of3.Revolutionary.Paris.PDTV.XviD.AC3.MVGroup.org.eng

Paris is heralded as
the most glamorous,

beautiful and sophisticated
cultural centre of Europe -

adorned by magnificent palaces,
gardens and boulevards.

But it wasn't always like this.

It's hard to believe now, but this
beautiful city used to stink.

The streets of 18th-century Paris
were narrow, crowded

and fetid - they were those of
medieval city, not a modern capital.

This was the most disgusting
city imaginable.

Just 200 years ago, Paris was
famously one of the foulest
and smelliest cities in Europe.

Wading through human and animal
filth to slave in toxic industries,

ordinary Parisians
suffered grotesque poverty,
sickness and starvation.

But after generations of injustice,
it wasn't just the conditions
that were revolting.

The people of Paris had had enough.

Filth, the result of poverty and
injustice, was becoming political.

Paris was a pressure cooker,
and it was about to explode.

Paris was on the brink
of an epic transformation.

I'm going to sniff out the rotten
story of how filth and squalor
drove Parisians into revolt,

experience the most toxic and
stinking of Paris's gruelling

industries, recreate the foul
smell that choked the streets,

come face to face with
the ultimate killing machine...

Yikes!

All to understand how ordinary
Parisians

fought to clean up their ancient
cesspit from the bottom up.

In less than 100 years, Paris would
be transformed from a filthy,
fetid place into a model city,

the blueprint
for every modern metropolis.

But it wouldn't be an easy path - it
would be bloody, violent and dirty.

A trip down the River Seine in the
18th century would have looked
and smelt very different.

Paris's main source of drinking
water was little more
than an open sewer,

with up to 300 tonnes of human
excrement dumped in it daily.

With no notion of public
hygiene or proper sanitation,

there was just too much waste
for the city to cope with.

As King Louis XVI
came to the throne in 1774, the city

had been growing for centuries,
and now it was fit to burst.

Over half a million people
were crammed into an area
just seven by four kilometres.

And the thriving
industries continued

to lure tens of thousands more
to the capital to work as dyers,
launderers, hatters and gunsmiths,

all spewing their toxic waste
into the Seine, and foul odours
into the air.

For Parisians, the filth,
misery and stench was intolerable.

This was the smelliest part of
18th-century Paris -

there's a road still
there called the Rue Mouffetard,

which at the time
meant putrid stench.

The reason for that
smell was the River Bievre,

which came out through here
and was noxious - notoriously so.

And it's now two metres below my
feet, covered up by the street.

Back then it was the centre for the
most toxic, stinking and downright

disgusting industry in Paris,
the gruesome process of turning
animal hides into leather - tanning.

This area was home to dozens
of tanneries up and down here,

who used to pour their filthy
waste straight out into the river.

I mean, the air was so toxic
that it used to give people
ulcerated throats.

To give a sense of the foul,
polluted stink that was
aggravating the people of Paris,

I've joined Andrew Parr, and
we're using the traditional filthy
ingredients to make leather.

The most caustic stage is
soaking the fatty hides in
alkaline lime for three weeks.

There's a rotting,
dead animal smell!

The smell, this is hydrated lime,
water and lime mixed together.

They've worked on the hide,
they've been working on the hair
and the flesh, and you're getting

ammonia coming off,
so that's what you can smell.

It wasn't just the lime that was
dangerously contaminating
the air and the water.

In the late 18th century, with
over 30 tanneries crammed along

the River Bievre, each stage was
adding layers of fetid pollution.

Drag it up over the beam,
so it's then ready for
the de-hairing process.

Ho-ho, look at that!
So it's got three blades, and you
work it so the blade is pointing

back towards you, so you're pulling
the hair out, rather than pushing it
out, just work it away like that.

With so many tanneries,
the heaps of loose hair
piling up would have been foul.

It's a funny process though,
isn't it? This used to be a

living animal and now you're
preparing it to be a pair of shoes.

To add to the matted hair floating
in the river, the grisly flesh
is cut from the other side.

A tanner's lot was certainly
back-breaking, messy and vile.

Just cut away all that nice fleshy
part there, all that fat and sinew.

I like the way it all splashes up
in your face, really pleasant!

You're getting dissolved fat, really,
because the lime has started
to dissolve it,

so it's really squidgy.
Quite unpleasant.

So basically, you spend all day
creating piles of fat, like that.

Stinking fat dumped into
the water supply is hazardous,
but there was an even more

disgusting, evil ingredient, as the
Parisian tanners relied on a foul
pollutant to do their dirty work.

Right, so you get the dog
poo and put it in there.

Baiting is a key part
of the tanning process.

The tanners used a mixture
of dog and bird dung
in hot water to release bacteria.

What is it about dog poo
that is so disgusting?

The hide was immersed in this
revolting concoction to soften it.

There was no shortage of dog poo
in Paris, as there were thousands

of stray dogs leaving their muck
all over the place.

Nothing like a bit of fresh bait.

Oh, every time you do that, there's
this wave...!

This was then mixed with human
urine, collected from piss pots
left on street corners.

Because it's full of bacteria, of
course the bacteria multiplies, so
it gets worse as the day goes on.

If you keep it for several days,
especially if it's warm in the
summer, the smell gets worse.

Do it by hand, it's going to...
No way.

The dog poo, hair, fat and acid
all got chucked into the Bievre,

that flowed directly
into the River Seine.

So it's a pretty filthy industry.
I mean, if you're living downstream

of a tannery, your life
expectancy wouldn't be that good...

If you were drinking this water,
it wouldn't be good at all -
I think that's why they drank wine.

The miserable working conditions
of industrial Paris were breeding

not just foul pollutants, but the
stench of injustice and discontent.

Paris was an awful
place to live, where

many people worked in disgusting
conditions, doing back-breaking
work in tanneries like this one.

But out of this,
exquisite luxury goods were
produced, like these gloves.

It was also a very unequal society.

These gloves would have cost ten
times what a family of four would
have been able to spend in a week -

only the super rich
could afford them.

This blatant injustice
riled the people of Paris.

In the late 18th century, French
society was clearly divided into
the haves and the have-nots.

The privileged nobility and clergy
accounted for just 2%
of the population.

The other 98% were marginalised, and
the majority were desperately poor.

These Parisians were deeply
unhappy with their lot.

They slaved to make Paris tick,
but saw few of the benefits.

Around this city of 600,000 people
was a three-metre-high wall,
designed to regulate the flow of

people and goods in
and out of the city.

But for the people of Paris,
it was both a jailer and a tax man,

because there were 60 of these toll
houses here, and all goods coming
into the city were heavily taxed.

The people of Paris felt they were
being squeezed, physically
and economically.

A very beautiful building -
typical 18th-century government,

if they're going to take money
off you, they do it in pleasant,
neo-classical surroundings.

So in here were the crowded
streets of Paris, and out there was
the sweet-smelling countryside.

And the people in here particularly
resented paying taxes toa king

they found increasingly
irrelevant and inefficient.

Of course they had no say in
how those taxes were spent,
because it was an absolute system.

And one project that particularly
angered them was when the
king, in the 18th century,

built what was effectively
a ring road, just out there,

which meant he didn't even have to
travel through his own capital city.

Built by his father, this
solution to the stench and crush

of insalubrious Paris was readily
embraced by the young Louis XVI
and his queen, Marie Antoinette.

Trouble was, abandoning their
subjects to rot in their own filth
just made matters worse.

And unlike England's king, who was
based in London itself, Louis XVI
chose to exercise his absolute rule

from an isolated and privileged
retreat, the Palace of Versailles.

This really was the home
of the filthy rich,

a palace of perfume
and powder, of pleasure and power.

It covers an area of
67,000 square metres - there are
700 rooms, with 2,000 windows.

Even though it was close to Paris,
it was a world away from those
crowded, stinking streets.

It was quite literally the most
extravagant palace on the planet.

The spectacular hall of mirrors,
where Louis XVI and Marie
Antoinette held court,

is almost as long as a football
pitch and required 8,000 candles

a night to light it - impolitic,
at a time when the king's subjects
could barely afford bread.

The palace was open, light,
full of mirrors and glass,

at every level giving the appearance
of all that Paris was not.

Surprisingly, given that their
lives in many ways couldn't have

been more different from the
filthy poor people out there,

the super rich had one thing
in common - they were filthy
and smelly themselves.

Over 2,000 people lived and worked
in the palace,

and with few toilets
and hundreds of visitors every day,

it's claimed that people had to
relieve themselves almost anywhere.

TRICKLING WATER
Horace Walpole wrote
that the approach

to Versailles was magnificent, but
the squalor inside was unspeakable.

Nowadays we think of Versailles as
a byword for exquisite luxury, but
back in the 18th century this was

a public building, it was thronged
with petitioners hoping to
get a favour out of the king or the

queen, which meant that in between
these exquisite rooms, the corridors

acted like public lavatories,
they were cesspits.

There was filth everywhere and the
stink would have been unbelievable.

Another prominent writer of the
time documented, "There was the

"smell of butchers roasting pigs,
the courtyard and corridors were

"full of urine and stagnant water,
and livestock even defecated
in the great gallery".

It was so dirty people
used to wear dresses

with hems that were brown,
so it wouldn't show up the muck.

But of course, the king and queen
needed some private space in which
they could be clean, and that's why

there's a secret door
right over there.

Right, so this is the private
side of Versailles, the bit the
public don't see, the bit that

all the courtiers and all the
people clamouring for the queen's
attention wouldn't see.

I suspect Marie Antoinette
would have been far more
comfortable in here.

You go from the grandeur out there
to the far more simple, far smaller

rooms in here,
it's a real human scale.

And the only people allowed back
here would have been personal
servants,

people helping her with her hair
and her skin, her make-up.

She would have been comfortable
here and shielded to the mass
of people out there.

Wonderful.

Now through here, I think,

yep, this I think is the bathroom,
this is where the bathtub
used to be.

She was infamous for spending hours
at a time in the bath, in fact, she
used to have her lunch in the bath.

In such a filthy, dirty age, this
was considered strange behaviour.

Marie Antoinette favoured
ostentatious powdered wigs,

expensive make-up, and extravagant
perfumes to maintain an air
of cleanliness.

But these obscene levels of
luxury, paid for by taxing the

poor, were provocative, especially
as the aristocracy didn't pay tax.

The more the royals tried
to escape the filth,

the more they seemed to be rubbing
ordinary people's noses in it.

Masking bad smells is one thing,
getting rid of their causes
quite another,

unless you're one of the privileged
few that could get their hands on
a cutting-edge piece of technology.

A woman obsessed with
cleanliness had to have a "lieu
anglais", place of the English.

Possibly having a bit of a dig at
the English, or because

this was the latest in conveniences
from across the Channel.

It's where we get the word loo from,
one of the first toilets in France,
where Marie Antoinette would sit

and get rid of the waste in what we
now consider a civilised fashion.

And of course, apart
from her, no-one in Versailles
had these mod cons,

for everyone else at Versailles,
they had simple chamber pots.

That meant once they'd finished
their business, they throw them
out of the windows,

which was tough for the people
walking around on the ground floor.

Apparently they used
leather umbrellas to keep this
rain of filth off their heads.

Just as this crazy invention
deflected the stinking mess, Louis
and his court shielded themselves

from the realities of
the political situation.

Not only were the filthy poor
funding the lavish lifestyle

at Versailles, France had also been
embroiled in costly wars abroad.

The coffers were empty.

The people were overtaxed
and on the verge of destitution.

15 miles away in Paris, it would
take more than expensive perfume

to cover up that stench, or the
real desire for political change.

Neglected and suffering from
grotesque filth and poverty, living

in Paris was described
as being sucked into a fetid sewer.

And what put everyone's noses
out of joint was the malodorous,
relentless stink.

I want to get a sense
of what it felt like
to be condemned to live like this.

Paris is home to some of the most
famous fragrances in the world, like

Chanel and Dior, but I haven't come
here to find a sophisticated scent.

Instead I'm going to enlist the
help of a man with one of the most

discerning noses in the city,
and together we're going to recreate
the stench of 18th-century Paris.

I want to brew up the definitive
heady blend of Pong de Paris.

I've brought a few of the terrible
smells that would have assaulted

the senses to the Givaudan
Perfumery,

to inspire Olivier Pescheux.

OK, let's smell. Here's a
disgusting picture of an open grave

and bodies decaying without lids
on the coffins. Cadavers, yeah.

Not very nice. Bit of an old onion.
Wow. Yep, pretty strong. Yeah.

Then of course, some of these,
very French - garlic.

Very strong smell.

Merchants from all over
the country flocked

to the biggest market in Paris,
Les Halles, to sell their goods.

Emile Zola later called it
the stomach of Paris.

That's not so fresh.

Without refrigeration, age-old meat,
rotting vegetables and rancid cheese

would vie for the nose's attention,
with the manure and garbage
that festered in the streets.

Fresh this morning.

Where did you find that in Paris?

Some horse manure.

With only nine bath houses and
a general suspicion of water,

washing was rare. The worst smell
was from the people themselves,
escaping from every pore.

Smelly T-shirt that I've been
wearing for a few days.
Wow. It's yours? Yep, afraid so.

Breath smelling of rotting teeth and
sour milk, stale sweat, dirty hair,

bodily secretions. Human urine.

OK, I'm not going to smell it,
OK, I trust you, thank you.

In the perfume lab,

we concoct a powerful blend
of some pretty evil ingredients,

with a base note of stale urine
and a top note of old fish.

An hour later, our bespoke
18th-century stench
is ready for a snifter.

So you want to smell the result
of Paris? Yes, please.

Will you be marketing
this one heavily?

That's going to be difficult, yeah.

Oh, that's so bad!
Yeah. It brings tears to the eyes.

You have everything actually.
Everything?

Especially this one. From the horse.

It's a little bit like garlic also.

A little bit like
garlic, yeah, it's quite...

Fatty, heavy. Quite musky.

It comes in different waves.
Sometimes

overwhelming vegetable smell and
then suddenly some fish, or some
rotting flesh comes at you.

Eurgh.

I would not like to live
in that world.

This stuff really stinks,
but don't just take my word for it.

I'm going to unleash it onto
Parisians today, to see if they can

stomach what their city would have
smelt like 200 years ago.

Madame...

Would you like to try some perfume?

Argh!

How about you?

They like it, that's great. It's,
er, meant to smell like a disgusting
street in 18th-century Paris.

It's weird.

What do you think it smells like?
I don't know, but I hate it.

Pas bon. Really? Not good.

OK. Can you try this perfume?

Not good?
SHE SPITS

Oh-ho! Excuse me.

Well, the people of Paris have
spoken, and they do not like the
Pong de Paris.

I can't say I'm
entirely surprised, it is

absolutely stinking, but that is as
close as most of these people are
ever going to come to time travel.

But back in the 18th century,
people knew their city stank -

what they were worried about was,
was that smell bad for them?

Paris was killing its own.

Around 20,000 people died each year
in the capital, one in four newborns

perished and the average life
expectancy at birth for a poor
labourer was just 23 years.

The shocking death toll was so bad
that it created a macabre problem.

It wasnust the waste
from the living that made
Paris stink so much.

The city was terribly overcrowded
and so too, inevitably,
were its burial grounds.

And this square is on the site
of what in the 18th century
was the largest of them all.

It was known as the Cemetery of the
Innocents and for eight centuries,
Parisians buried their

dead in the ground here, in a
completely haphazard fashion,
few of them in proper coffins.

Rotting corpses,
ravaged by smallpox,

tuberculosis and syphilis started
piling up in church graveyards.

Parishioners stayed away from their
daily worship as the smell of bodies

was so strong, it make their eyes
water and their throats retch.

But that wasnll.

By the late 18th century, this place
was filled literally to overflowing
- As one local restaurateur, a Mr

Gravelot, found to his cost,
when he made a particularly
shocking trip to his basement.

In June 1780,
the smell emanating from Mr
Gravelotellar was revolting.

As he went to investigate, he
saw that his wall had collapsed,

and through the wet earth,
corpses were spilling out
from the adjacent cemetery.

Rotting, putrefying smells
like this terrified Parisians.

For centuries,
theyelieved that evil

odours themselves, miasmas, were
the cause of sickness and death.

But now, some
forward-thinking Parisians
were questioning this medieval idea.

They wanted to see if there
was a scientific link
between dirt and disease.

With historian Andrew Hussey,
Ietracing the steps of one

pioneering hygienist who wanted
to drag Paris out of the dark ages.

Itll a bit gentrified
around here now, isnt?

But this used to be a
real cesspit, did it?

This was, you know, I think
as a 21st century person,

you would have been on your
knees with the sheer noxiousness
of what went on round here.

I mean this, effectively, was an open
latrine, the river was full of sewage

and dead bodies, so this place
was absolutely amazingly rank.

So it sounds pretty noxious.

Was it actually bad for
peopleealth living round here?

People believed that smells
could kill you, but there was
no scientific basis for this.

But we havenot yet to the
age of hygiene, because thereo

connection between germ theory
and disease and mortality.

But in the age of reason, you know,
it was a logical question to ask why.

And who starts to ask those questions
and what do they start to find out?

The leading figure is a man of
science and reason called Jean Noel
Halle, and his assistant, who decided

that the best way to understand the
connection between smells and disease
was to set off in Paris, using the

only scientific equipment they had,
which was their noses, and to
discover what was really going on.

Armed with nothing but a map
and their sense of smell,
Halle and his assistant embarked

on a route that penetrated the
most notoriously filthy and
contaminated areas of Paris.

Their aim was to improve public
hygiene by recording which
areas smelt worse and why.

First, they descended to
the banks of the Seine.

Ittill
not the cleanest city in the world,
some nasty-looking sludge.

Yeah. But there was a belief that
if you touched that, youet
gangrene within days.

But I donant to put it to
the test. Now wejust come

out of the Pont Neuf and we
got the Pont au Change over there.

Now this is described by Halle as a
kind of a mud bank thato black,
the stench is poisonous.

And thatecause iteing
fed by the open sewer of Chatelet,
which is just over there.

The mud bank of sewage
then meets the detritus

of the abattoirs and the butchers, so
yougot a mound of rotting meat.

You can imagine the
flies, the maggots, the larva,

and iturrounded, encrusted
by a kind of coulis of sewage.

It must have just been
relentless, because other cities
throughout the world have got rivers

where itidal and they kind of
get swept out, whereas the Seine
is quite slow-moving, isnt?

Yougot to think of the Seine as a
kind of open, weeping sore
in the centre of the city.

On their horrible ten kilometre
journey around the Seine,

they recorded the levels of human
sewage, rotting matter and fetid
air, to establish the difference

between merely unpleasant pongs and
smells that were actually dangerous.

The area that was
most distressing to the

Parisians was the east of Paris, the
centre for the polluting industries.

There, the noxious fumes from
the rancid tanneries was so acute

that Halle heroically sent
his assistant to go on alone.

What happened was that he went down
there, right down to the tanneries,

and within half an hour, his tongue
had swollen up, his mouth had swollen
up, with lesions on his throat,

he was retching,
his mouth was ulcerated,
he thought he was going to die.

And he came back to Halle and
he said, dono down there
under any circumstances.

Well, when he recovered,
what they worked out was there was
the distinction between the stench of

excrement over there in the west
and the poisons that could kill you
over in the east.

Now this wasnerm theory, this
wasnhe beginnings of germ theory,
but it was the distinction between

smell, which can be pretty harmless,
and poison, which is going
to kill you. Thatreat.

So although it was very primitive,
this was the first time that anyone

had actually experimented with
it, in a kind of scientific way.

I donhink itny exaggeration
to say that what happens here is one

of those moments in history where
yougot a gear change between the
medieval mind and the modern mind,

the medieval city
and the modern city.

And Paris is the first modern city in
the world, everything we see around
us was invented in the 19th century,

as a product of modernity,
laying order over disorder.

And Halleourney through
the excrement, the smells,

the nasty pongs of Paris, was the
beginning of that historical journey.

It wasnust the men of science
who had a vision for a modern,
cleaner and healthier future,

but also a group of intellectuals,
who were offering the emerging
educated and literate middle class,

the bourgeoisie,
a very persuasive alternative to
life in stinking Paris.

I always loved coming to this place,
it consciously imitates the Pantheon

in Rome, where the ancient Romans
went to celebrate their gods.

But this is a temple not of gods
but of men, of people like Voltaire

and Rousseau,
the Olympians of the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment was a movement of
change, where thinkers used science

and reason to challenge authority,
tradition and superstition.

And Voltaire believed
that a sanitary, clean, civilised

city was very much part of a new,
enlightened society, and he was so

disgusted by the filth of Paris that
he began to imagine what a new city
would smell and look like.

We rightly blush to see public
markets in narrow streets displaying

dirtiness, spreading infection
and causing public disorders.

We need to open public markets,
water fountains which work,

we must widen the narrow
and unhealthy streets.

Filth was now becoming a
catalyst for political change.

Generations of oppression,
squalor and desperation
had reached tipping point.

The Parisians were now clamouring to
radically improve their overcrowded,
stinking and poisoned city.

In a bid to quell
the mounting unrest,

the king commissioned a nationwide
survey of his subjectsncerns.

Gathered from all over the country,
the national archives keeps
all the written complaints.

These are the cahiers de doleances,
the books of grievances,
and there are 25,000 of them.

We have just a
fraction of them here.

This was a remarkable,
totally unexpected response

to Louistempt to placate his
people by asking them what was
concerning them in their lives.

And actually, it was
a huge reservoir of

bitterness that had been building
up, because theyeen denied
that kind of outlet before.

So this was an unprecedented
national survey, it gives us a

wonderful snapshot of what life was
like in late 18th century France.

This one here talks about the people
that live near a slaughter house,

and they say the smell is
absolutely terrible, stinking,
particularly in the summer.

And theyterribly worried
about the effect of fire during
the process of making candles.

Fire of course was an omnipresent
fear for people that lived in these

tightly-packed conditions,
wooden houses.

Itonderful how rough these
are, you can still see people
signatures and crossings-out as

people change their mind. These ones
were collated just a few years later
into slightly smarter volumes.

This one refers to the River Bievre,
which is the tributary to the Seine,

where all the
tanneries were of course.

And it says that the water was so
polluted it was impossible to drink,

impossible to make soup out of,
particularly with all the dye from

the colourists that was flooding
in there, and people were worried
theye poisoned.

Really what lies behind all
this is the idea of rights.

The people of France had
come to believe that they

had rights that were being infringed
by their denial of access to clean
water and decent living conditions.

They wanted to be heard and
they wanted to protect those
rights and advance them.

This man here is an architect,
and he says heeen forwarding all

sorts of ideas for
cleaning up Paris.

For example,
dredging the Seine, which at the
moment is nothing but a sewer.

But heot being listened to.
And people were struggling to
improve their quality of life, and

for them it was absolutely linked in
their minds to the achievement of
political rights as well.

Thathy these documents
are not just a list of grievances,
they are revolutionary.

Expectations had been raised.

From all over France, tens
of thousands contributed.

And those whoigned
wanted to see significant results.

They believed the king would act
in their interests and alleviate the

filth and degradation piled upon
them, but after all this effort,

when the complaints were read at the
Palace of Versailles in May 1789,
it was a total sham.

The scale of the problems were
so vast that the king, with

little money or inclination to take
on this challenge, changed nothing.

Whato ironic
about the kingit gesture is
that it totally backfired.

People were politicised,
they were radicalised by this
process of consultation.

It gave them the taste for political
involvement, it also showed just how
impotent the king was.

He was penniless so he was unable
to do anything about all these
grievances that had been raised.

Rather than dispelling revolutionary
feeling in the country,
the king had fanned its flames.

Parisians were incensed that their
suggestions for a modern, cleaner
and more just city had been ignored.

On the streets,
the anger was palpable.

The masses were ready for action.

Incendiary pamphlets
flew off the printing presses,

revolutionary speakers fired up
the people in the streets.

And in this cafe, radicals gathered
to plan their strategy.

One of them was a 26 year-old
called Camille Desmoulins,
and on the 12th of July 1789,

he made one particularly fervent
speech, brandishing a pistol.

From one end of the country
to the other, he said,
"The same universal cry is heard.

"Everyone wants to be free."

Paris was slipping
from the king's grasp.

Middle class revolutionaries started
to adopt the filth covered clothes

of tradesmen to stress their
solidarity with the workers.

Revolution was in the air.

What finally tipped the city into
open revolt was a natural disaster.

A volcano erupted in Iceland,
causing havoc across Europe.

The harvest in 1788 was decimated.

Making bread, the most basic staple,
impossible to buy.

Such was the desperation
that fights broke out.

Bakers were even lynched
for stockpiling flour

or using the contaminated
river water to make foul bread.

Events now accelerated
with terrifying momentum.

Paris was seething, people were
living surrounded by filth,

unable to afford bread
and being ruled over

by a king who was useless
and his administration,

who despite all of their taxes,
was bankrupt.

And when people are threatened
with starvation,

when people are desperate,
they turn violent.

On July 14th 1789,
the people of Paris charged
through the filthy streets.

It was revolution.

They wanted their
basic human rights.

A cleaner, modern city for all
and an end to royal tyranny.

As they marched up this road toward
the site of the Bastille,

which is just there, they were
starting a long French tradition

of resistance and revolution.

Today, people are marching about
pensions, but ever since then,

the French people have marched,
physically and metaphorically,
towards the Bastille.

The Bastille was the main prison
in Paris

and was thought to contain supplies
of muskets and gunpowder

The starving, dirty, marauding mob
wanted to storm the fortress

and arm themselves against
the king's troops.

The choice of the Bastille
was obvious.

For the people of Paris
it symbolised arbitrary,
tyrannical government.

The king was allowed to throw men
in there as political prisoners
without due process of law.

Filth even played it's part.

One key revolutionary, Santerre,
dragged carts filled with

horse manure up to the Bastille
and set them alight.

The acrid smoke was crucial
in shielding the mob's advance.

Like these protesters today,

the rioters arrived here at the
Bastille and stormed the fortress.

They carried out the governor
and executed him in the street.

It was the start of the bloodiest
revolution in French history.

The storming of the Bastille
is still celebrated every
year all over France.

It symbolises the start
of the French Revolution

and the first steps towards
a modern democracy

based on the principles of liberte,
egalite and fraternite.

Just a month after the Bastille
was stormed,

a document was drawn up
outlining the people's vision

to state their
basic human rights.

It's kept under lock and key
here at the national archives.

This really is a unique opportunity
to have a look at a momentous

landmark on the road to modern,
democratic thought.

I have to be very,
very careful here.

Because it is the Declarations
of the Rights of Man and Citizen,

made in 1789,
and it's still a beautiful document,

just incredible to be handling
the original like this.

It's also one of the most
inflammatory documents ever created

because this lists a series
of rights that men have,

not as a product of their class or
their race or educational background

or their wealth,
but because they are men.

And any government that disrespects
those rights

is illegitimate
and should be overthrown.

It a very short document,
it's only 800 words,

it could be easily printed
on one page,

easily understood, and it
spread like wildfire through Europe.

It was translated into
countless languages.

And the preamble starts by making
a strong link between rights

and the actual living conditions
of normal people.

Rights matter,
and this is the reason.

It says, "The representatives
of the French people believe
that ignorance,

"neglect or contempt
of the rights of man are the
sole cause of public calamities

"and of the corruption
of governments."

Once you've defined the rights
of man, you can build a
government that protects them,

and that will be a better government
than what has gone before.

Incredible to think that out of
the seething, filthy chaos of Paris,

a cornerstone
of western democracy was laid.

It is such an influential
document that it's seared into
the fabric of our modern world.

When the United Nations
set down their Declaration
of Human Rights in 1948,

it was modelled on this.

And today, here in Paris,
proud Parisians have displayed

every word on the walls
of the Metro station Concorde.

But back in the 18th century,
it was just too radical
for the king to accept.

He refused to relinquish his
sovereign power into
the hands of the great unwashed.

But soon the people
gave him no choice.

In the autumn of 1789, a group
of rowdy women gathered in Paris.

Fishmongers, prostitutes
and market stall holders,
determined to march to Versailles.

They confronted the king
and demanded food and demanded
his presence in Paris.

Reluctantly, he signed this,
and his signature is still here.

But as the months wore on, feeling
became increasingly radicalised.

Louis himself was seen
now to be incompatible

with the sentiments
expressed in this document,

and for that, he would pay
the ultimate price.

The people's desire
for a more ordered,

just and sanitary city was clear.

But the path to modernity would be
gruelling and bloody.

Paris was about to get filthier
and more chaotic than ever.

A typical, rather quaint street
in a touristy part of Paris,
lined with pleasant shops.

But behind this door is a machine
that's become synonymous

with all that is
ghoulish and macabre.

Wow.

Guillotine, one of only
four remaining from
the revolutionary period

and the only one here in Paris.

It's a lot bigger than
I was expecting, it must have
towered over the crowd.

It's amazing being this close
to what is definitely

the most infamous instrument
of death in history.

I wonder if it's still sharp?

This killing machine
was first used in 1792.

It was revolutionary
execution technology.

But despite it's terrifying
reputation for bloodshed,

it's also an example of
equality and human rights.

This is a surprisingly humane
form of capital punishment.

For centuries, execution
had a class divide.

Ordinary prisoners were slowly
hanged, broken on the wheel,
or burnt at the stake.

The aristocracy were more
simply decapitated by sword.

Armourer Damian Mitchell
is showing why this method was just

too inefficient for mass slaughter.
It's pretty heavy, isn't it?

It's weighted at the end,

so when you get the swing,
it cuts through the air.

The drawbacks of killing with a sword
is it's not very efficient.

You would have to sharpen it
afterwards, and if the cut was not
exact, it could be a painful death.

You can't guarantee
a clean kill every time.

So even skilled swordsmen
would occasionally mess up?

One small twist either way and
you can take a nose or an ear off.

They would have to be finished off
as they were lying there screaming.

Would you like to see how it works?
Yeah. OK.

It's not a human head,
this is a piece of lamb that
we got from the butchers today,

to give you the indication
of how difficult it is

and why they moved from the sword
onto the guillotine.

So I want to go for about there,
I think.

So remind me, it's up...?

Up, it's the twist,
build momentum,
very similar to a golf swing,

if you start thinking like that.

Golf is a good walk ruined,
I've never played in my life.
But I'll try it.

Ooh, you can really feel that
in your shoulders. Absolutely.

Let me take that off you. Wow.

Now you can see, we've got
quite a clean cut there,

cut all the way through the bone.

You can feel that
as you pass through it,

it sends a jolt
right through your body. Yeah.

It's amazing, the concentration...
I was trying to get that sweep
spot and it takes incredible focus.

But imagine 1,000 people
trying to watch you as you do this,

you're normally masked, there'sa lot
of pomp and ceremony attached,

so the pressure would have been on.

It's a windy day... Absolutely.

There was just too much potential
for making gory mistakes.

You can see why the guillotine is
a far more efficient way of doing
it.

This is the mechanisation
of that process, isn't it?

Absolutely, you would have a master
executioner with six assistants,

and it is like a production line.

So you'd be strapped to the bascule,
which is like a wheelbarrow,

they would be wheeled in,
your neck would be placed.

And then you'd drop this,
the lunette, which means
half moon, onto the neck.

I can see why. And locked in place.

And the blade, like when you cut
bread at home, nice and angled

so it would cut all the way through,
so that all the pressure is
at one point instead of flat.

So you're talking about 35 kilos
falling seven feet,

and that's a serious amount of force,
so it would cut
straight through the neck.

We can put something inside it
and see how efficient it can be.

Nicely, so all the way in.

OK, ready? Yeah.

Whoa.

That is unbelievable.
You get a sense of the force

because the meat just fires
into the basket, it's hocking.

Cut clean through
and this hasn't been used for
the best part of 150 years.

You can see here how
it just cut straight through.

That is just astonishing, isn't it?

Wow. So this is an
enlightened bit of kit,

it's science finding more efficient
ways of killing people.

It was an instrument of equality.

And it didn't matter who you were,
king, pauper, peasant,

soldier, this is how your life
was ended.

Super-efficient the guillotine
may have been, but
this created another problem.

The scale of the bloodshed.

As the revolution grew ever more
radical,

eventually it was decided
that only the blood
of King Louis XVI himself

could wash away the remnants
of the absolutist state.

Only with the king dead
could France be democratic and free.

And so, on the 21st of January 1793,
Louis was brought here,

to what is now
the Place de la Concorde.

In front of his cart marched
drummers to drown out the sound
of any loyal shouts in the crowd.

Thousands of people gathered here,
a guillotine towering above them.

Once on it,
Louis made a brave speech pardoning

his executioners and seconds later,
his head was severed from his body.

There was silence,
then people surged forward
with their handkerchiefs,

trying to dip it
in the blood of the king.

A grisly souvenir
of what was an historic day.

But the king's death wasn't enough.

Following his execution,
the terror began.

Thousands were executed
as rival political factions
fought for supremacy.

And with that came unprecedented
amounts of gruesome filth.

The most famous executioner
was Charles Henri Sanson.

On a good day, he could execute
up to one person a minute.

He said, "I can chop off your
head in the twinkling of an eye

"and you'll only feel a slight
freshness around the neck."

As the head was severed, the body
jerked back, muscles twitching,

and supposedly the blood in the head

would keep the victim's brain
alive for three to five seconds.

This was a gruesome,
but compelling spectacle.

The crowd packed into this square,
baying for blood.

The victims were led
onto the guillotine

and then everyone listened out
for the terrifying sound,

the rasp and the thud,
as the blade cut

into the victim's neck and the crash
as their head fell into the basket.

But all these killings,
300 in one weekend, for example,

were giving Paris a new problem.

That was a lot of bodies.

It wasn't just the loathed
aristocracy that
were being massacred,

but anyone seen as unrevolutionary,

calling each other
madame or monsieur,
instead of brother or citizen.

Here in Paris, 2,794 people
were killed.

The youngest was 13,
the oldest was 93.

Piles of decapitated bodies
and severed heads made
for an unbearably grisly city.

The streets were filled with
the stench of rotting bodies

and pools of fermented blood
that became rancid in the heat.

You can always tell an
executioner in revolutionary Paris.

He had blood to his elbows,
there was so much of it about.

They tried digging trenches
and pits, but soon those overflowed.

Each human, when decapitated,

produces about
three litres of blood,

so this whole area would have been

covered in pools of stagnant blood
with human tissue in

and flies buzzing around.

With Paris at its most
pestilent and grim,

some way had to be found to deal
with the piles of bloody bodies.

The Chapelle Expiatoire
is built on the site of
one of the largest mass burial pits.

During the terror, thousands of
bodies were brought here, stripped
of their clothing and rotting.

One man who has experience of mass
graves full of putrefying corpses

is forensic pathologist
Dr Dick Sheperd.

There were two huge pits
at this site that were dug,
about three metres deep.

Into them the bodies were tipped.

Is this also where
the king and queen were brought?

Yep, they were buried in
exactly the same place,

so Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette,
one in January, one in October, were
dumped here in exactly the same way.

So different to the way their
ancestors were buried, thrown into a
grave with all the commoners and...

Absolutely, it's complete degradation
aimed at these people.

I can't imagine
a more disgusting sight,

and of course the smell would have
been mind-blowing.

To look into this pit,
200 or so years ago,

would have been
just utterly, utterly awful.

In it would have been bodies in
all stages of decomposition,

there would probably have been fluid
at the bottom, so they have been
floating around a bit in the fluids.

In your career you've seen
burial pits with people that
have been in mass killings.

Can you give me any sense of
what that looks and smells like?

The smell is just horrendous.

We all know what a piece of off meat
smells like in the fridge.

Just imagine that with thousands
and thousands of rotting bodies.

It is just a disgusting stench.

How long does it take for someone
to decompose? What are the stages?

It is a totally temperature-dependent
process.

The warmer the temperature, the
faster decomposition will take place.

The process begins usually with
green discolouration of the abdomen,

then you get this change in the skin
as the bacteria from the body
spreads throughout the blood vessels

and produces quite a pretty
discolouration on the skin
called marbling,

because it's like the veins of colour
you get through a good marble.

And then the body will begin to
bloat, then you'll get the distension
of the abdomen, the genitalia,

there'll be leakage of the fluids
from all of the orifices,
any areas of damage.

And then, after that rather wet
decomposition phase, the process
then will be hastened by maggots.

This pit was more unpleasant
than most because they had
their heads chopped off as well.

Exactly. Their heads would have
been separate and it may have had

a peculiar effect that the heads
would have been better preserved,

so would perhaps have remained
more recognisable for longer.

More than a decade after
the revolution ended, the skeletal
remains were finally laid to rest.

With the cemeteries
already overflowing,

the authorities had found a burial
place for centuries of Paris' dead.

These labyrinthine catacombs were
fashioned as a grisly mausoleum.

As you enter, the sign reads, "Stop,
this is the empire of death."

I'm 20 or 30 metres
below the streets of Paris

and I've come to see the solution to
that overcrowding in the cemeteries.

And that is finding an old limestone
quarry here and sticking the remains
of countless bodies in here.

It's absolutely extraordinary,
I've never seen anything like it.

It's macabre, look how they're all
ghoulishly laid out.

A mixture of decoration and...
and uniformity.

It's extraordinary.

And look down there, it stretches
for half a mile underground.

They have tried to estimate how many
bodies are in here

and they think
it's something like six million.

And you can see why. This is
two metres high, this bank here,

and it stretches back.

I can't even see the back wall.

30 or 40 metres, I'd say, at least.

It's just extraordinary.

Somewhere in this section here
are also the remains

of the thousands of people
who were killed on the guillotine.

They were dug up out of that
burial pit. It's amazing to think
they're in here as well.

And while some order was being
imposed on this necropolis
underground, one man up there

was trying to do the same
on the streets of Paris.

He was a courageous, handsome,
successful general who had been
winning battles right across Europe.

After a revolutionary decade,
Napoleon turned his attention

to the still turbulent city,
with another adversary in mind.

He was determined
to wage war on filth.

Famous for spending hours
luxuriating in lovely hot baths,

Napoleon had himself crowned
emperor of the French in 1804.

He had an obsession with clean,
fresh water, so his accession

marked a new era for Paris
in terms of health and hygiene.

Fresh water fountains and canals
sprang up all over the city.

He commissioned 56 of
these ornamental fountains,

had five new bridges built,

eight covered markets to sell
food and flowers

and five new slaughterhouses
to feed the city.

His dream was to turn Paris into the
most beautiful city in the world,

a contemporary version
of Imperial Rome.

To do that, he drove this
magnificent boulevard through
the city, the Champs Elysees.

And at the end he erected that
arch to his military victories,
the Arc de Triomphe.

For me, Napoleon shouldn't just be
heralded as a military genius

and architectural visionary,
he should also be remembered

for declaring war on Paris'
invisible enemy.

One of the worst killers in France
was smallpox.

'Frederic Tangy at the Institut
Pasteur specialises in vaccination,

'the weapon Napoleon used
to fight this virulent disease.'

So, in honour of Napoleon's
breakthrough with smallpox,

I decided to get some makeup
put on, some prosthetics.

How good do you think that is?
Looks like smallpox?

Yeah, it looks like smallpox
but the pustules are too scarce.

You don't have enough. There would
have been more than this?

Yes, this is a true
image of smallpox,

your whole body should be covered.

Wow, ugh! This is...this is awful.

This is awful, this is
probably one of the most...

the worst disease that humanity
ever experienced.

That's incredible. And is that
terribly painful as well?

Yes, very painful, because each one,
you will have a scar.

And it's very... You scratch the
scar, you bleed, you rescratch, etc.

Once you are infected like that,
the virus goes into your blood

then invades your lung, your spleen,
your stomach, your everywhere, OK?

And when you have that inside the
body, you die in a matter of days.

'With tens of thousands dying of
smallpox in France each year,
Napoleon took a radical approach.

'In 1809 he pioneered

'the first ever state-funded
immunisation programme.'

He thought of himself
as a very modern man, I suppose?

Yes, he decided to protect his troops
and to protect the country

and he decided to have a country
where everybody has the same right.

Because it was just after
the French Revolution,

so he wanted people making...
what he thought was good for them.

So everybody must be vaccinated,
must be clean, must go to school.

He invented the mass vaccination
campaigns, in fact. Incredible.

Vaccination is a way of protecting
the whole society

rather than yourself, so you protect
yourself but you protect the others.

So where does the idea of
vaccinating come from?

The observation
that already infected people are
protected from the next epidemic.

So the first idea was to take
something from those pustules and
to give that to other people.

You'd be a brave person if you...
Yeah, which is disgusting, I agree.

So you'd get one of these.

Yeah, you take that.
Then you take a little bit.

Scoop some pus out of there. Yes.

And you scratch it on another guy.

Disgusting, isn't it?
So you infect him with your disease.

Although this arm-to-arm inoculation
looks rudimentary and risky,

it forms the basis of how
vaccinations work today.

In fact, the word vaccination
came from this period,

when cowpox was used instead of
human pustules,

and vacca is the Latin for cow.

Napoleon had started to put Paris
on the road to modernity,

with improvements to public health
creating some order from the chaos.

But there was still
a long way to go.

It wasn't until 1848, when Napoleon's
nephew, Louis Napoleon III,
came to power,

that the Parisians got a leader
determined to finish the job.

After more decades of conflict,
revolutions and turmoil,

Paris was still desperate
for the ultimate clean-up,
to finally wrench it away

from centuries of filth,
pestilence and squalor

and drag it
into the modern, civilised world.

This was to be an absolutely
no-nonsense approach, there
would be no more pissing around.

In 1850 they passed a law which
forbade urinating on the street and
they established 500 of these,

ironically nicknamed Vespasiennes,
after the Roman Emperor Vespasian,

who put jugs of drinking water
on the street for citizens

and fined heavily anyone
found jovially pissing in them.

Not only were Parisians'
toilet habits freshening up
the city above ground,

down below the removal of the waste
was being tidied up considerably.

Next on the agenda was sewage.

In 1850,
Louis Napoleon ordered the small
vaulted sewers that his uncle built

to be made 20 times larger,
cleaner and more efficient.

Over 600 kilometres of tunnels were
built, funnelling all the waste
water away from the city centre

and bringing in clean running
water into people's homes.

It was an incredible feat of
engineering and is still lauded

as one of the more extensive
urban sewer systems in the world.

Not only were these sewers radically
cleaning up 19th-century Paris,

but they also instilled civic pride.

Visitors flocked to see
this sewage spectacular,

even the Tsar of Russia.

Paris was well on its way
to becoming a model modern city.

It wasn't just underground
that Paris was being cleaned up.

Above, the streets were getting
a radical, fresh new look.

This is now a pretty typical modern
road junction,

but back then
this was highly innovative.

Wide open streets, nice and airy,
and on the ground this, Tarmac.

A Scottish invention but used
here in Paris for the first time.

This meant the roads were a lot
cleaner because the manure couldn't
get stuck between the cobbles.

It also meant people couldn't prise
the cobbles up and throw them during
bouts of revolutionary fervour.

Queen Victoria visited Paris in 1855
and she commented
on the beautiful roads.

Paris continued to forge ahead
as a pioneering city.

Its piece de resistance
was taking urban planning
to inspiring new heights.

In 1850, Napoleon III and his famous
chief architect, Baron Haussmann,

embarked on the strategic
beautification of Paris.

Haussmann dreamt of a city
with grand boulevards and parks
and buildings,

so that the whole thing would look
like a palace.

Haussmann acted with
remarkable audacity and ambition.

He bulldozed
three-quarters of Paris,

ripping out its guts, flattening
the city and calling himself

the world's first demolition artist.

He destroyed 20,000 houses
and built 40,000 more.

He planted 100,000 trees

and lined long pavements
with brand-new gas lamps.

And this is the effect of
that Haussmannisation,

the most dramatic reordering
of any city in Europe.

Look at these boulevards stretching
off in all different directions.

This one here runs five kilometres
without a single kink.

Parisians had the ordered,
clean city that they'd wanted.

But there was an irony here.

This was about strategy
as much as beautification.

Poor people
in the way of these streets

were moved out to the suburbs,

they're wide enough to make sure
that any revolutionary barricade
wouldn't really be effective.

Troops can be moved quickly from
one area of town to the next and
the field of fire here is perfect.

Soldiers could shoot down
revolutionary mobs
in no time at all.

Haussmann had sanitised Paris,
he had drained the swamp

from which revolutionary fervour
had been emanating for generations.

Paris had finally been dragged out
of the dark ages of its filthy past.

Centuries of chaotic,
squalid living,

filled with disease, pollution,
blood and death, had been cleansed.

Now in its place,
a pioneering, modern city
had emerged, resplendent.

Transformation of Paris
was a triumphant achievement.

These slum-like medieval streets,
with their squalor and filth,
their chaos and revolution,

had given birth to the world's
first truly modern city.

One which many still think
is the most beautiful on the planet.

It was an inspiration for
19th-century London and New York

and it became the blueprint
for the modern metropolis.

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