Pissoirs: The Public Urinals of Paris from mid-19th Century

Paris in the early 19th century was a city of striking contradictions. Renowned for its art, culture, and architecture, it was also a city that smelled terrible. Streets were clogged with horse dung, rotting garbage, and the stale stench of urine. With no designated public facilities, men simply relieved themselves wherever they stood — against walls, in alleys, and along busy boulevards. The city had a hygiene problem, and it was completely out in the open.

The solution came in 1834, proposed by Claude-Philibert Barthelot, Comte de Rambuteau — a French official who had already been working to modernize Paris’s aging sewer system. Rambuteau championed the construction of public urinals across the city, simple cylindrical structures built from masonry. They were open on one side for access and decorated on the other. Because of their shape, Parisians quickly nicknamed them “colonnes Rambuteau” — Rambuteau columns.

Rambuteau, not particularly eager to have his name permanently linked to public urination, proposed an alternative name: “vespasiennes.” The name honored the Roman emperor Titus Flavius Vespasianus, who had famously taxed the collection of urine from public latrines — urine was used in the leather-tanning industry. The name stuck in formal usage, though on the street, these structures were simply called pissoirs. In French-speaking countries, that was the standard term. Elsewhere, the word “pissoir” carried a more exotic, French-sounding quality and was borrowed as a borrowed term for public urinals in general.

The early pissoirs were practical but basic. They left a man’s head and feet visible while shielding his midsection from public view — enough modesty to make the experience more dignified than using a street corner. As they spread across the city during the 1850s, they made a real dent in the problem of stale urine pooling on sidewalks and cobblestones. Paris’s streets, at least in this one respect, became noticeably cleaner.

Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s sweeping redesign of Paris in the mid-19th century brought the pissoir into a new era. Haussmann oversaw the installation of cast iron urinals in a wide variety of styles and sizes across the city. Some were single-unit columns; others were larger, multi-user enclosures with decorative ironwork. Screens were added to the older Rambuteau columns to provide additional privacy. The pissoir had evolved from a bare utility into something that fit within the visual language of Haussmann’s modernized Paris.

Designers produced numerous variations over the following decades. Some were slim and upright, barely wider than the man using them. Others were larger structures capable of serving multiple users at once, with more elaborate ironwork and roofing. All of them shared the same basic design principle: cover the torso, leave the head and feet exposed, and keep the footprint small enough to fit on a city sidewalk.

The question of providing similar facilities for women was raised at various points, but city planners consistently rejected it. The reason was straightforward: enclosed stalls for women would require significantly more space than the slim, open-sided columns used by men, and that space was not considered available on Paris’s public thoroughfares. Women were left without equivalent public facilities.

By the 1930s, pissoirs were a fully established feature of Parisian street life. The city had 1,230 of them at their peak. They stood on busy boulevards, in park squares, beside markets, and along the Seine. They were as unremarkable a part of the urban landscape as a lamp post or a bench. Then, slowly, their numbers began to fall. By 1966, only 329 remained. By 2006, just one survivor stood on the Boulevard Arago.

During World War II, the pissoirs served an unexpected secondary purpose. Members of the French Resistance used them as discreet meeting points and dead-letter drops — places to pass messages or hold brief conversations without drawing the attention of German occupiers. A man stopping at a pissoir attracted no suspicion. Inside one, a folded note or a whispered exchange went unnoticed.

Starting in 1980, the city began replacing its remaining pissoirs with Sanisettes — self-cleaning, enclosed, unisex units that required no attendant and served users of any gender. The technology was modern, the hygiene was better, and the old iron columns were dismantled one by one. The era of the pissoir was over.

The most detailed visual record of the pissoirs comes from the work of Charles Marville, one of the most accomplished photographers of 19th-century France. The city of Paris commissioned Marville to document its transformation under Haussmann — the new boulevards, the demolished neighborhoods, and the street furniture that defined urban life. Marville turned his camera on the pissoirs with the same careful attention he gave to grand monuments. His photographs show these structures as they actually existed: worn iron columns on busy street corners, integrated into the rhythms of daily Parisian life.

Marville’s photographs preserve something that would otherwise exist only in passing references — the texture of ordinary street life in a city undergoing one of the most dramatic urban transformations in history. The pissoir was never meant to be remarkable. It was a utility, a piece of civic infrastructure built to solve a very basic problem. But Marville photographed them as seriously as he photographed everything else, and because of that, they survive in extraordinary detail.