First exhibition of public urinals
Paris – They were as much a symbol of Paris as croissants and the Eiffel Tower, though they had more than a whiff of scandal from the start.
Now the much-mourned “pissotieres”, the dark-green public urinals that gave relief to generations of Parisian men, are finally getting their place in the city’s social and architectural history.
The first-ever exhibition in the French capital dedicated to the once ubiquitous and notorious facilities opened on Wednesday.
But the metropolis which invented the on-street urinal had an ambivalent attitude towards them from the unbuttoning of the first fly, said curator Marc Martin.
The one-man originals – with a rather phallic peppermill design – were quickly christened “Rambuteau’s columns” after the aristocratic city official who commissioned them in 1834.
Scandalised at the double entendre, “Monsieur Clean”, as he was nicknamed, tried to give the urinals a grander air by calling them “vespasiennes” after the Roman emperor Vespasian who once taxed urine – which the ancients use to bleach their togas.
But the pissotieres’ success quickly spawned three-, six- and eight-man versions – and that is when the fun began, laughed Martin, an artist and photographer who is a specialist on forgotten urban underworlds.
“They rapidly became places for hookups that would be impossible anywhere else. Generations of (gay) men were emancipated in them,” he said.
But beyond the gay world, they also played a pivotal role in French history as a place of secrets and subterfuge, used by spies to make drops and by Resistance fighters to pass messages and weapons out of sight from the Nazi occupiers during World War II.
Some of the disinformation that fuelled the anti-Semitic Dreyfus Affair, which rocked France at the turn of the 20th century, was spread through the pissotieres, Martin found through a decade of research.
But it was their reputation for illicit encounters that piqued the interest and the pens of writers from Verlaine and Rimbaud to Celine.
Some scholars believe Proust may have enjoyed pongy pleasures in their stalls. Martin said they were “an incredible vector in social and sexual mixing” where the man in “the strategic middle stall was usually there to do everything but go to the toilet”.
Martin said his own fascination with them began because he had the “first sensations” about his own sexuality “just as they were being closed down” in the early 1980s.