DOWN AND DIRTY : PARIS SEWERS AND SEWERMEN: Realities and Representations <i> By Donald Reid (Harvard University Press: $39.95; 235 pp.)</i>

Sewers? Yes, and a worthy subject it is. For in the grand sweep of French history, the sewers of Paris hold a privileged position.

For centuries, thiefs and subversives used the sewers as hiding places and staging areas. During the Nazi Occupation, the Germans used the sewers for air-raid shelters, and during the liberation of Paris, the Resistance used branches of the sewers as command posts and first-aid stations.

With such a distinguished past, the sewers often have been celebrated in French literature and film; in “Les Miserables,” Victor Hugo even deemed the Paris sewers an ideal prism through which to ponder the human condition:

“The history of men is reflected in the history of sewers,” Hugo wrote. “Crime, intelligence, social protest, freedom of conscience, thought, theft, all that human laws prosecuted or have prosecuted was hidden in this pit. . . .”

Following Hugo’s lead, author Donald Reid has come out with a fascinating book, “Paris Sewers and Sewermen.” Reid is a history professor at the University of North Carolina, and in his search for what makes France France and Paris Paris, no one can accuse him of not digging beneath the surface.

In an earlier book, “The Miners of Decazeville,” Reid focused on one mining community and through it examined the political, economic and social forces shaping industrial France. His new book is both an informative social history of the Paris sewers and an insightful study of the guiding vision of the city planners who helped make Paris into the urban model it is today.

As Reid makes clear, the French conceive of Paris not just as a city but as a vast political, economic, social and technological creation, a living work of art. Participatory art. Where else in the world do city planners and the general public so readily come to blows over prestigious urban projects? In the 1970s, the flash-point was the ultra-modern Pompidou Arts Center. In the ‘80s, it was President Francois Mitterrand’s decision to place a futurist glass pyramid right in The Louvre’s Napoleonic courtyard.

As heated as these controversies were, they pale beside the civic outrage that Reid describes during earlier phases of the creation of Paris, when a city garbage policy known as “ Tout a la rue ,” meaning throw everything into the street, produced mountains of waste: “Each quartier created dumps outside the city walls. Some achieved such heights that in the reign of Louis XIII they had to be incorporated within the city fortifications for fear that enemies would use them for gun emplacements during a siege.”

Long before Paris became known as the City of Light, decaying refuse, cesspools and a sewer system that was little more than open gutters earned Paris the nickname the City of Mud. All sorts of stench, pestilence and plague emerged from this untamed flood of waste, which in turn generated civic unrest and periodic threats to the political and social order. In a detail that would delight city planners and sanitation engineers, Reid describes the city’s efforts to bring all its human and organic waste under control, first by means of a central city dump and then by the development of a city-wide sewer system flushing sewage down-stream into the River Seine.

Bureaucratic in-fighting slowed the plan, and by the time of the French Revolution, the sewers were still a provocative symbol of urban decay and royal indifference. “Fears of mysterious goings-on in the sewers fed the culture of suspicion which infused the period,” Reid explains. Gendarmes frequently searched the sewers for caches of explosives or political outlaws in hiding.

Reid frames his narrative with sewer-related allusions from such distinguished writers as Victor Hugo, Alexis de Tocqueville, Emile Zola, Jean Giraudoux, even Sigmund Freud. These references are important, for they reflected public perceptions of the sewers and sewermen. As Reid stresses, planners understood the sewers’ clean-up had to be accompanied by a cleansing of the system’s public image. Sewermen too needed to be publicly rehabilitated; how could an aesthetically pleasing and efficiently run city be created if some of its most vital workers were perceived to be malodorous and diseased?

The clean-up was laced with ironies. In the 19th Century, the sewer administration urged its workers to dredge out salvageable goods so that they could be cleaned and sold to junk dealers, in what amounted to an early form of recycling. One item of especial worth was corks, as Reid explains: “The administration directed sewermen to skim these corks off the top of the water. It then sold them to perfumers, who cut them down for use as stoppers in perfume bottles. Thus did the foul meet the fragrant.”

Other prized items were the hip boots sewermen used to wade through the slime and muck being flushed through the sewers. When the sewermen had worn out a pair of boots, the soles were resold to make galoshes for rural workers who had to tramp through peat bogs. The leather uppers, stiff from the constant soaking in water and muck, were resold to Parisian boot makers, who refashioned them into high-heeled ankle boots for the well-heeled bourgeoisie. Prof. Reid: “Such projects of recuperation questioned the boundaries delineating the lower depths and high society, the fetid and the feminine.”

In their search for creative solutions to the problems posed by human and organic waste, French engineers turned the waste into fertilizer and used it to grow cash crops in experimental “sewage farms” in the suburb of Gennevilliers. Besides its ecological merit, Reid explains that the project had more ambitious goals: “The sewage of Paris, far from devastating Gennevilliers, would serve as its entree to commerce and civilization.”

In Reid’s account, two men stand out. One is a brilliant 19th-Century public-health expert named Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Parent-Duchatelet. Thanks to his administration, sewermen, once the “untouchables” of France’s caste system, became exemplary civil servants, with salaries and benefits that became the envy of the labor movement and a symbol of political enlightenment. It was largely because of Parent-Duchatelet that Reid was able to write in his conclusion that the transformation of the sewer system made ordure (garbage) and odeur (odor) give way to ordre (social order.)”

The other man who emerges as a visionary is Baron George Eugene Haussmann, the man who redesigned Paris during the reign of Napoleon III. Haussmann is responsible for many of the joys of Paris today, from its broad, tree-lined boulevards to its sweeps of open space and green. Water supplies and sewage were critical to his plans, and Haussmann was the key to making the Paris sewer system into such a sparkling success that visitors even today tour the system and marvel at its efficiency and ingenuity.

As fascinating as his story is, and with all the information and insight he has to offer, Reid makes few concessions to the general American reader. His scholarly approach presupposes his readers will have a strong knowledge of French history, and as thorough as Reid’s narrative is, a reader waits in vain for an enlightening contrast to, say, the sewers of New York or perhaps those of Washington, designed as they were by a Frenchman.

Reid also whets the reader’s appetite for a more comprehensive conclusion, showing how the mentality that built the sewers still guides Paris planners today as they keep refining the Metro, the bus and rail networks, the revamped phone system and the trice-daily mail service. But Reid does not go that far.

At least not yet. Part of the joy of reading Reid is that he shows no inclination to join the legions of other writers who rhapsodize about the eternal beauty of the City of Light, and who fawn over its painters, poets and philosophers, or its cafes, wine and cuisine.

But now that he has burrowed into its sewers, Reid has raised at least this reader’s hope that he will now turn his attention and expertise to the unequaled splendors of Paris above ground. A biography of Baron Haussmann would seem a natural.