Customer Reviews

Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910

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Professor Jackson's book finally provides English-language audiences with a historical narrative of the little-known Paris flooding of 1910. While Paris is one of the most written-about cities, and this era (the belle epoque) is one of the most written-about periods in Paris history, Jackson has unearthed a gripping tale of belle epoque Paris that we have not yet heard much about. Largely relegated to local and popular memory in Paris, the flooding of 1910 is exactly the kind of forgotten moment that historians long to find hidden in the archive. Jackson's exemplary research and writing have done just that. In flowing, readable prose, Jackson describes the catastrophic flooding, the ways it shut down the city, and the ways that Parisians banded together to survive the disaster. Not just a story for those interested in the environmental history of natural disasters, this book focuses more on the human dimensions of the flooding - the disaster's social, political and cultural effects and the human response to disaster. The book is saturated with rich, detailed narrative of daily events during the flooding and eye-witness reactions from Paris memoirs and other texts, giving the reader a vivid sense of Paris's damp, cold and disorder in January of 1910. This story holds important lessons for students of disaster management, urban history, environmental history and French history, and Jackson has carefully crafted the book to be equally readable and rewarding for scholars and laypersons alike. This is excellent reading for those interested in how human communities (especially cities) respond to disasters like the Paris heatwave of 2003 or Hurricane Katrina.

Paris Under Water is a clearly written narrative about the flood of the Seine in Paris during January and February 1910. Jackson takes a lesser-known event and spins an evocative, non-fiction account of both unknown and well-known victims and both anonymous and famous places (especially memorable scenes include: the Louvre Museum threatened by rising water; the Orsay train station platforms seemingly lagooned and unusable; the Metro tunnels flooded and fetid). I especially loved Jackson's use of the period photographs that begin each chapter and are occasionally scattered throughout the text. They enliven the story and help the reader imagine the scene. Paris has been the subject of beautiful and touristy photographs for more than 100 years--it's fascinating to see Paris "underwater" and in a new way. Jackson and the photographs he chose also focus on the ways in which everyday Parisians pitched in and helped one another during the crisis--definitely a useful lesson as more and more disasters seem to threaten our world and require us once again to come to the aid of others.

The mark of a high-quality work of history is the ability to weave compelling storytelling with an explanation of the story's deeper meaning. In "Paris Under Water," Jeff Jackson has given us such an achievement. The story of the flood--how it was caused, what damage it wrought, how Parisians responded--is recreated from a number of interesting sources and weaved into a gripping narrative. But his interpretation of the event, most notably the way in which the flood forged, strengthened, and embodied a national and local character and became an important "trial run" of national unity prior to the the Great War, deepens the experience for the reader.

Over the past few years, chronicles of disasters and the ways in which people respond to them have become increasingly relevant and interesting. Douglas Brinkley's "The Great Deluge," Rebecca Solnit's "A Paradise Built in Hell," Campanella's and Vale's "Resilient Cities," and others have delved into the intensity of post-disaster experiences. "Paris Under Water" joins these other important works as a must-read for anyone interested in the physical, civic, cultural, and spiritual components of disasters. And Jackson has established himself as a rare writer who gracefully bridges the often insurmountable gap between academic rigor and popular accessibility.

I know that Paris is called "La Ville-Lumière" (the City of Light), the city for lovers, where Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire danced through the bistros and into the streets, and that we love it in the spring time...and evidently every other moment of the year. We love it through the Hollywood lens. Until I read Paris Under Water, I did not know that its people, its year round citizens, had endured such a calamitous flood as it did in January of 1910 and at a time of year when it is already cold and damp and difficult to be warm and comfortable. This amazing and complex story of the flooding of basements and streets and train stations and fields throughout Paris is laid out for us in historical detail and in a story form that makes it a good read. The flood affected the citizens of Paris, and their neighborhoods, stores and factories and this book gives us those stories. I do recommend this book for history buffs and winter readers and beach readers and for people like me who like to learn new things about places we think we already know.

This book grabbed my interest from the very first paragraph. Telling of a little known event in such a descriptive way it compelled me to read on. The book is not only facts in history, but they are well told in a story format by a very skilled storyteller.

To answer my own question, I doubt it. But Paris is Paris, so a flood that did a lot of individual damage and received widespread press a century ago is now recounted in over 200 pages of pretty numbing detail. Professor Jackson does his educational homework and draws on many contemporary sources for a number of individual stories, but not a whole lot of analysis or overview. Why does this flood matter more than others? What lessons were learned from it? What is the context? While there is a belated and half-hearted effort to address those questions in the final chapter, Paris Under Water misses the forest and gives us a lot of individual trees of people complaining about the amount of compensation they received for their losses or being plucked from the water by boats. At the end of the book it's even unclear how many people, if any, died as a direct result of the flood. Professor Jackson says he first learned about the flood while touring through the Paris sewers in 2005. There's a reason for that -- as floods go, this one was middling. Just as -- as books go -- this one is competent, but not compelling.

Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 was one of the most interesting, best researched, and just plain fascinating books I have read in a long time. I was hooked from the very beginning when the author explained that although the flood was a serious event in the history of Paris it was virtually unknown today. I realized at this point that this was not going to be one of your run of the mill disaster books. In fact, it turned out to be a real page turner. Professor Jackson organizes his material chronologically; however, it is the geographical and social variety that makes the book so interesting and easy to read. The geographic locus is very broad. The author examines the cause as well as the impact of the flood on the neighborhoods of Paris and its suburbs, as well as the small cities and towns outside of Paris.

For me, the most fascinating aspect of the book was the variety of sources upon which the author draws to give a full and complete picture of how people managed during this disaster. There are reports from journalists, French of course, but also British and American. There are diaries from people who experienced the flood, newspaper reports, official documents and records of decision makers, both political and administrative. One of the most fascinating of the latter is Police Prefect Louis Lepine who is beyond a doubt the hero of the story. As the senior civilian administrator he is everywhere gathering information and comforting people as well as being involved in most of the important decisions. From the point of view of one who teaches leadership the Police Prefect is an interesting study.

Constantly on display is the author's extensive knowledge of French history, culture, language, and best of all his familiarity with Paris, its monuments, buildings, infrastructure and people. A wonderful example of this is when the author describes the scene of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire departing after visiting a shelter that had been established in the Church of Saint-Sulspice. The author notes, "... Apollinaire might have looked up at the enormous Eugene Delacroix painting of Jacob trying to wrestle his blessing from an angel, a fitting metaphor for a city still struggling for its salvation." This is a wonderful story of destruction and resilience, frustration and patience, solidarity and selfishness that leaves one with the feeling that Parisians of that era were a hardy lot.

I loved this book! The writing flows smoother than the Seine -- you learn all sorts of telling details about life in Paris in the early twentieth century, and the book is full of vivid descriptions of the flood, making you feel like you're living through it yourself. There are well-done, telling profiles of both important figures and ordinary people upon whom the flood has an impact. Maybe best of all, it uses this extraordinary event to illustrate the political, social, and urban planning issues that Parisians faced in the era before World War One. Even an expert on French history would probably learn a lot from this book, but it's a great read for anyone who enjoys narrative non-fiction. Kudos to Jeffrey Jackson.

Seeing this book in the History section of the bookstore, I did a double take because I never knew that Paris had flooded 100 years ago. My own personal introduction to flooding came not from Katrina and its aftermath, but from the Great Chicago Flood which was the result of a misplaced pylon being driven into one of the branches of the deep tunnel system in Chicago.
Society never seems to be immune to disasters, but as time wears on the memories seem to fade or even become obliterated. In the case of the Paris flood, flooding was not exactly an unknown or unexpected phenomenom. As winter snow gradually melted there was usually a rise in the water level of the Seine which was the main artery of commerce into and out of the city. It was a public concern and city officials knew there was a real possibility of flooding of major proportion. However, at the time when their worst scenarios were realized, nothing effective was in place to handle the flooding. As the river breached its banks, the Metro was compromised and released a torrent of water into the area of the right bank. Complicating matters was recorded torrential rainfall. The city was facing all sorts of problems from a general lack of sanitation to a shortage of food. According to the author, parisians were often at odds with one another over a variety of things. There was rampant distrust of the military following the Dreyfus trial. There was serious concern that there might be civil unrest and that people would not come together to improve matters. However, for the most part, small and large acts on behalf of the city itself by its citizens saved Paris. Boats were put into use to ferry people around the city, there were acts of heroism to save lives, ordinary citizens restrained looters, funds were authorized to obtain food supplies, sanitation crews and municipal workers set about the tasks of sandbagging and cleaning the city. Through solid research and interesting vintage photographs the author reconstructed the flood of 1910. This was a very interesting book. Thoughtful, detailed and well-written, it provides insight into a somewhat forgotten disaster.

I live not far from the Seine, so the topic interested me. The book is interesting to a point, but there's really not enough in it to make a whole book, so the author had to stretch. He also tries to apply modern cultural perspectives to the situation--maybe the publisher asked for this--and I don't think it works terribly well. I did learn, however, how this flood happened. There is a mark on the street between the Metro and the Musée D'Orsay showing the high water mark (la crue) of the flood, and it is hard to believe.