Paris sewers

Consecutive French governments enlarged the system to cover the city's population, including expansions under Louis XIV and Napoleon III, and modernisation programs in the 1990s under Mayor Jacques Chirac.

The system has featured in popular culture through its existence, including Victor Hugo's 1862 novel, Les Misérables, and H. L. Humes's 1958 novel The Underground City.

[citation needed] On at least two occasions in the late 1700s, Paris refused to build an updated water system that scientists had studied.

[citation needed] Voltaire wrote about it, saying that they "will not begrudge money for a Comic Opera, but will complain about building aqueducts worthy of Augustus".

[citation needed] In 1855, as a part of his plan to improve the sanitation and traffic circulation in Paris, Napoleon III ordered the construction of new boulevards, aqueducts and sewers.

[citation needed] His prefect for the Seine, Baron Haussmann, and the engineer Eugène Belgrand, designed the present Parisian sewer and water supply networks.

[citation needed] The aim was to carry all the Parisian wastewater to the Achères treatment plant using a network of effluent channels.

In the American television show The Honeymooners episode "The Man from Space", broadcast 31 December 1955, sewer worker Ed Norton comes in dressed as an 18th-century fop, and announces that he will win the Raccoon lodge costume ball because he is dressed as "Pierre Francois de la Brioski, designer of the Paris sewers."