Water supply improvements, typhoid epidemics, and environmental inequalities in France (1880s-1930s)

International audienceThe late decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century are the crucial period when modern sanitation systems became almost universal in industrialized countries and benefited from several technological progresses (Melosi 2000). Nevertheless, an "environmental justice" perspective can be used, a posteriori, to study the way the urban areas were progressively given basic utilities such as water provision to each street and each building. Concurrently, a series of urban typhoid fever epidemics can be examined in order to understand their causes and geography. Did social and institutional factors at work allow the researcher to qualify, retrospectively, these deadly events as environmental injustice situations? This paper will try to answer these problems by studying several French cities, from the 1880s, when the first citywide water supply systems had been set up, to the 1930s, when France became slightly populated by a majority of urban dwellers. I will show how the economic power of people shaped the geography of the urban network in the immediate vicinity of the city centres and how people, willing not to pay for water, continued to use wells contaminated by seeping sewage, helping to trigger public health hazards. Lastly, the twitchy story of the public service of water supply will be illustrated by a case-study of the typhoid fever epidemic which struck the suburbs of Lyon in 1928, causing more than 3000 affected and 300 deaths