Consuming the Resource: Escalating Scarcity

Water Domesticated: Measuring the Resource for Better Control

The saga of water in France started later than in England. Paradoxically, this allowed for the deployment of a crucial innovation: the water meter. In addition to resolving equity issues posed by other types of subscriptions, the water meter enabled control over consumption, which was skyrocketing at a time when the network was still too small, especially during periods of drought. Although poorly documented except in a few cities, the history of water service subscriptions has been well studied by researchers such as Konstantinos Chatzis, Bernard Barraqué, and Frédéric Graber, who trace the various issues surrounding subscriptions based on gauges, free taps, and water meters.

Originally, the gauge allowed heavy consumers to have a constant but low flow of water (hence the term “running water”) according to a predetermined volume, while the free tap corresponded to the usage of small consumers. The price of the subscription to the free tap was evaluated based on the most accurate estimate of daily consumption by individuals, regardless of actual consumption. In Angers in 1855, for example, it was estimated that each person in a household would use 20 liters of water, while 75 liters were allocated per horse, 50 liters per car, and 1.5 liters per square meter of irrigable garden. This gives an idea of the urban uses of that time, which were more focused on outdoor spaces (stables, courtyards, gardens, and streets) rather than domestic use.

Jules Dupuit, an engineer from the Ponts et Chaussées, advocated for the “free tap,” which he considered to be the payment solution closest to users’ needs. His Treatise on Water Distribution, published in 1854, prompted many cities, including Paris, to adopt this subscription method in numerous households. However, criticisms quickly arose against this system, with detractors fearing abuses, as the “free tap” sometimes led to donations or resale between neighbors, which was prohibited. In reality, abuses related to this subscription were quite rare, especially since safeguards were put in place in certain municipalities, such as limiting the number of taps, push-button taps (similar to those still found in some public places, now replaced by motion detectors), tap restrictions, absence of sinks (to prevent users from leaving taps open for too long), overestimation of needs in subscriptions, etc.

Abundant Water: Modern Comfort Accessible to All

By 1975, 97 percent of households had running water: the conquest of water was complete, and it brought about a transformation in our way of life. Published within a year of each other, Georges Vigarello's book Le Propre et le sale: L’hygiène du corps depuis le Moyen Age (The Dirty and the Clean: Bodily Hygiene since the Middles Ages, 1985) and Jean-Pierre Goubert's book La Conquête de l'eau : L'avènement de la santé à l'âge industriel (The Conquest of Water: The Advent of Health in the Industrial Age, 1986) illustrate how running water has revolutionized our hygiene habits in only a century. Behind the issue of hygiene, it is, in reality, a bourgeois vision of society that has prevailed over the declining aristocratic elite. The hygienist bourgeoisie opposed the frivolous beautifying practices of the aristocracy with the rigor of nature; they preferred the chaste and pure nudity of the body over cosmetics that enhanced only visible parts of the skin. Previously, it was believed that changing clothes was sufficient for cleanliness, but now doctors recommended washing hands, face, and body with water. However, it took time for bourgeois morality, influenced by Catholicism, to no longer associate intimate hygiene with a form of self-gratification and, instead, conceive personal cleanliness as an unprecedented moral value. In the twentieth century, dirt became the shameful mark of the working classes, who needed to be taught a new physics of the body: fresh air, physical exercise, personal hygiene, as well as the fight against moral and health deviances such as alcoholism.

 This marked a complete reversal of mentality, a true revolution in which the Compagnie Générale des Eaux played a role. As researcher Dominique Lorrain explains, “In the mid-nineteenth century, water at home did not exist, neither technically nor in people's minds.” Initially, both affluent and modest populations saw no need to change their habits, which were based on modest needs. It was only under the influence of hygiene and the Anglo-Saxon elites that behaviors began to change. In the mid-nineteenth century, the average French person consumed an average of twenty liters of water per day and relied on public fountains or water carriers for their supply. In Paris, the commercialization of subscriptions was one of the main reasons why Prefect Haussmann turned to interested management: the teams of the company agreed to convince household staff to connect the homes they were responsible for to the water network and to overcome the resistant competition from water carriers. The pace of change accelerated when French elites compared themselves to their Anglo-Saxon counterparts vacationing on the French coast, for whom access to running water was synonymous with modern comfort.

The arrival of water at home was not enough, and hygiene in the household remained a luxury for a long time, as it required purchasing expensive equipment. Moreover, it required having enough space to dedicate an entire room to personal hygiene. For a large part of the nineteenth century, hygienic practices continued to take place outside the home: laundry was washed in public washhouses, bathing occurred in rivers or public baths, and drinking water was obtained from public fountains.

During this time, the bathtub made its appearance, but it was not fixed in place. Built on legs and not connected to plumbing, it had to be placed in a location convenient for heating water. For those who could not afford a bathtub, the English tub was imported—a sort of basin that could be moved around the dwelling and allowed for standing washing with minimal water usage, embracing the concept of frugality. Bathing scenes were immortalized by Degas in several nude pastel drawings during the 1880s. Other artists, such as painter Pierre Bonnard, made it a subject of study. In the 1920s, he drew multiple nudes of his companion, Marthe, reclining in her bathtub, combining the modern ritual of a woman enjoying time in her bath with the ancient ritual of a body embalmed in a sarcophagus to defy the passage of time.

More trivially, in 1840, the prefect of Nièvre was the only one in the entire department to have a bathtub, and a century later, in 1954, not much had changed: only one in ten households had a bathtub or a shower. However, these new fixtures—the sink, bidet, bathtub, and “water closet” (W.C.)—eventually became more accessible with the post-war economic boom. Historian Jean-Pierre Goubert notes that “gestures performed in public, particularly those related to laundry and defecation, were rejected as belonging to a bygone, even somewhat barbaric past. The landscape of housing evolved. Rooms became specialized, and uses were privatized. Modern comfort settled in, along with an entirely new way of living.” In a 2010 study entitled “Toilet and Bathroom in France at the Turn of the Century,” Monique Eleb analyzed the transformation of the toilet cabinet, which was more focused on beauty and vanity, into the bathroom, a space that “is not defined as masculine or feminine and allows men to access cleanliness in a space less symbolically feminine than the toilet cabinet.”²

The 1950s marked a real turning point. In 1951, Françoise Giroud, then the director of Elle magazine, commissioned a comprehensive study on the cleanliness of the French, but the article's title only focused on women: “Is the French Woman Clean?” The response was “no,” documented by “distressing results” that caused quite a stir even at that time. Toothbrushes, changing or not changing underwear, soap usage—everything was scrutinized. With a touch of sexism that was characteristic of the time, Françoise Giroud took the opportunity to criticize vanity, which continued to overshadow basic hygiene and prevented women from wanting to be clean—the proof being that men, being less concerned with vanity, were supposedly cleaner. A year later, Paris Match presented its ideal home. The magazine stated that “water and order are the true luxuries of modern life.” This conclusion was in line with modernist architects Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier, as they placed hygienic concerns at the center of their work: air circulation, access to water and sanitation, the need for light, space optimization, decluttering rooms, and the importance of outdoor spaces—all concepts that were brought to the forefront during the Covid crisis.

From Invisible Water to Rare Water

Despite its major consequences for our way of life, it is clear that society as a whole seems to have amnesia when it comes to water: whether it is simply about its source (who knows where the water they drink comes from?), its price (who knows the amount of their water bill?), or its quality (who can say what the water flowing from their tap is composed of and what standards define its potability?). While water used to be tangible, organic, and foundational, our relationship with water has evolved in a few decades to a high level of abstraction that “invisibilizes” both the water network (pipes, pumps, and treatment plants) and the territory it manages.

Even the names of French departments, almost all of which are named after a river or stream, are now only described by their number in common language, a sign of a new attachment that is more administrative than geographical. By hiding water, by treating it far from home (upstream or downstream), we have domesticated it. But in the process, we have made the awareness of its fragility less acute. Today, there are many points of ignorance among the general public regarding water management. This can be seen by reading the national water barometer published every year for the past twenty-six years by the Water Information Center (CIEAU). In 2022, for example, 77 percent of people believe that water is drinkable in its natural state. The real function of wastewater treatment is known by less than a third of French people, and two-thirds of French people are unaware of the price of a cubic meter of water. Many of them feel that they spend more on water than on the internet and telephone when, in reality, water is two to three times cheaper.

This lack of knowledge has been particularly supported by CNRS researcher Agathe Euzen who in 2007 studied perceptions regarding water quality and health risks. She found that the definition of good water evolves with time and sensibilities, but also that ignorance of health standards leads to risky or at least paradoxical behaviors. For example, one condominium refused to change lead pipes because it downplayed the risk involved while “disengaging from any responsibility by adopting individual alternative solutions using filtering pitchers.” Similarly, Parisians, who were the subject of her study, rarely make the connection between limestone and calcium, even though the former contains the latter. One interviewed user said, “In tap water, there is limestone; it is less rich than mineral water.” However, this limestone is composed of calcium carbonate, exactly like some mineral waters, which could also cause scale buildup in household appliances if they were used in kettles or washing machines. From limestone to calcium, there is only a lexical step that consumers dare not take, convinced that one is harmful while the other is beneficial.

It was in the 1990s that consumers began to gather in associations and the media started to take an interest in issues such as water quality or network efficiency (and therefore leaks). The French portmanteau consom'acteur (consumer-actor) appeared to describe the committed forms of consumption that result from ecological awareness.

Géraldine Sénemaud, consumer director of the Water France activity at Veolia, says that, as a result of individualized behaviors and increased consumer demands, customer relations have become paramount in the ecosystem of water distributors. “For a long time, the only contact between the user and the distributor took place when they subscribed and terminated their contract, or when a billing problem arose. Today, the customer does not have a relationship of simple convenience with water; they are aware that it needs to be protected.”

On the customer relations front, the relationship with the user now passes through a permanent link, via call centers modeled on those set up by telecommunications operators in the 1990s. “It has become a know-how,” says Sénemaud. “The customer experience has become paramount.” Water distributors now assert themselves as a local service, with small local agencies in the hearts of cities and permanent offices on market days—and the teams responsible for consumers regain the central role they originally had when it came to contracting the first subscriptions.

On the water quality front, to meet the demand of dissatisfied consumers who see their pipes or domestic appliances damaged, Veolia's expertise, for example, was solicited in the Normandy Vexin to build water decarbonation plants and reduce the limestone content. “These are big investments,” explains Guy Burette, “but it also allows us to protect the groundwater, because limestone encourages people to use more detergent and softeners, which pollute downstream.”

On the equity front, the implementation of the Brottes law in France in 2013 accelerated the deployment of the solidarity water voucher and, more broadly, social tariffing—in addition to ongoing efforts to raise awareness about tap water use, especially among disadvantaged populations who, coming from countries where water is not drinkable, may still prefer to buy bottled water, even for hygiene or cooking purposes, at the expense of their purchasing power.

Finally, on the consumption control front, new personalized services are emerging, based on the introduction of remote meter reading in the early 2000s, well before it was deployed for energy. These new meters allow for almost perfect transparency with the consumer, as well as for real-time billing, capable of alerting the user to their consumption or potential leaks. In 2022, for example, consumers were informed of more than seventy thousand leaks, saving 4.2 million cubic meters of water (equivalent to 1,700 Olympic-sized swimming pools). Xavier Mathieu, CEO of Birdz, a Veolia subsidiary specializing in the digitalization of water professions, believes that data science will make cities smarter, in France and around the world. “Soon, we will even be able to predict tomorrow's consumption volumes or analyze population flows, as water consumption is the best indicator of presence in a territory,” he says. “This information has real value for waste collection. For example, we will be able to determine whether additional trucks need to be dispatched based on the situation.”

As has long been the case, Veolia is developing new services to meet emerging needs—services whose usage is gaining importance over time, with new needs being added to the initial ones: remote reading, initially invented to meet the needs of individualization, shows its usefulness in an era of water scarcity.

Because the era of water scarcity is now: since the late 2010s, episodes of drought and climate disasters have changed mentalities much faster than years of scientific education, and more and more people in France and elsewhere are realizing that water is scarce. As seen in California for several years, customers are now hunting for water waste. They question the irrigation of crops during heatwaves, swimming pool water, golf course irrigation, and the artificial snow at ski resorts. Sandrine Motte, director of Eaux de Marseille, sees attitudes changing in the city: “Just five years ago, the street cleaners would open the hydrants to clean the sidewalks in the middle of summer, letting the water flow into the gutters,” she says. “Today, these hydrants are closed. And when people see practices like street pooling—opening fire hydrants to cool off during heat waves—they send us indignant messages on social media. These are ways of doing things that are no longer acceptable.”