Just outside the notorious La Santé prison in Paris’s 14th arrondissement lies the city’s last public urinal, or “la dernière vespasienne de Paris”, as its accompanying plaque declares.
In the early 19th century, public urinals began to be installed all across Paris to fight the city’s unsanitary conditions, which had led to various epidemics (public toilets for women were not installed, as they were deemed to take up too much room on public thoroughfares). They were named vespasiennes after the Roman emperor Vespasian, who famously placed a “urine tax” on the purchase of urine collected from public toilets which was commonly used by laundries and leather tanneries for its ammonia.
Public urinals proliferated quickly in Paris, and by 1904, the city’s rues and boulevards were dotted with around 4,000 of them. As the presence of plumbing in private residences increased, use of the urinals decreased, but not before they took on a few different uses.
These public urinals unintentionally created a public place for secretive activity, leading to their use by clandestine homosexual men as early as 1862, and as place to exchange information for those in the Resistance during WWII. In 1876, right-wing Catholic politician Eugène de Germiny was arrested in what became a political scandal for engaging in what was termed indecent exposure with an 18 year-old man, and notable French write Roger Peyrefitte said that during the German Occupation of World War II “the streets were empty, but the pissotières were full.” Even stranger subcultures, such as ‘soupeurs’, who enjoyed dipping stale bread in others’ urine evolved around these odd pillars of Parisian society.
Most vespasiennes were dismantled from the 1960’s onwards, and today the only one remaining is the one outside La Santé prison. The cultural and historic importance of these public urinals is memorialized with an attached plaque. And, yes, it’s still possible to do your business there today!