The Pollution Legacy

For centuries, French rivers served as convenient sewers. Industries dumped chemicals, cities discharged waste, agriculture spread pesticides—all trusting moving water to carry problems away. But water only transports pollution; it doesn't destroy it. Today's rivers bear the accumulated sins of industrialization.

The Seine below Paris once ran black with waste. The Rhône carried so many chemicals that fish developed mutations. The Loire's tributaries in mining regions ran red with heavy metals. Even the pastoral Garonne received agricultural runoff that created dead zones in its estuary.

"My grandfather fished here in the 1950s," recalls Philippe Mercier, standing by a recovered stretch of the Moselle. "He said the river was dead—no fish, no plants, just foam and stench. Chemical factories had turned it into a drain. People accepted it as the price of progress."

What changed wasn't just regulation but consciousness. Environmental movements of the 1970s made river pollution visible. The first to protest often came from communities directly affected—fishing families, riverside residents, immigrants living in cheaper housing near polluted waterways.