Meanwhile, back in Paris, and tired of the sight–and by-product– of so much furtive, and potentially disrespectful, public urination, voluntary or otherwise, the government of the city decided in the early summer of 1830 to install public urinals on the principal boulevards. Just in time, as it happens, for them to be converted to use as street barricades during the Revolution of that year. But the urinals survived to fight another day, and it was only a matter of time before the spin doctors of Louis Philippe, the ‘July monarch’, saw pissoirs as just so much free advertising space.
To be honest, that last bit isn’t completely true, I lied.
But the monarchy of Louis Philippe began with revolution, ended with revolution and feared revolution every day of its existence. So the role of the humble pissoir took on an exaggerated magnitude, and only later came to be used to advertise quick cures for rampant syphilis, and extol the virtues of Galeries Lafayette. (see left)
From the metaphorical ashes of the 1830 urinoirs, there rose the colonnes Rambuteau, cylindrical constructions first appearing in 1841 and named after Claude-Philibert Barthelot, comte de Rambuteau, the Prefect of the Seine department. Just two years later, there were almost 500 of them, and popular they were, too, especially with prostitutes and pick-pockets who soon learned that it was easier to allow their victims/clients to be drawn to them as it were, by the processes of Nature, rather than wander the streets in search of them. As such they seemed to have served as embryonic job centres, at least for a somewhat specialist range of employment opportunity.
In 1877, the simple cylindrical shape of the pissoirs, was replaced by multi-compartmentalised structures, dotted along the boulevards, in parks and at busy locations, and known as vespasiennes after the Roman emperor Titus Flavius Vespasianus, who placed a tax on urine collected from public toilets for use in tanning, although nothing appears on record to indicate how he gathered the tax, or quantified it.