I had the opportunity to go to Paris last week. Thanks to the generosity of my loyal band of paying subscribers on Substack, I was able to add a couple of nights’ accommodation to the trip to research this blog about swimming in the city of light – in the female dorm of a youth hostel.
The place was cheap and cheerful, and in the Marais, a short walk from the Seine where I planned to swim. Last weekend was the tail end of the first summer season when the city has opened public swimming facilities in the river.
A minor inconvenience was that I’d been put in the top bunk. It was pretty rickety and, if I got in while there was no one in the lower bunk to counterbalance me, it threatened to topple over as I clung desperately to the ladder. I learned how to fling my weight forward to clunk the thing back in place. It felt a bit more like surviving a shipwreck than going to bed.
A drink with Sophie
The evening I arrived, I met one of the French writers in our book, Sophie Berrebi, for a drink at the Cafe Beaubourg, which retains blocky white chairs and a decor in the same style as its neighbour, the 1970s icon the Pompidou Centre, which is about to close for a five-year refurbishment.
(We seem to have acquired a bit of a French influence – there are several French writers in Take Me to the River (1))
Sophie is a dear friend of my co-author Vicky’s – they are each other’s first readers. Sophie’s contribution to Take Me to the River is a sensual scene of swimming naked in a flooded peatbog called the Botshol near Amsterdam, with a lover. Her book ‘The Sharing Economy’ is the year in the life of a 40-something woman in an open marriage, discovering dating apps.
Recently divorced, Sophie has returned to Paris after a gap of decades and is working on her second novel. We discussed the swimming culture of France. Like many French families, Sophie’s holidayed at the seaside.
Les plongeurs brutes?
Roger Deakin coined the phrase “wild swimming” in the UK. He saw swimming in open water as liberation from the constraints of modern life. But Sophie shook her head at my reference to la natation sauvage or les plongeurs bruts – Non, the French do not use these terms.
The great beach resorts from Deauville and St Malo in the north to Cannes and Biarritz in the south are some of the most famous in the world. The French didn’t turn away from their coast the way that the UK did when cheap flights to warmer climes came along. They never stopped swimming in open water, so they haven’t really rediscovered it.
However, online you can see that there are wild swimmers in Paris. They swim at night, risking arrest as well as drowning, and argue that they are rejecting the “zero risk culture” of modern life.
The Seine is five metres deep and its dark green surface hides weeds and other hazards. There are large boats wending their way up and down it – so this is much, much more than zero risk.
A conversation at Paris Plage
The next morning, I walked down to the river after breakfasting with a young Swiss man who said he had come to Paris for a modelling competition. A tall gangly guy with a prominent nose and sticking-out ears, I would never have advised him to try modelling. But what do I know? Maybe I had coffee with next year’s big thing. I also managed to set the fire alarm off in the hostel by putting bread in the toaster before joining the coffee queue. It took some while to turn it off – they rejected my offers of help, which involved me miming the action of poking the smoke alarm with a broom handle that I do at home.
At the first “Paris Plage” site I visited at Bras-Marie, there was no sign of swimming but stripey loungers were laid out. I sat in one and then started chatting to an English teacher named Miriam who was reading a book there. Miriam is a big fan of the free swimming areas and all the other things that Paris provides for its citizens over the summer. There are outdoor fitness sessions, sports events and concerts. Miriam, who used to live in the UK, said that in France, culture is relatively well funded.
Miriam, whose grandfather was Moroccan, says that these things support diversity and the multicultural society. We agree that, while culture can only do so much, the fightback against the rise of the populist right starts not so much with rhetoric but with funding swimming pools and libraries.
When I look it up later, I find that an incredible 95% of young French people can swim. Only about two thirds of young people can swim in the UK (I couldn’t find separate figures for Scotland). This is not just because of the better weather as the figure for older French people above 60 who know how to swim is also about two-thirds. So this represents a major effort across the whole country. Swimmimg pools are cheap or free – I guess French councils don’t have to pay astronomical energy bills the way they do in Scotland.
La baignade est fermée
Next, I strolled along to the largest site, Baignade Bercy in the 12th arrondissement. Ten or a dozen lifeguards were pottering around with no customers. It was closed because this morning the water quality test was a fail.
This is not because of combined sewage outlets. Victorian plumbing was done in a similar way on either side of the channel – both sewage and rainwater sloshing from the city streets drain into the same pipes. When it rains heavily, the pipes fill up. Then, to stop the water backing up into homes and businesses, the pipes vent into rivers. That vent water doesn’t go through treatment plants – it is dirty.
The mitigation for this situation is to build underground storm tanks to take the overflow. After the rain has stopped, this water can go through the sewage treatment works. These also provide flood defence. Before the 2024 Olympics, France spent more than a billion euros on building vast basins along the river to take this water. The largest can hold – appropriately – 20 Olympic swimming pools worth. (Scotland is also investing heavily in underground storm tanks- they just completed one in Edinburgh’s Marchmont).
Paris has also attached houseboats to the municipal sewage system so their waste doesn’t go in the river.
But the lifeguards explained that rain still affects the water quality – it washes whatever is on the banks of the river – leaf litter, fag ends, dog shit, whatever Madame Dupont has been feeding the gargantuan begonias on the deck of her houseboat – into the water. It takes a day or two to wash out.
But they have not had to close the Baignade Bercy at all this month until these very last days of August. (Technically the Seine bathing is open for another couple of weeks but the rainy weather is against it). Often, its 700 capacity area – of the solarium and the swimming pools – has been full.
There is a height restriction and an age limit of 10 to swim. An adult can bring several young teens as long as they pass the swimming test. Fortunately, they have not had to do any rescues – it has all been fine. They look to be a strong team of young lifeguards, but rescue could be challenging in the deep, dark water.
Swimming in the canals
The guards told me that I could swim in the Canal de l’Ourcq so I took a bus to an outlying area called La Villette. I found two large swimming areas with floats and ladders and another team of lifeguards. There was also a children’s play area with wee pedalos and balls that the children can get into and roll along the surface of the water. This area also had a formidable crew of young athletes, these brandishing boathooks, marshalling the kids as their parents looked on. It was all free. I was there on the last weekend of the summer programme.
I was not allowed to take photos but in the swimming area, a mother was playing with a child in armbands who must have been about five. There were no age restrictions and – as long as the children can swim – no adult to child ratio. This made me feel angry all over again about the years when I was not allowed to take my three children to a municipal swimming pool in Edinburgh, even though they could swim, because of an arbitrary one adult to two children ratio that the council imposed.
The water is about two metres deep, still and pond-like. I had a lovely swim in it – the temperature was about 21 degrees – cool, but a balmy 7 degrees warmer than the sea where I usually bathe. I chatted to the lifeguard afterwards, who pointed out the old customs house at the place where the canal passed into the old city.
La Villette was once a separate village with a river running through it. The Ourcq was channelled into a broad canal joining the Seine by Napoleon, who had grand dreams of making Paris rival ancient Rome. Barges loaded with agricultural produce, wine, timber and so on had to stop to pay customs duty before entering the city.
A swim in a canal in the rain
The following day, I managed to swim in the Canal St Martin. I decided to walk there after visiting the recently renovated and free museum of Paris, the Carnavalet. I was hoping to find there something about the plumbing system or pictures of swimmers in the Seine, but there isn’t much about that. There is, however, an entire floor devoted to the political turmoil of 19th-century Paris which makes today’s concerns about the looming no-confidence vote on Prime Minister François Bayrou pale into insignficance.
On the way to the swimming, which I knew closed at five, I seemed to be getting further away – I must have taken a wrong turning. It was already after four, so I jumped in a cab. I knew I might have missed the boat and not be able to swim and was trying to prepare myself for the sense of disappointment that I knew that would bring. You can get slightly addicted to cold water immersion, which brings endorphins, I guess.
I made it – just. This bathing area seemed more relaxed than the others, perhaps because it was about to close for the summer. St Martin, also channelling the Ourcq, is an area of chic shops, cute cafes and sauntering couples. I changed in the nearby leisure centre and walked over to join the mainly well-upholstered older people, with a few whooping young lads, in the water.
A light rain was falling and the occasional leaf floated by from the plane trees lining the canal as I plunged in and swam back and forth along the large swimming area. The immersion felt total as I couldn’t put my feet on the ground. Instead of the blue of a tiled pool, the water was a viscous green. Fronds of weeds at the edges tickled my legs. About a quarter to five, the guards started chivvying us to get out and began to dismantle the summer pool. By five pm you would never know it had been there. Time has flowed on but the words remain.
(1) French Writers in Take Me to the River
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In 1696, Melchisédech Thévenot published The Art of Swimming. We didn’t have room for his tips so here is an outtake
“The hazard of taking in water in the nose and ears may be avoided by holding in the breath. It sometimes happens that those who are less expert go down quite to the bottom, which is inconvenient, and in a great depth you are obliged to hold your breath a great while…But you may remedy that by turning on your back as soon as you begin to approach to the bottom, for you will cease descending as soon as you begin to turn yourself.”
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Benjamin Franklin – OK not actually French – taught himself to swim using Thévenot’s book. He later swam the Thames and performed aquatic stunts for astonished Londoners. Franklin gets a mention in the Carnavalet because he was the ambassador who helped to secure French military support for revolutionary America.
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George Sand, writing to Gustave Flaubert, described her river baths at Nohant. Sand adopted a male name and obtained a permit from the Paris police to wear male attire in public. She also sometimes used male pronouns when writing about herself. In her time, Sand was better known than Victor Hugo and many of her peers admired her work – Flaubert called her “chère maitre” (dear master) of letters. He also described her as belonging to a “third sex.” Sand had many male lovers, including Chopin.
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Alexandre Dumas gave us one of literature’s most famous swims: Edmond Dantès’s escape from the Château d’If in The Count of Monte Cristo. That fictional dash through the waves inspired the Défi de Monte Cristo, now the biggest open-water race in Europe.
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Heinrich Heine, the Jewish poet who grew up on the Franco-German border made Paris his home. He mocks Poseidon as a coarse bully, in verse.
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The Comte de Lautréamont, in Les Chants de Maldoror, conjures a surreal image of his anti-hero falling in love with a shark. Lautréamont was not a count at all, that was the pseudonym of a Franco-Urugyan poet who was born in Montevideo and died in Paris in 1870, aged 24, of TB. Though unknown at the time of his death, he was rediscovered by the Surrealists, including Salvador Dali and Man Ray
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Kate Chopin – American, but of French Canadian descent. There is a swimming scene from her proto-feminist novel The Awakening.
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Essayist and poet Paul Valéry, in Mediterranean Inspiration, famously described swimming as fornication avec l’onde — “fornication with the wave.”