Now the much-mourned “pissotieres,” the dark-green public urinals that gave relief to generations of Parisian men, are finally getting their place in the city’s social and architectural history. The first-ever exhibition in the French capital dedicated to the once ubiquitous and notorious facilities opened on Wednesday. The one-man originals — with a rather phallic peppermill design — were quickly christened “Rambuteau’s columns” after the aristocratic city official who commissioned them in 1834. Some of the disinformation that fueled the anti-Semitic Dreyfus Affair, which rocked France at the turn of the 20th century, was spread through the pissotieres, Martin found through a decade of research. Despite endless campaigns for their closure on grounds of “social hygiene,” pissotieres were a potent if smelly symbol of the City of Lights, he said.
