How the Seine River shaped the city of Paris

When the 2024 Summer Olympics kick off in Paris, the city is going for the wow factor. The opening ceremony won’t take place in a stadium but—bucking tradition—outside on the River Seine. For the Parade of Nations, boats carrying the participating teams will glide by an estimated 300,000 spectators congregated on the quays.

Bathed in myth and memory, the Seine is the lifeblood of the city that sprang up on its banks. Along this “main street,” as Napoleon called it, photogenic Pari­sian landmarks are on proud display, oozing grandeur and majesty. It’s so cen­tral to the city’s existence that building numbers are linked to the river: Those on perpendicular streets begin their num­bering closest to the Seine, while on parallel streets building numbers ascend in the direction of the current.

“For Parisians, there’s a strong historical and visceral attachment to the river,” says Pierre Rabadan, the deputy mayor in charge of sport, the Olympic and Paralympic Games, and the Seine. 

(Paris made an Olympic-size effort to clean up the Seine—did they succeed?)

The genesis of Paris

From its source in Burgundy, the Seine flows 483 miles to reach the sea at Le Havre, with the capital sitting nearly in the middle. The River’s Parisian cartography has changed over time, its course altered by incessant floods, its branches and channels ultimately merging into the serpentine riverbed we know today. The city’s Latin motto, “Fluctuat nec mergitur—Tossed by the waves but does not sink,” evokes these historical floods, and Paris’s resilience in dealing with them. The city’s coat of arms depicts a ship under full sail.

It was near the Seine’s banks at Bercy that evidence of the city’s first human settlement was discovered. There have been older archaeological finds in Paris, namely the Mesolithic site unearthed in 2008 in the 15th arrondisse­ment that yielded flint arrowheads and bone fragments from a Seine-side hunting camp set up by nomadic hunter-gatherers. But the earliest fixed settlement was the Neolithic site excavated at the Bercy archaeological dig from 1991 to 1992.

“Situated on an arm, or canal, of the Seine, the village had been well pre­served under layers of sediment left by floods,” says Sylvie Robin, head curator for archaeology at the Carnavalet Museum. “We found traces of a palisade, a bridge, a hunter’s bow that’s one of the most beautifully preserved in Europe, and dugout canoes which had been placed on the riverbanks.”

The dugout canoe, measuring more than 16 feet today, was carved from a single trunk of oak—which experts believe required a lot of work, starting with the sourcing of the tree, which did not grow in the imme­diate vicinity. Robin says such a canoe was “a pearl”—a valuable asset designed to last for a generation.

Of boats and mariners

From whatever riverside vantage point—a pop-up bar, bridge, or the floating Joséphine Baker swimming pool—it’s easy to be mesmerized by the boat traffic on the Seine. The passing vessels may include a freight barge, a touristic open-top Bateaux Mouche, or a high-powered speedboat carry­ing the Brigade Fluviale, or river police, who patrol the Seine with obvious joie de vivre.

Boats have been plying these waters from time immemorial. It’s not surprising that one of the city’s oldest monuments is linked to the river’s mariners. Found during excavations under Notre Dame’s nave in 1711, the Pillar of the Boatmen formed the base of a statue offered to Emperor Tiberius by a guild of boatmen in the first century A.D.

“This rare, sculpted monument makes it possible to connect the Greco-Roman pan­theon and the Celtic gods such as Cernunnos,” says Séverine Lepape, director of the Cluny Museum-National Museum of the Middle Ages, where the pillar is housed. “It’s the symbol of an interesting syncretism of two types of pantheons united in one.” 

The same powerful boatsmen’s guild is thought to have financed part of the construction of the Gallo-Roman baths that form the museum’s pièce de résis­tance. Under a vaulted ceiling soaring nearly 50 feet high, the frigidarium (cold room), part of the city’s sizable thermal baths, is one of the best preserved Gallo-Roman sites north of the Loire. 

(Meet the ancient goddess of the Seine River: Sequana.)

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Beauty and industry

The city’s beloved stone quays were built over the centuries as much for the city’s beautification as for its economy and defense. The earliest quays, Conti and Grands-Augustins, date from 1313. Like stone fortifica­tions, the quays also served to channel the river and attempt to curb flooding. As the mighty river fueled industry and empire, dams, locks, bridges, and later factories forever altered its fluvial patterns.

In the early 18th century, the Seine became so clogged with commercial boat traffic that Napoleon initiated a canal project, resulting in the Canal de l’Ourcq, Canal Saint-Martin, and Canal Saint-Denis. The network of canals not only alleviated the maritime congestion, deviating traffic from central Paris, but also brought fresh drinking water to the capital, since water from the sewage-saturated Seine—unfit for consumption—had caused epidemics.

Over time, engineers sought to control the Seine’s water flow: Baron Haussmann’s urban renewal project included a Seine transformation. Yet despite human intervention, the Seine is still known to flood. Parisians traditionally look to the statue of Zouave on the Pont de l’Alma as an unofficial means of measuring water level. Standing sentry over the Seine’s currents, the colonial army soldier dips his toe in the river in times of flood.

A river’s renaissance

For millennia, life was lived on the river. The Seine’s banks were a gathering place for work and leisure: Laundresses washed clothes, dockers unloaded cargo, merchants hawked their goods, and bon vivants sun­bathed and swam.

But a different approach to urban planning in the 20th century began to separate the populace from the river. In the 1960s, highways were constructed directly on the water’s edge. The quays even morphed into parking lots. 

The tide turned in 2013 when the city govern­ment decided to pedestrianize the motorway on the Left Bank. Cyclists and walkers returned to the quays, enjoying new installations such as climbing walls and floating gardens. A riverside park on the Right Bank’s motorway followed in 2016. The much vaunted $1.5 billion Olympic Games river cleanup project is the culmination of years of investment.

“We are now trying to reconnect and reclaim the Seine, what’s historically been a trame bleue [aquatic ecological cor­ridor] in a city that’s extremely dense and paved over,” says Rabadan. “We want to bring life back to the Seine.”