Towards a new Parisian Seine river?

I had lunch recently with my friend Macund'Eau and we remade the world as usual to finally agree that Paris will lack ambitions once the Olympic and Paralympic games have passed, Notre-Dame cathedral is once again open to the public and our new public lines transportation completed.

And we were looking for a major development project worthy of Paris “Ville des Lumières” status : a museum, a new Arc de Triomphe, a tower to scrape the sky....

But what ?

It was then that my friend told me about the fabulous project of a Romanian engineer, named Nicolas Ceausescu.

Because only few people know it, but the destiny of this character was not limited to that of a simple apparatchik who became an autocrat, carried away in a sudden and brutal death by the wind of great History, a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

He was first a building engineer who wanted to transform Bucharest. And as his capital lacked a river worthy of his own ambitions, he transformed the Dambovita river, a modest tributary of the Danube, by diverting it into an underground conduit, called Cassette, leaving on the surface only a visible body of water, almost inert and supposedly clear, with concrete banks made of materials 'made in CCCP'

These gigantic works brought progress. In fact, the invisible Cassette now serves as an outlet for the entire Bucharest sanitation network. The visible part of the Dambovita, once 'corseted', found the opportunity to get to know its new neighbor, the Bucharest metro.

History does not say whether the environmentalist opponents of the project, enamored of the holy sequence "avoid - reduce - compensate", were numerous; at the risk of them experiencing the harsh winters of the Carpathians.

However, a question immediately arose in our poor minds : how can we justify such ambitious project for Paris ?

It then seemed to us that the obvious benefit of this project would be to provide Paris with a large canal capable of supporting low-carbon and mass river traffic from the borders of Burgundy to Le Havre, then later, Antwerp and Rotterdam, once the Seine-Nord Europe Canal was built.

No more forced cohabitation with these tourist boats and these Parisian bridges, starting with the Pont Neuf, so numerous and so low that they constitute an impassable blockage for large river transport. This new river will be equipped with vast bridges, very aerial, 2 x 4 lanes, for cyclists only or strictly prohibited for Sport Utility Vehicles, and finally favorable the development of large river transport.

A second interest would be to give Paris a double chance of being able to bathe in a river, either the old one or the new one. In particular, if like the Dambovita, this new river overlooks a vast sanitation network, waterproof, oversized and efficient 'in all weather conditions'.?

Faced with such ambitions, which, far from it, we had not all identified, our thoughts focused on the nature of the compensatory measures that we would have to negotiate with the opponents of this magnificent project of national and European interest.

It was then that, once we left the restaurant, one of the many Parisian signs “STOP aux rats” (“STOP rats !”) awakened our imaginations, ready to bounce back.

Eureka!

The very first compensatory measure will aim to silence the opposition of "animalists" to this project by offering dedicated funding from a group of associations so that they can finally learn to read, both in French and in English, to these four-legged pests so that they end up respecting the injunctions that these signs address to them.

What's more, this compensatory measure will have a health benefit for our magnificent project by mitigating the risk that the cursed leptospirosis virus will contaminate the waters of our new and magnificent river.

With all these arguments in mind, we parted ways with the firm intention of completing, from the first quarter of 2024, the financing of this second Parisian, French and European river in two meetings moderated firmly in "start-up & FrenchTech & France2030" mode."

The author: Paloma Castro Martínez

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