In January 1910, during a “terrible week”, Paris experienced an exceptional flood, caused by wretched meteorological conditions. It was the most severe flood in the history of the Capital after the1658 one. Invading the newly-opened underground and surface roads intended for transport and sewers, bursting from the Seine banks or gushing out of the ground, the water gained on the quays and riverside streets, flowing up as far as Saint-Lazare station. The capital, flooded in twelve arrondissements and several hundreds of its main streets, presented a new aspect which owned the city the nickname “Paris-Venice”. As a show, the flood attracted the onlookers’ crowd, and the new urban landscape drew the attention of photographers and painters.

Paris was stricken in its very modernity : public transport, sewers, electricity, supplies, communications, were paralyzed or disorganized. A makeshift management was set up: parapets and footbridges were built, rowing boats were used as means of transport, people were going back home climbing ladders, or moved away. Parisians public services, reinforced by the army and its dinghies, got involved immediately to maintain the functioning of the City’s key services and organize aid.

The memory of the 1910 flood has never faded away, certainly due to its extent, but also because of its unprecedented media coverage. It was the first disaster of this scale seized by the new media: topical photography served by organized press agencies, postcards, popular press illustrated with photographs, cinematograph. These pictures and documents draw up the amazing portrait of an ephemeral Paris, alternately aesthetic and picturesque, comical and dramatic.

The exhibition presents more than 200 documents, most of them never published, predominantly originating from the collections of Paris Historical Library which, from the early days of flood, endeavoured to collect written and iconographic accounts of this event. Other Parisian collections – Carnavalet museum, Roger-Viollet photograph agency, Archives of Paris, Forney library – are also represented in the exhibition.