Book. Rats in the city! Not nice little mice. No, real rats, those unloved animals, associated in the imagination with devastation, disease, dirt, with the darkness in which they would swarm. In Paris, there is hardly a city council where the subject is not discussed, and where the mayor, Anne Hidalgo, does not find herself accused of letting this frightening species proliferate. Journalist Olivier Thomas, from the magazine The story, wanted to get out of clichés and invectives. His book, supported by solid documentation, places current debates in their historical context, and challenges three received ideas.
Starting with the supposed proliferation of rats in Paris. How many are there in the capital: 1 million, 5 million, 10 million? Truth be told, no one knows. No reliable count is available. “The development of urban vegetation offers them ideal hiding places and the incessant work, which disturbs them, makes them more visible”, notes the author. Are they therefore more numerous today than yesterday, or do they simply go out into the open air more? An ongoing scientific study could clarify the situation in 2023.
More like Norway rats
Second subject of controversy, the name of these animals. In July, an elected animalist in Paris, Douchka Markovic, had preferred to speak rather of “sur-mouses” than of “rats”, to avoid a word “negatively connoted”. A judged intervention “lunar” by right-wingers. She wasn’t wrong though. The black rat, the one associated with the Great Plague of 1347-1352 in Europe, dominated for centuries in Paris.
But another rodent, a species with a brown coat that arrived in the capital in 1753, supplanted it long ago. “Since it differs from the rat as much as the field mouse or the mouse, which have proper names, it must also have a particular name”, writes Buffon in his Natural History. He then baptizes him « surmulot », “like who would say big, big field mouse”. Rattus norvegicus for scientists, “sewer rat” for many. Good news: it is the black rat flea, and not the Norway rat flea, that mainly transmits the plague to humans.
Last cliché to be tackled The rats entered Paris : the immediate classification of this mammal among the terrible pests. In reality, the view of rats has evolved over time. In the Paris of the second half of the 18th centurye century, “the rat is a pet that the inhabitants rub shoulders with without being particularly afraid of it, except when it is in herds”assure Olivier Thomas.
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