Sordid Class, Dangerous Class? Observations on Parisian Ragpickers and Their Cités During the Nineteenth Century

Everybody knows that refuse is a ragpicker's raison d'être . Continuous collection of the waste from big city consumption, along with the rubbish and the refuse, led to collection efforts that gradually brought about a wholesale trade and an industry for recycling these wastes back into production. Until the famous prefectorial decree of 24 November 1883, garbage was left on the public thoroughfares and collected by the dust carts of the licensed garbage collectors at daybreak. During the night, the bins were searched by the ragpickers, who constituted a unique category of workers known as ramasseurs (gatherers). They seemed to work with standard equipment from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards. Each carried a hook, a basket suspended from the back (a “dummy”), and a lantern. They sought and garnered a wide variety of products, from fabric to cork, ranging through metals, bones and skins, each item serving a specific purpose, from the most common-place (old papers and rags for paper production) to the most extraordinary (crusts of bread for the crumbs used by butchers for frying). Around 1900, the ragpicker's take consisted of all kinds of old papers, twine, rags for manufacturing paper (50 to 60 per cent), all types of bones (20 to 25 per cent), and an infinite variety of objects (15 to 30 per cent). At this time, however, the rag industry changed dramatically as a result of technological advances (especially the new manufacture of paper from wood pulp). The subsequent collapse of most of the markets exacerbated the recent differentiation between ragpickers. Nevertheless, ragmen still siphoned off 13 per cent of the tonnage of garbage in Paris. Annual exports of this capital resource by the rag trade totalled 27 million francs

Agricultural economics · Archaeology · Business · Clothing · Commerce · Consumption (sociology · Economics · Economy · Garbage · Geography · Social science · Sociology · Waste management · Crafts, Textile, and Design · Decadence, Literature, and Society · Engineering · Fashion and Cultural Textiles

• Inside the Paris Zone

  Open Access•Jérôme Beauchez, Djemila Zeneidi•Space and Culture•2023

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