The Story of Canal Saint-Martin: The Paris Waterway Napoleon Built on a Wine Tax

On my last trip to Paris a couple of weeks ago, I decided it was high time I visited the Canal Saint-Martin in the 10th arrondissement. I’d heard so much about it, but never been as I’d always stayed in either the Latin Quarter or Montmartre, so not close by.

It was a beautiful spring morning, and the perfect time to see it with bright blue skies and the sun shining. But, as always, I wanted the story of why and how such a place came to be. When was it built and by whom?

So, I booked a tour that saw me pass under numerous bridges, through the mile-long underground vault perforated by light holes, all while listening to the fascinating tales François regaled us with of the history of Canal Saint-Martin. I hope you’re ready to be entertained and discover why this canal got funded by a tax on wine.

Why Napoleon Built a Canal on a Wine Tax

By 1802, Paris had a population of around 550,000 people and a water supply that was slowly killing them. Dysentery and cholera were spreading through the city, and the streets were filthy. The Seine, which Parisians were drinking from, was also the river they were dumping everything into.

Gaspard de Chabrol, the prefect of Paris, came up with a solution. He proposed drawing fresh water from the River Ourcq, 100 kilometers northeast of the city, through a network of new canals. Napoleon signed off on the construction order that same year.

To pay for it, the government introduced a new tax on wine. It was an entirely French way to fund public infrastructure, and nobody seemed to find it strange.

Construction started at both ends of the canal in 1805. Building a waterway through an increasingly dense, urbanized city proved complicated, and the project dragged on for two decades. The canal was finally inaugurated in 1825, four years after Napoleon‘s death in exile on Saint Helena.

The finished waterway dropped 25 meters in elevation over its length, requiring nine locks and two swing bridges to manage. Two ports were built to handle the unloading of goods: Bassin de la Villette at the northern end and Port de l’Arsenal where the canal connects to the Seine in the south. 

For the following decades, the canal was a working industrial waterway. Warehouses and factories lined the quays, and barge traffic carried grain, building materials, and other goods into the city.

The canal also fed the city’s fountains, including the Elephant of the Bastille, a giant plaster elephant statue that stood in Place de la Bastille for 30 years and housed a small population of rats. But that’s a whole other story.

How Baron Haussmann Buried Half of It

In the 1860s, Napoleon III tasked his engineer Baron Haussmann with redesigning central Paris. Haussmann is the man responsible for the wide, straight boulevards that define the city today, and he had strong opinions about what Paris should look like.

When it came to the canal, he made an odd decision. Rather than simply building bridges over the water, he sent nearly half of it underground. The canal bed had to be lowered and locks modified to make the engineering work. The result was two new boulevards, Jules Ferry and Richard-Lenoir, running directly above the subterranean waterway.

About 2 kilometers of the canal still flows underground today, between Place de la Bastille and Rue du Faubourg du Temple. You can travel through this section on a canal cruise and see the vaulted tunnels from the water, as I did. It’s one of those experiences that feels like discovering a hidden artery of the city.

The 1938 Film That Made It Famous (Mostly in a Studio)

The canal’s first real moment of cultural fame came in 1938, when director Marcel Carné made a film called Hôtel du Nord. It was set along the canal, based on a collection of short stories written in 1929 by Eugène Dabit, whose father owned the real hotel at 102 Quai de Jemmapes.

The film follows the working-class residents of a small canal-side hotel: a suicidal young couple, a prostitute, and her pimp. Arletty, who played the prostitute, delivered what became one of the most quoted lines in French cinema history. 

Standing on a bridge over the canal, she turns to Louis Jouvet mid-argument and says, “Atmosphère, atmosphère… est-ce que j’ai une gueule d’atmosphère?” (Roughly: “Atmosphere, atmosphere… do I look like atmosphere to you?”)

The irony is that almost nothing in the film was actually shot at the canal. Carné decided filming on location was too difficult, so the entire canal, hotel, and surrounding buildings were rebuilt on a studio lot in Boulogne-Billancourt. For the water, they dug ditches outside the studio and filled them from land that belonged to the local cemetery.

The real Hôtel du Nord survived regardless. It nearly got demolished in 1984, but an association dedicated to protecting it campaigned loudly enough to stop it. Arletty herself, by then in her 80s, was president of that association.

Today, the building at 102 Quai de Jemmapes operates as a bar and restaurant, with lobby cards and old film posters from the 1938 production still on the walls.

The 1960s: It Almost Became a Highway

By the 1960s, barge traffic on the canal had dropped to almost nothing. Car culture was taking over European cities, and urban planners across the continent were proposing highways wherever water or green space currently existed.

Paris was no different. The city put forward a proposal to fill in Canal Saint-Martin entirely and build a road over it.

The canal survived not because anyone fought particularly hard to save it, but because the city couldn’t afford the demolition and construction costs. Budget constraints did what preservation instincts didn’t.

That accidental reprieve turned out to matter a great deal. Over the following decades, as Paris rediscovered the value of its waterways and public spaces, the canal went from industrial relic to neighborhood asset. It was designated a historic monument in 1993.

Amélie, the Bobos, and What It Is Today

The canal’s transformation gathered pace in the late 1990s and early 2000s. A major water cleanup in 2001 improved water quality. Cheaper rents relative to other Paris neighborhoods drew students, artists, and young professionals to the 10th arrondissement. The quays became a place to spend an evening.

Then Jean-Pierre Jeunet filmed Amélie, released in 2001, and the canal reached a global audience in one of its most memorable scenes. The title character, played by Audrey Tautou, skips stones from the Passerelle des Douanes footbridge. It’s a small moment in the film, but it lodged the image of this particular stretch of Paris in the minds of a generation of moviegoers.

The neighborhood today has a reputation as bobo Paris, a French term for bourgeois-bohemian, which is accurate. There are excellent independent cafes, wine bars, bookshops, and boutiques along Quai de Valmy and Quai de Jemmapes. There’s also significant gentrification, with rents that have pushed out long-time residents who made the area what it is today.

What Happens When They Drain It

Every 10 to 15 years, Paris drains the canal completely for maintenance. The city empties 90,000 cubic meters of water into the Seine, relocates roughly 20 species of fish to safety, and then spends three months dredging the bottom. Parisians line the banks to watch, and the press covers it like a sporting event.

The findings never disappoint. In 1886, cleaners found an antique chest containing a gold coin. In 1916, they found a bomb. In 1925, a cat in a basket and a human skull turned up in the same operation.

The 2001 draining produced around 40 tonnes of debris, including two WWI artillery shells, washing machines, a car, and some gold coins. By the time the canal was drained again in 2016 at a cost of €9.5 million, the haul included around 100 stolen Vélib hire bikes, baby strollers, shopping carts, a bathtub, a single ski boot, a white toy tiger, a kitchen knife, and a handgun seized by police on the very first day of the operation. A rifle was found shortly after.

The next draining is expected around 2030, give or take. Whatever’s down there now has another few years to accumulate.

Visiting Canal Saint-Martin

The section of the canal most people mean when they say Canal Saint-Martin is the open-air stretch between Place de la République and the Bassin de la Villette. This is where the working locks, the cast-iron footbridges, and the tree-lined quays are. A walk from one end to the other takes about an hour at a relaxed pace.

The underground section, buried beneath Boulevards Jules Ferry and Richard-Lenoir, can be explored by boat. Canal cruises run between the Bassin de la Villette and Port de l’Arsenal, passing through the atmospheric vaulted tunnels that most people walking the streets above have no idea exist.

At the northern end, the Bassin de la Villette is the largest artificial basin in Paris, 800 meters long and 70 meters wide. It was once a working port and is now an entertainment and leisure area, with bars and music venues set up on stationary barges along the water. On summer evenings, it fills up fast.

At the southern end, the Port de l’Arsenal near Place de la Bastille is Paris’s main pleasure boat marina. Historic riverboats converted into houseboats sit alongside modern yachts. The adjacent Jardin du Port de l’Arsenal is one of the quieter green spaces in this part of the city.

A few minutes’ walk from the canal at 33 Boulevard Magenta is the Marché Couvert Saint-Quentin, a covered food market established in 1854. It’s one of only five covered markets still operating in Paris, open Tuesday through Saturday and on Sunday mornings. It’s the right place to put together a picnic before settling on the quayside.

Canal Saint-Martin is accessible by Metro from Stalingrad (Lines 2, 5, 7bis), République (Lines 3, 5, 8, 9, 11), Goncourt (Line 11), Jacques Bonsergent (Line 5), and Jaurès (Lines 2, 5, 7bis).