Canal du Midi

In November 1662 a salt tax collector sat down to write to the king's finance minister about something he admitted he had no business discussing. Pierre-Paul Riquet confessed that he knew neither Greek nor Latin and could barely speak French without stammering, yet he believed a canal could link the Atlantic and the Mediterranean across Languedoc. It was an old dream. Kings from Charlemagne to Henri IV had toyed with it, and earlier engineers had put forward plans in 1539, 1598 and 1617. All of them collapsed on the same problem: where would the water come from to feed a canal climbing over the high ground at Naurouze? Riquet's answer came from years of tramping the Montagne Noire. He had bought the estate of Bonrepos and the water rights of nearby Revel, and with the local fountain-keeper Pierre Campmas he followed streams across the hills until the idea took shape. Rain falling on the mountain could be gathered in a reservoir and sent down channels to the summit of the canal, where it could feed both slopes at once. In 1664 the Estates of Languedoc asked for proof, so he dug a trial channel, the rigole de la plaine, and sent Sor river water all the way to Naurouze in 1665. The sceptics went quiet. Louis XIV signed the edict authorising the work in October 1666. Riquet received the canal as a tax-free hereditary estate, which let the Crown avoid the headache of managing it. The finances were another matter. The budget was around six million livres, and the final bill came to between seventeen and eighteen million. Riquet put in a fifth from his own pocket, and he had to borrow heavily to keep the work going. The first stones of the great reservoir of Saint-Ferréol were laid in April 1667, and the first boats began moving between Toulouse and Naurouze in the winter of 1671 to 1672. Riquet did not live to see the end. He died in October 1680, a few months before the canal was ready. On 15 May 1681 a flotilla set out from Toulouse behind an admiral's barge, with the archbishop of Narbonne among the passengers. It blessed the works at Castelnaudary, passed through the tunnel of Malpas and down the staircase of locks at Fonseranes, and reached Sète on Pentecost Sunday, 25 May. The work was not quite finished, and the canal had to be drained again for finishing touches, but the link between two seas existed. The early years were rough. Streams that Riquet had let flow straight into the canal brought sand and silt in every storm, and the reservoir supply did not deliver enough water. In 1686 Vauban inspected the canal and ordered a programme of repairs that ran into the 1690s. It included a tunnel at the Cammazes to bring more mountain water to Saint-Ferréol, a stronger dam, and masonry aqueducts and bridge-canals to carry the unruly rivers over or around the canal. The following century added the Jonction canal to Narbonne, the Brienne canal in Toulouse, and, in 1810, a diversion that brought the canal through Carcassonne. The Canal latéral à la Garonne completed the route to Bordeaux in 1857. The canal made fortunes for the Riquet family and carried wheat, wine and passengers at a rate that astonished their contemporaries. Its peak came in 1856. Then the railway arrived. The company that leased the canal also ran the Bordeaux to Sète line and raised canal tolls, and within a generation goods traffic had roughly halved. The State bought the canal back in 1898 and dropped tolls, and motor barges kept some trade alive well into the twentieth century. The last regular cargo boats stopped in 1989, when a drought halted navigation. By then people had started to see the canal differently. In 1973 Toulouse's mayor, Pierre Baudis, declined to fill in the city stretch for an urban expressway. British boaters had been discovering the waterway since the 1960s, and the 1980s saw leisure traffic surge. UNESCO inscribed the canal and its water supply system in 1996. Today a new chapter is being written along the banks: a fungal disease has been killing the plane trees since 2006, and tens of thousands of them are being replaced with a mix of other species, giving the towpath a shade pattern that will take decades to settle.